A History of Modern Europe, 1792-1878
Date: 2004-09-02T00:00:00+00:00
Keywords: Europe -- History -- 1789-1900

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Title: A History of Modern Europe, 1792-1878

Author: Charles Alan Fyffe

Release date: September 1, 2004 [eBook #6589]
Most recently updated: June 21, 2023

Language: English

Credits: Produced by Tom Allen, Charles Franks, David Gundry and
the Online Distributed Proofreading Team.

*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK A HISTORY OF MODERN EUROPE, 1792-1878 ***

HISTORY

OF

MODERN EUROPE

1792-1878

BY

C. A. FYFFE, M.A.

Barrister-at-Law; Fellow of University College, Oxford;
Vice-President of the Royal Historical Society

POPULAR EDITION

With Maps

CONTENTS.

PREFACE.

PREFACE TO THE FIRST EDITION.

PREFACE TO THE SECOND EDITION OF THE FIRST VOLUME.

PREFACE TO THE SECOND VOLUME.

Transcriber's Note

CHAPTER I.

FRANCE AND GERMANY AT THE OUTBREAK OF THE REVOLUTIONARY WAR.

Outbreak of the Revolutionary War in 1792-Its immediate causes- Declaration of Pillnitz made and withdrawn-Agitation of the Priests and Emigrants-War Policy of the Gironde-Provocations offered to France by the Powers-State of Central Europe in 1792-The Holy Roman Empire-Austria- Rule of the Hapsburgs-The Reforms of Maria Theresa and Joseph II.-Policy of Leopold II.-Government and Foreign Policy of Francis II.-Prussia- Government of Frederick William II.-Social Condition of Prussia-Secondary States of Germany-Ecclesiastical States-Free Cities-Knights-Weakness of Germany

CHAPTER II.

THE WAR, DOWN TO THE TREATIES OF BASLE AND THE ESTABLISHMENT OF THE DIRECTORY.

French and Austrian Armies on the Flemish Frontier-Prussia enters the War-Brunswick invades France-His Proclamation-Insurrection of Aug. 10 at Paris-Massacres of September-Character of the War-Brunswick, checked at Valmy, retreats-The War becomes a Crusade of France-Neighbours of France-Custine enters Mainz-Dumouriez conquers the Austrian Netherlands- Nice and Savoy annexed-Decree of the Convention against all Governments- Execution of Louis XVI.-War with England, followed by war with the Mediterranean States-Condition of England-English Parties, how affected by the Revolution-The Gironde and the Mountain-Austria recovers the Netherlands-The Allies invade France-La Vendée-Revolutionary System of 1793-Errors of the Allies-New French Commanders and Democratic Army-Victories of Jourdan, Hoche, and Pichegru-Prussia withdrawing from the War-Polish Affairs-Austria abandons the Netherlands-Treaties of Basle-France in 1795-Insurrection of 13 Vendémiaire-Constitution of 1795-The Directory-Effect of the Revolution on the Spirit of Europe up to 1795

CHAPTER III.

ITALIAN CAMPAIGNS: TREATY OF CAMPO FORMIO.

Triple attack on Austria-Moreau, Jourdan-Bonaparte in Italy-Condition of the Italian States-Professions and real intentions of Bonaparte and the Directory-Battle of Montenotte-Armistice with Sardinia-Campaign in Lombardy-Treatment of the Pope, Naples, Tuscany-Siege of Mantua- Castiglione-Moreau and Jourdan in Germany-Their retreat-Secret Treaty with Prussia-Negotiations with England-Cispadane Republic-Rise of the idea of Italian Independence-Battles of Arcola and Rivoli-Peace with the Pope at Tolentino-Venice-Preliminaries of Leoben-The French in Venice-The French take the Ionian Islands and give Venice to Austria-Genoa-Coup d'état of 17 Fructidor in Paris-Treaty of Campo Formio-Victories of England at Sea-Bonaparte's project against Egypt

CHAPTER IV.

FROM THE CONGRESS OF RASTADT TO THE ESTABLISHMENT OF THE CONSULATE.

Congress of Rastadt-The Rhenish Provinces ceded-Ecclesiastical States of Germany suppressed-French Intervention in Switzerland-Helvetic Republic-The French invade the Papal States-Roman Republic-Expedition to Egypt-Battle of the Nile-Coalition of 1798-Ferdinand of Naples enters Rome-Mack's defeats-French enter Naples-Parthenopean Republic-War with Austria and Russia-Battle of Stockach-Murder of the French Envoys at Rastadt-Campaign in Lombardy-Reign of Terror at Naples-Austrian designs upon Italy-Suvaroff and the Austrians-Campaign in Switzerland-Campaign in Holland-Bonaparte returns from Egypt-Coup d'état of 18 Brumaire- Constitution of 1799-System of Bonaparte in France-Its effect on the influence of France abroad

CHAPTER V.

FROM MARENGO TO THE RUPTURE OF THE PEACE OF AMIENS.

Overtures of Bonaparte to Austria and England-The War continues-Massena besieged in Genoa-Moreau invades Southern Germany-Bonaparte crosses the St. Bernard, and descends in the rear of the Austrians-Battle of Marengo-Austrians retire behind the Mincio-Treaty between England and Austria-Austria continues the War-Battle of Hohenlinden-Peace of Lunéville-War between England and the Northern Maritime League-Battle of Copenhagen-Murder of Paul-End of the Maritime War-English Army enters Egypt-French defeated at Alexandria-They capitulate at Cairo and Alexandria-Preliminaries of Peace between England and France signed at London, followed by Peace of Amiens-Pitt's Irish Policy and his retirement-Debates on the Peace-Aggressions of Bonaparte during the Continental Peace-Holland, Italy, Switzerland-Settlement of Germany under French and Russian influence-Suppression of Ecclesiastical States and Free Cities-Its effects-Stein-France under the Consulate-The Civil Code-The Concordat

CHAPTER VI.

THE EMPIRE, TO THE PEACE OF PRESBURG.

England claims Malta-War renewed-Bonaparte occupies Hanover, and blockades the Elbe-Remonstrances of Prussia-Cadoudal's Plot-Murder of the Duke of Enghien-Napoleon Emperor-Coalition of 1805-Prussia holds aloof-State of Austria-Failure of Napoleon's Attempt to gain Naval Superiority in the Channel-Campaign in Western Germany- Capitulation of Ulm-Trafalgar-Treaty of Potsdam between Prussia and the Allies-The French enter Vienna-Haugwitz sent to Napoleon with Prussian Ultimatum-Battle of Austerlitz-Haugwitz signs a Treaty of Alliance with Napoleon-Peace-Treaty of Presburg-End of the Holy Roman Empire-Naples given to Joseph Bonaparte-Battle of Maida-The Napoleonic Empire and Dynasty-Federation of the Rhine-State of Germany-Possibility of maintaining the Empire of 1806

CHAPTER VII.

DEATH OF PITT, TO THE PEACE OF TILSIT.

Death of Pitt-Ministry of Fox and Grenville-Napoleon forces Prussia into war with England, and then offers Hanover to England-Prussia resolves on war with Napoleon-State of Prussia-Decline of the Army-Southern Germany with Napoleon-Austria neutral-England and Russia about to help Prussia, but not immediately-Campaign of 1806-Battles of Jena and Auerstädt-Ruin of the Prussian Army-Capitulation of Fortresses-Demands of Napoleon-The War continues-Berlin Decree-Exclusion of English goods from the Continent-Russia enters the war-Campaign in Poland and East Prussia-Eylau-Treaty of Bartenstein-Friedland-Interview at Tilsit-Alliance of Napoleon and Alexander-Secret Articles-English expedition to Denmark-The French enter Portugal-Prussia after the Peace of Tilsit-Stein's Edict of Emancipation-The Prussian Peasant-Reform of the Prussian Army, and creation of Municipalities-Stein's other projects of Reform, which are not carried out

CHAPTER VIII.

SPAIN, TO THE FALL OF SARAGOSSA.

Spain in 1806-Napoleon uses the quarrel between Ferdinand and Godoy-He affects to be Ferdinand's Protector-Dupont's Army enters Spain-Murat in Spain-Charles abdicates-Ferdinand King-Savary brings Ferdinand to Bayonne-Napoleon makes both Charles and Ferdinand resign-Spirit of the Spanish Nation-Contrast with Germany-Rising of all Spain-The Notables at Bayonne-Campaign of 1808-Capitulation of Baylen-Wellesley lands in Portugal-Vimieiro-Convention of Cintra-Effect of the Spanish Rising on Europe-War Party in Prussia-Napoleon and Alexander at Erfurt-Stein resigns, and is proscribed-Napoleon in Spain-Spanish Misgovernment- Campaign on the Ebro-Campaign of Sir John Moore-Corunna-Napoleon leaves Spain-Siege of Saragossa-Successes of the French

CHAPTER IX.

WAR OF 1809: THE NAPOLEONIC EMPIRE-SPAIN, TO THE BATTLE OF SALAMANCA.

Austria preparing for war-The war to be one on behalf of the German Nation-Patriotic movement in Prussia-Expected Insurrection in North Germany-Plans of Campaign-Austrian Manifesto to the Germans-Rising of the Tyrolese-Defeats of the Archduke Charles in Bavaria-French in Vienna-Attempts of Dörnberg and Schill-Battle of Aspern-Second passage of the Danube-Battle of Wagram-Armistice of Znaim-Austria waiting for Events-Wellesley in Spain-He gains the Battle of Talavera, but retreats-Expedition against Antwerp fails-Austria makes Peace-Treaty of Vienna-Real Effects of the War of 1809-Austria after 1809-Metternich- Marriage of Napoleon with Marie Louise-Severance of Napoleon and Alexander-Napoleon annexes the Papal States, Holland, Le Valais, and the North German Coast-The Napoleonic Empire: its benefits and wrongs-The Czar withdraws from Napoleon's Commercial System-War with Russia imminent-Wellington in Portugal; Lines of Torres Vedras; Massena's Campaign of 1810, and retreat-Soult in Andalusia-Wellington's Campaign of 1811-Capture of Ciudad Rodrigo and Badajoz-Salamanca

CHAPTER X.

RUSSIAN CAMPAIGN, TO THE TREATY OF KALISCH.

War approaching between France and Russia-Policy of Prussia-Hardenberg's Ministry-Prussia forced into Alliance with Napoleon-Austrian Alliance- Napoleon's Preparations-He enters Russia-Alexander and Bernadotte-Plan of Russians to fight a battle at Drissa frustrated-They retreat on Witepsk-Sufferings of the French-French enter Smolensko-Battle of Borodino-Evacuation of Moscow-Moscow fired-The Retreat from Moscow- French at Smolensko-Advance of Russian Armies from North and South-Battle of Krasnoi-Passage of the Beresina-The French reach the Niemen-York's Convention with the Russians-The Czar and Stein-Russian Army enters Prussia-Stein raises East Prussia-Treaty of Kalisch-Prussia declares War-Enthusiasm of the Nation-Idea of German Unity-The Landwehr

CHAPTER XI.

WAR OF LIBERATION, TO THE PEACE OF PARIS.

The War of Liberation-Blücher crosses the Elbe-Battle of Lützen-The Allies retreat to Silesia-Battle of Bautzen-Armistice-Napoleon intends to intimidate Austria-Mistaken as to the Forces of Austria-Metternich's Policy-Treaty of Reichenbach-Austria offers its Mediation-Congress of Prague-Austria enters the War-Armies and Plans of Napoleon and the Allies-Campaign of August-Battles of Dresden, Grosbeeren, the Katzbach, and Kulm-Effect of these Actions-Battle of Dennewitz-German Policy of Austria favourable to the Princes of the Rhenish Confederacy-Frustrated hopes of German Unity-Battle of Leipzig-The Allies reach the Rhine- Offers of Peace at Frankfort-Plan of Invasion of France-Backwardness of Austria-The Allies enter France-Campaign of 1814-Congress of Châtillon-Napoleon moves to the rear of the Allies-The Allies advance on Paris-Capitulation of Paris-Entry of the Allies-Dethronement of Napoleon-Restoration of the Bourbons-The Charta-Treaty of Paris- Territorial effects of the War, 1792-1814-Every Power except France had gained-France relatively weaker in Europe-Summary of the permanent effects of this period on Europe

END OF VOL. I. (ORIGINAL EDITION).

CHAPTER XII.

THE RESTORATION.

The Restoration of 1814-Norway-Naples-Westphalia-Spain-The Spanish Constitution overthrown: victory of the clergy-Restoration in France-The Charta-Encroachments of the nobles and clergy-Growing hostility to the Bourbons-Congress of Vienna-Talleyrand and the Four Powers-The Polish question-The Saxon question-Theory of Legitimacy-Secret alliance against Russia and Prussia-Compromise-The Rhenish Provinces-Napoleon leaves Elba and lands in France-His declarations-Napoleon at Grenoble, at Lyons, at Paris-The Congress of Vienna unites Europe against France-Murat's action in Italy-The Acte Additionnel-The Champ de Mai-Napoleon takes up the offensive-Battles of Ligny, Quatre Bras, Waterloo-Affairs at Paris-Napoleon sent to St. Helena-Wellington and Fouché-Arguments on the proposed cession of French territory-Treaty of Holy Alliance-Second Treaty of Paris-Conclusion of the work of the Congress of Vienna-Federation of Germany-Estimate of the Congress of Vienna and of the Treaties of 1815-The Slave Trade

CHAPTER XIII.

THE PROGRESS OF REACTION.

Concert of Europe after 1815-Spirit of the Foreign Policy of Alexander, of Metternich, and of the English Ministry-Metternich's action in Italy, England's in Sicily and Spain-The Reaction in France-Richelieu and the New Chamber-Execution of Ney-Imprisonments and persecutions-Conduct of the Ultra-Royalists in Parliament-Contests on the Electoral Bill and the Budget-The Chamber prorogued-Affair of Grenoble-Dissolution of the Chamber-Electoral Law and Financial Settlement of 1817-Character of the first years of peace in Europe generally-Promise of a Constitution in Prussia-Hardenberg opposed by the partisans of autocracy and privilege-Schmalz' Pamphlet-Delay of Constitutional Reform in Germany at large-The Wartburg Festival-Progress of Reaction-The Czar now inclines to repression-Congress of Aix-la-Chapelle-Evacuation of France-Growing influence of Metternich in Europe-His action on Prussia-Murder of Kotzebue-The Carlsbad Conference and measures of repression in Germany-Richelieu and Decazes-Murder of the Duke of Berry-Progress of the reaction in France-General causes of the victory of reaction in Europe

CHAPTER XIV.

THE MEDITERRANEAN MOVEMENTS OF 1820.

Movements in the Mediterranean States beginning in 1820-Spain from 1814 to 1820-The South American Colonies-The Army at Cadiz: Action of Quiroga and Riego-Movement at Corunna-Ferdinand accepts the Constitution of 1812-Naples from 1815 to 1820-The Court-party, the Muratists, the Carbonari-The Spanish Constitution proclaimed at Naples-Constitutional movement in Portugal-Alexander's proposal with regard to Spain-The Conference and Declaration of Troppau-Protest of England-Conference of Laibach-The Austrians invade Naples and restore absolute Monarchy-Insurrection in Piedmont, which fails-Spain from 1820 to 1822-Death of Castlereagh-The Congress of Verona-Policy of England-The French invade Spain-Restoration of absolute Monarchy, and violence of the reaction-England prohibits the conquest of the Spanish Colonies by France, and subsequently recognises their independence- Affairs in Portugal-Canning sends troops to Lisbon-The Policy of Canning-Estimate of his place in the history of Europe

CHAPTER XV.

GREECE AND EASTERN AFFAIRS.

Condition of Greece: its Races and Institutions-The Greek Church -Communal System-The Ægæan Islands-The Phanariots-Greek intellectual revival: Koraes-Beginning of Greek National Movement; Contact of Greece with the French Revolution and Napoleon-The Hetæria Philike-Hypsilanti's Attempt in the Danubian Provinces: its failure-Revolt of the Morea: Massacres: Execution of Gregorius, and Terrorism at Constantinople -Attitude of Russia, Austria, and England-Extension of the Revolt: Affairs at Hydra-The Greek Leaders-Fall of Tripolitza-The Massacre of Chios-Failure of the Turks in the Campaign of 1822-Dissensions of the Greeks-Mahmud calls upon Mehemet Ali for Aid-Ibrahim conquers Crete and invades the Morea-Siege of Missolonghi-Philhellenism in Europe-Russian proposal for Intervention-Conspiracies in Russia: Death of Alexander: Accession of Nicholas-Military Insurrection at St. Petersburg- Anglo-Russian Protocol-Treaty between England, Russia, and France-Death of Canning-Navarino-War between Russia and Turkey-Campaigns of 1828 and 1829-Treaty of Adrianople-Capodistrias President of Greece-Leopold accepts and then declines the Greek Crown-Murder of Capodistrias-Otho, King of Greece

CHAPTER XVI.

THE MOVEMENTS OF 1830.

France before 1830-Reign of Charles X.-Ministry of Martignac-Ministry of Polignac-The Duke of Orleans-War in Algiers-The July Ordinances- Revolution of July-Louis Philippe King-Nature and effects of the July Revolution-Affairs in Belgium-The Belgian Revolution-The Great Powers-Intervention, and establishment of the Kingdom of Belgium-Affairs of Poland-Insurrection at Warsaw-War between Russia and Poland-Overthrow of the Poles: End of the Polish Constitution-Affairs of Italy- Insurrection in the Papal States-France and Austria-Austrian Intervention-Ancona occupied by the French-Affairs of Germany-Prussia; the Zollverein-Brunswick, Hanover, Saxony-The Palatinate-Reaction in Germany-The exiles in Switzerland: Incursion into Savoy-Dispersion of the Exiles-France under Louis Philippe: Successive risings-Period of Parliamentary activity-England after 1830: The Reform Bill

CHAPTER XVII.

SPANISH AND EASTERN AFFAIRS.

France and England after 1830-Affairs of Portugal-Don Miguel-Don Pedro invades Portugal-Ferdinand of Spain-The Pragmatic Sanction-Death of Ferdinand: Regency of Christina-The Constitution-Quadruple Alliance-Miguel and Carlos expelled from Portugal-Carlos enters Spain-The Basque Provinces-Carlist War: Zumalacarregui-The Spanish Government seeks French assistance, which is refused-Constitution of 1837-End of the War-Regency of Espartero-Isabella Queen-Affairs of the Ottoman Empire-Ibrahim invades Syria; his victories-Rivalry of France and Russia at Constantinople-Peace of Kutaya and Treaty of Unkiar Skelessi-Effect of this Treaty-France and Mehemet Ali-Commerce of the Levant-Second War between Mehemet and the Porte-Ottoman disasters-The Policy of the Great Powers-Quadruple Treaty without France-Ibrahim expelled from Syria-Final Settlement-Turkey after 1840-Attempted reforms of Reschid Pasha

CHAPTER XVIII.

EUROPE BEFORE 1848.

Europe during the Thirty-years' Peace-Italy and Austria-Mazzini-The House of Savoy-Gioberti-Election of Pius IX.-Reforms expected- Revolution at Palermo-Agitation in Northern Italy-Lombardy-State of the Austrian Empire-Growth of Hungarian national spirit-The Magyars and Slavs-Transylvania-Parties among the Magyars-Kossuth-The Slavic national movements in Austria-The government enters on reforms in Hungary-Policy of the Opposition-The Rural system of Austria- Insurrection in Galicia: the nobles and the peasants-Agrarian edict-Public opinion in Vienna-Prussia-Accession and character of King Frederick William IV.-Convocation of the United Diet-Its debates and dissolution-France-The Spanish Marriages-Reform movement-Socialism-Revolution of February-End of the Orleanist Monarchy

END OF VOL. II. (ORIGINAL EDITION).

CHAPTER XIX.

THE MARCH REVOLUTION, 1848.

Europe in 1789 and in 1848-Agitation in Western Germany before and after the Revolution at Paris-Austria and Hungary-The March Revolution at Vienna-Flight of Metternich-The Hungarian Diet-Hungary wins its independence-Bohemian movement-Autonomy promised to Bohemia- Insurrection of Lombardy-Of Venice-Piedmont makes war on Austria-A general Italian war against Austria imminent-The March Days at Berlin-Frederick William IV.-A National Assembly promised- Schleswig-Holstein-Insurrection in Holstein-War between Germany and Denmark-The German Ante-Parliament-Republican Rising in Baden-Meeting of the German National Assembly at Frankfort-Europe generally in March, 1848-The French Provisional Government-The National Workshops-The Government and the Red Republicans-French National Assembly-Riot of May 15-Measures against the National Workshops-The Four Days of June-Cavaignac-Louis Napoleon-He is elected to the Assembly-Elected President

CHAPTER XX.

THE PERIOD OF CONFLICT, DOWN TO THE ESTABLISHMENT OF THE SECOND FRENCH EMPIRE.

Austria and Italy-Vienna from March to May-Flight of the Emperor -Bohemian National Movement-Windischgrätz subdues Prague-Campaign around Verona-Papal Allocution-Naples in May-Negotiations as to Lombardy- Reconquest of Venetia-Battle of Custozza-The Austrians enter Milan-Austrian Court and Hungary-The Serbs in Southern Hungary-Serb Congress at Carlowitz-Jellacic-Affairs of Croatia-Jellacic, the Court and the Hungarian Movement-Murder of Lamberg-Manifesto of October 3- Vienna on October 6-The Emperor at Olmütz-Windischgrätz conquers Vienna-The Parliament at Kremsier-Schwarzenberg Minister-Ferdinand abdicates-Dissolution of the Kremsier Parliament-Unitary Edict-Hungary -The Roumanians in Transylvania-The Austrian Army occupies Pesth- Hungarian Government at Debreczin-The Austrians driven out of Hungary-Declaration of Hungarian Independence-Russian Intervention-The Hungarian Summer Campaign-Capitulation of Vilagos-Italy-Murder of Rossi-Tuscany-The March Campaign in Lombardy-Novara-Abdication of Charles Albert-Victor Emmanuel-Restoration in Tuscany-French Intervention in Rome-Defeat of Oudinot-Oudinot and Lesseps-The French enter Rome-The Restored Pontifical Government-Fall of Venice-Ferdinand reconquers Sicily-Germany-The National Assembly at Frankfort-The Armistice of Malmö-Berlin from April to September-The Prussian Army-Last Days of the Prussian Parliament-Prussian Constitution granted by Edict-The German National Assembly and Austria-Frederick William IV. elected Emperor-He refuses the Crown-End of the National Assembly- Prussia attempts to form a separate Union-The Union Parliament at Erfurt-Action of Austria-Hesse-Cassel-The Diet of Frankfort restored-Olmütz-Schleswig-Holstein-Germany after 1849-Austria after 1851-France after 1848-Louis Napoleon-The October Message-Law Limiting the Franchise-Louis Napoleon and the Army-Proposed Revision of the Constitution-The Coup d'Etat-Napoleon III. Emperor

CHAPTER XXI.

THE CRIMEAN WAR.

England and France in 1851-Russia under Nicholas-The Hungarian Refugees-Dispute between France and Russia on the Holy Places-Nicholas and the British Ambassador-Lord Stratford de Redcliffe-Menschikoff's Mission-Russian troops enter the Danubian Principalities-Lord Aberdeen's Cabinet-Movements of the Fleets-The Vienna Note-The Fleets pass the Dardanelles-Turkish Squadron destroyed at Sinope-Declaration of War-Policy of Austria-Policy of Prussia-The Western Powers and the European Concert-Siege of Silistria-The Principalities evacuated- Further objects of the Western Powers-Invasion of the Crimea-Battle of the Alma-The Flank March-Balaclava-Inkermann-Winter in the Crimea-Death of Nicholas-Conference of Vienna-Austria-Progress of the Siege-Plans of Napoleon III.-Canrobert and Pélissier-Unsuccessful Assault-Battle of the Tchernaya-Capture of the Malakoff-Fall of Sebastopol-Fall of Kars-Negotiations for Peace-The Conference of Paris-Treaty of Paris-The Danubian Principalities-Continued discord in the Ottoman Empire-Revision of the Treaty of Paris in 1871

CHAPTER XXII.

THE CREATION OF THE ITALIAN KINGDOM.

Piedmont after 1849-Ministry of Azeglio-Cavour Prime Minister-Designs of Cavour-His Crimean Policy-Cavour at the Conference of Paris-Cavour and Napoleon III.-The Meeting at Plombières-Preparations in Italy-Treaty of January, 1859-Attempts at Mediation-Austrian Ultimatum-Campaign of 1859-Magenta-Movement in Central Italy-Solferino-Napoleon and Prussia-Interview of Villafranca-Cavour resigns-Peace of Zürich-Central Italy after Villafranca-The Proposed Congress-"The Pope and the Congress"-Cavour resumes office-Cavour and Napoleon-Union of the Duchies and the Romagna with Piedmont-Savoy and Nice added to France-Cavour on this cession-European opinion-Naples-Sicily-Garibaldi lands at Marsala-Capture of Palermo-The Neapolitans evacuate Sicily-Cavour and the Party of Action-Cavour's Policy as to Naples-Garibaldi on the mainland-Persano and Villamarina at Naples-Garibaldi at Naples-The Piedmontese Army enters Umbria and the Marches-Fall of Ancona-Garibaldi and Cavour-The Armies on the Volturno-Fall of Gaeta-Cavour's Policy with regard to Rome and Venice-Death of Cavour-The Free Church in the Free State

CHAPTER XXIII.

GERMAN ASCENDENCY WON BY PRUSSIA.

Germany after 1858-The Regency in Prussia-Army-reorganisation-King William I.-Conflict between the Crown and the Parliament-Bismarck-The struggle continued-Austria from 1859-The October Diploma-Resistance of Hungary-The Reichsrath-Russia under Alexander II.-Liberation of the Serfs-Poland-The Insurrection of 1863-Agrarian measures in Poland- Schleswig-Holstein-Death of Frederick VII.-Plans of Bismarck-Campaign in Schleswig-Conference of London-Treaty of Vienna-England and Napoleon III.-Prussia and Austria-Convention of Gastein-Italy-Alliance of Prussia with Italy-Proposals for a Congress fail-War between Austria and Prussia-Napoleon III.-Königgrätz-Custozza-Mediation of Napoleon -Treaty of Prague-South Germany-Projects for compensation to France-Austria and Hungary-Deák-Establishment of the Dual System in Austria-Hungary

CHAPTER XXIV.

THE WAR BETWEEN FRANCE AND GERMANY.

Napoleon III.-The Mexican Expedition-Withdrawal of the French and death of Maximilian-The Luxemburg Question-Exasperation in France against Prussia-Austria-Italy-Mentana-Germany after 1866-The Spanish Candidature of Leopold of Hohenzollern-French declaration-Benedetti and King William-Withdrawal of Leopold and demand for guarantees-The telegram from Ems-War-Expected Alliances of France-Austria-Italy-Prussian plans-The French army-Causes of French inferiority-Weissenburg-Wörth- Spicheren-Borny-Mars-la-Tour-Gravelotte-Sedan-The Republic proclaimed at Paris-Favre and Bismarck-Siege of Paris-Gambetta at Tours-The Army of the Loire-Fall of Metz-Fighting at Orleans-Sortie of Champigny-The Armies of the North, of the Loire, of the East-Bourbaki's ruin- Capitulation of Paris and Armistice-Preliminaries of Peace-Germany- Establishment of the German Empire-The Commune of Paris-Second Siege- Effects of the war as to Russia and Italy-Rome

CHAPTER XXV.

EASTERN AFFAIRS.

France after 1871-Alliance of the Three Emperors-Revolt of Herzegovina- The Andrássy Note-Murder of the Consuls at Salonika-The Berlin Memorandum-Rejected by England-Abdul Aziz deposed-Massacres in Bulgaria-Servia and Montenegro declare War-Opinion in England-Disraeli- Meeting of Emperors at Reichstadt-Servian Campaign-Declaration of the Czar-Conference at Constantinople-Its Failure-The London Protocol- Russia declares War-Advance on the Balkans-Osman at Plevna-Second Attack on Plevna-The Shipka Pass-Roumania-Third Attack on Plevna-Todleben- Fall of Plevna-Passage of the Balkans-Armistice-England-The Fleet passes the Dardanelles-Treaty of San Stefano-England and Russia-Secret Agreement-Convention with Turkey-Congress of Berlin-Treaty of Berlin-Bulgaria

MAPS.

EUROPEAN STATES IN 1792

CENTRAL EUROPE IN 1812

MODERN EUROPE.

PREFACE.

In acceding to the Publishers' request for a re-issue of the "History of Modern Europe," in the form of a popular edition, I feel that I am only fulfilling what would have been the wish of the Author himself. A few manuscript corrections and additions found in his own copy of the work have been adopted in the present edition; in general, however, my attention in revising each sheet for the press has been devoted to securing an accurate reproduction of the text and notes as they appeared in the previous editions in three volumes. I trust that in this cheaper and more portable form the work will prove, both to the student and the general reader, even more widely acceptable than heretofore.

HENRIETTA F. A. FYFFE.

London, November, 1895.

PREFACE TO THE FIRST EDITION.

The object of this work is to show how the States of Europe have gained the form and character which they possess at the present moment. The outbreak of the Revolutionary War in 1792, terminating a period which now appears far removed from us, and setting in motion forces which have in our own day produced a united Germany and a united Italy, forms the natural starting-point of a history of the present century. I have endeavoured to tell a simple story, believing that a narrative in which facts are chosen for their significance, and exhibited in their real connection, may be made to convey as true an impression as a fuller history in which the writer is not forced by the necessity of concentration to exercise the same rigour towards himself and his materials. The second volume of the work will bring the reader down to the year 1848: the third, down to the present time.

London, 1880.

PREFACE TO THE SECOND EDITION OF THE FIRST VOLUME.  [1]

In revising this volume for the second edition I have occupied myself mainly with two sources of information-the unpublished Records of the English Foreign Office, and the published works which have during recent years resulted from the investigation of the Archives of Vienna. The English Records from 1792 to 1814, for access to which I have to express my thanks to Lord Granville, form a body of first-hand authority of extraordinary richness, compass, and interest. They include the whole correspondence between the representatives of Great Britain at Foreign Courts and the English Foreign Office; a certain number of private communications between Ministers and these representatives; a quantity of reports from consuls, agents, and "informants" of every description; and in addition to these the military reports, often admirably vivid and full of matter, sent by the British officers attached to the head-quarters of our Allies in most of the campaigns from 1792 to 1814. It is impossible that any one person should go through the whole of this material, which it took the Diplomatic Service a quarter of a century to write. I have endeavoured to master the correspondence from each quarter of Europe which, for the time being, had a preponderance in political or military interest, leaving it when its importance became obviously subordinate to that of others; and although I have no doubt left untouched much that would repay investigation, I trust that the narrative has gained in accuracy from a labour which was not a light one, and that the few short extracts which space has permitted me to throw into the notes may serve to bring the reader nearer to events. At some future time I hope to publish a selection from the most important documents of this period. It is strange that our learned Societies, so appreciative of every distant and trivial chronicle of the Middle Ages, should ignore the records of a time of such surpassing interest, and one in which England played so great a part. No just conception can be formed of the difference between English statesmanship and that of the Continental Courts in integrity, truthfulness, and public spirit, until the mass of diplomatic correspondence preserved at London has been studied; nor, until this has been done, can anything like an adequate biography of Pitt be written.

The second and less important group of authorities with which I have busied myself during the work of revision comprises the works of Hüffer, Vivenot, Beer, Helfert, and others, based on Austrian documents, along with the Austrian documents and letters that have been published by Vivenot. The last-named writer is himself a partizan, but the material which he has given to the world is most valuable. The mystery in which the Austrian Government until lately enveloped all its actions caused some of these to be described as worse than they really were; and I believe that in the First Edition I under-estimated the bias of Prussian and North-German writers. Where I have seen reasons to alter any statements, I have done so without reserve, as it appears to me childish for any one who attempts to write history to cling to an opinion after the balance of evidence seems to be against it. The publication of the second volume of this work has been delayed by the revision of the first; but I hope that it will appear before many months more. I must express my obligations to Mr. Oscar Browning, a fellow-labourer in the same field, who not only furnished me with various corrections, but placed his own lectures at my disposal; and to Mr. Alfred Kingston, whose unfailing kindness and courtesy make so great a difference to those whose work lies in the department of the Record Office which is under his care.

London, 1883.

PREFACE TO THE SECOND VOLUME.[2]

In writing this volume I have not had the advantage of consulting the English Foreign Office Records for a later period than the end of 1815. A rule not found necessary at Berlin and some other foreign capitals still closes to historical inquirers the English documents of the last seventy years. Restrictions are no doubt necessary in the case of transactions of recent date, but the period of seventy years is surely unnecessarily long. Public interests could not be prejudiced, nor could individuals be even remotely affected, by the freest examination of the papers of 1820 or 1830.

The London documents of 1814-1815 are of various degrees of interest and importance. Those relating to the Congress of Vienna are somewhat disappointing. Taken all together, they add less to our knowledge on the one or two points still requiring elucidation than the recently-published correspondence of Talleyrand with Louis XVIII. The despatches from Italy are on the other hand of great value, proving, what I believe was not established before, that the Secret Treaty of 1815, whereby Austria gained a legal right to prevent any departure from absolute Government at Naples, was communicated to the British Ministry and received its sanction. This sanction explains the obscure and embarrassed language of Castlereagh in 1820, which in its turn gave rise to the belief in Italy that England was more deeply committed to Austria than it actually was, and probably occasioned the forgery of the pretended Treaty of July 27, 1813, exposed in vol. i. of this work, p. 538, 2nd edit.  [3] The papers from France and Spain are also interesting, though not establishing any new conclusions.

While regretting that I have not been able to use the London archives later than 1815, I believe that it is nevertheless possible, without recourse to unpublished papers, to write the history of the succeeding thirty years with substantial correctness. There exist in a published form, apart from documents printed officially, masses of first-hand material of undoubtedly authentic character, such as the great English collection known by the somewhat misleading name of Wellington Despatches, New Series; or again, the collection printed as an appendix to Prokesch von Osten's History of the Greek Rebellion, or the many volumes of Gentz' Correspondence belonging to the period about 1820, when Gentz was really at the centre of affairs. The Metternich papers, interesting as far as they go, are a mere selection. The omissions are glaring, and scarcely accidental. Many minor collections bearing on particular events might be named, such as those in Guizot's Mémoires. Frequent references will show my obligation to the German series of historical works constituting the Leipzig Staatengeschichte, as well as to French authors who, like Viel-Castel, have worked with original sources of information before them. There exist in English literature singularly few works on this period of Continental history.

A greater publicity was introduced into political affairs on the Continent by the establishment of Parliamentary Government in France in 1815, and even by the attempts made to introduce it in other States. In England we have always had freedom of discussion, but the amount of information made public by the executive in recent times has been enormously greater than it was at the end of the last century. The only documents published at the outbreak of the war of 1793 were, so far as I can ascertain, the well-known letters of Chauvelin and Lord Grenville. During the twenty years' struggle with France next to nothing was known of the diplomatic transactions between England and the Continental Powers. But from the time of the Reform Bill onwards the amount of information given to the public has been constantly increasing, and the reader of Parliamentary Papers in our own day is likely to complain of diffusiveness rather than of reticence. Nevertheless the perusal of published papers can never be quite the same thing as an examination of the originals; and the writer who first has access to the English archives after 1815 will have an advantage over those who have gone before him.

The completion of this volume has been delayed by almost every circumstance adverse to historical study and production, including a severe Parliamentary contest. I trust, however, that no trace of partisanship or unrest appears in the work, which I have valued for the sake of the mental discipline which it demanded. With quieter times the third volume will, I trust, advance more rapidly.

LONDON, October, 1886.

NOTE.-The third volume was published in 1889.

CHAPTER I.

Outbreak of the Revolutionary War in 1792-Its immediate causes- Declaration of Pillnitz made and withdrawn-Agitation of the Priests and Emigrants-War Policy of the Gironde-Provocations offered to France by the Powers-State of Central Europe in 1792-The Holy Roman Empire- Austria-Rule of the Hapsburgs-The Reforms of Maria Theresa and Joseph II.-Policy of Leopold II.-Government and Foreign Policy of Francis II.-Prussia-Government of Frederick William II.-Social condition or Prussia-Secondary States of Germany-Ecclesiastical States-Free Cities-Knights-Weakness of Germany

On the morning of the 19th of April, 1792, after weeks of stormy agitation in Paris, the Ministers of Louis XVI. brought down a letter from the King to the Legislative Assembly of France. The letter was brief but significant. It announced that the King intended to appear in the Hall of Assembly at noon on the following day. Though the letter did not disclose the object of the King's visit, it was known that Louis had given way to the pressure of his Ministry and the national cry for war, and that a declaration of war against Austria was the measure which the King was about to propose in person to the Assembly. On the morrow the public thronged the hall; the Assembly broke off its debate at midday in order to be in readiness for the King. Louis entered the hall in the midst of deep silence, and seated himself beside the President in the chair which was now substituted for the throne of France. At the King's bidding General Dumouriez, Minister of Foreign Affairs, read a report to the Assembly upon the relations of France to foreign Powers. The report contained a long series of charges against Austria, and concluded with the recommendation of war. When Dumouriez ceased reading Louis rose, and in a low voice declared that he himself and the whole of the Ministry accepted the report read to the Assembly; that he had used every effort to maintain peace, and in vain; and that he was now come, in accordance with the terms of the Constitution, to propose that the Assembly declare war against the Austrian Sovereign. It was not three months since Louis himself had supplicated the Courts of Europe for armed aid against his own subjects. The words which he now uttered were put in his mouth by men whom he hated, but could not resist: the very outburst of applause that followed them only proved the fatal antagonism that existed between the nation and the King. After the President of the Assembly had made a short answer, Louis retired from the hall. The Assembly itself broke up, to commence its debate on the King's proposal after an interval of some hours. When the House re-assembled in the evening, those few courageous men who argued on grounds of national interest and justice against the passion of the moment could scarcely obtain a hearing. An appeal for a second day's discussion was rejected; the debate abruptly closed; and the declaration of war was carried against seven dissentient votes. It was a decision big with consequences for France and for the world. From that day began the struggle between Revolutionary France and the established order of Europe. A period opened in which almost every State on the Continent gained some new character from the aggressions of France, from the laws and political changes introduced by the conqueror, or from the awakening of new forces of national life in the crisis of successful resistance or of humiliation. It is my intention to trace the great lines of European history from that time to the present, briefly sketching the condition of some of the principal States at the outbreak of the Revolutionary War, and endeavouring to distinguish, amid scenes of ever-shifting incident, the steps by which the Europe of 1792 has become the Europe of to-day.

[First threats of foreign Courts against France, 1791.]

The first two years of the Revolution had ended without bringing France into collision with foreign Powers. This was not due to any goodwill that the Courts of Europe bore to the French people, or to want of effort on the part of the French aristocracy to raise the armies of Europe against their own country. The National Assembly, which met in 1789, had cut at the roots of the power of the Crown; it had deprived the nobility of their privileges, and laid its hand upon the revenues of the Church. The brothers of King Louis XVI., with a host of nobles too impatient to pursue a course of steady political opposition at home, quitted France, and wearied foreign Courts with their appeals for armed assistance. The absolute monarchs of the Continent gave them a warm and even ostentatious welcome; but they confined their support to words and tokens of distinction, and until the summer of 1791 the Revolution was not seriously threatened with the interference of the stranger. The flight of King Louis from Paris in June, 1791, followed by his capture and his strict confinement within the Tuileries, gave rise to the first definite project of foreign intervention.  [4] Louis had fled from his capital and from the National Assembly; he returned, the hostage of a populace already familiar with outrage and bloodshed. For a moment the exasperation of Paris brought the Royal Family into real jeopardy. The Emperor Leopold, brother of Marie Antoinette, trembled for the safety of his unhappy sister, and addressed a letter to the European Courts from Padua, on the 6th of July, proposing that the Powers should unite to preserve the Royal Family of France from popular violence. Six weeks later the Emperor and King Frederick William II. of Prussia met at Pillnitz, in Saxony. A declaration was published by the two Sovereigns, stating that they considered the position of the King of France to be matter of European concern, and that, in the event of all the other great Powers consenting to a joint action, they were prepared to supply an armed force to operate on the French frontier.

[Declaration of Pillnitz withdrawn.]

Had the National Assembly instantly declared war on Leopold and Frederick William, its action would have been justified by every rule of international law. The Assembly did not, however, declare war, and for a good reason. It was known at Paris that the manifesto was no more than a device of the Emperor's to intimidate the enemies of the Royal Family. Leopold, when he pledged himself to join a coalition of all the Powers, was in fact aware that England would be no party to any such coalition. He was determined to do nothing that would force him into war; and it did not occur to him that French politicians would understand the emptiness of his threats as well as he did himself. Yet this turned out to be the case; and whatever indignation the manifesto of Pillnitz excited in the mass of the French people, it was received with more derision than alarm by the men who were cognisant of the affairs of Europe. All the politicians of the National Assembly knew that Prussia and Austria had lately been on the verge of war with one another upon the Eastern question; they even underrated the effect of the French revolution in appeasing the existing enmities of the great Powers. No important party in France regarded the Declaration of Pillnitz as a possible reason for hostilities; and the challenge given to France was soon publicly withdrawn. It was withdrawn when Louis XVI., by accepting the Constitution made by the National Assembly, placed himself, in the sight of Europe, in the position of a free agent. On the 14th September, 1791, the King, by a solemn public oath, identified his will with that of the nation. It was known in Paris that he had been urged by the emigrants to refuse his assent, and to plunge the nation into civil war by an open breach with the Assembly. The frankness with which Louis pledged himself to the Constitution, the seeming sincerity of his patriotism, again turned the tide of public opinion in his favour. His flight was forgiven; the restrictions placed upon his personal liberty were relaxed. Louis seemed to be once more reconciled with France, and France was relieved from the ban of Europe. The Emperor announced that the circumstances which had provoked the Declaration of Pillnitz no longer existed, and that the Powers, though prepared to revive the League if future occasion should arise, suspended all joint action in reference to the internal affairs of France.

[Priests and emigrants keep France in agitation.]

The National Assembly, which, in two years, had carried France so far towards the goal of political and social freedom, now declared its work ended. In the mass of the nation there was little desire for further change. The grievances which pressed most heavily upon the common course of men's lives-unfair taxation, exclusion from public employment, monopolies among the townspeople, and the feudal dues which consumed the produce of the peasant-had been swept away. It was less by any general demand for further reform than by the antagonisms already kindled in the Revolution that France was forced into a new series of violent changes. The King himself was not sincerely at one with the nation; in everything that most keenly touched his conscience he had unwillingly accepted the work of the Assembly. The Church and the noblesse were bent on undoing what had already been done. Without interfering with doctrine or ritual, the National Assembly had re-organised the ecclesiastical system of France, and had enforced that supremacy of the State over the priesthood to which, throughout the eighteenth century, the Governments of Catholic Europe had been steadily tending. The Civil Constitution of the Clergy, which was created by the National Assembly in 1790, transformed the priesthood from a society of landowners into a body of salaried officers of the State, and gave to the laity the election of their bishops and ministers. The change, carried out in this extreme form, threw the whole body of bishops and a great part of the lower clergy into revolt. Their interests were hurt by the sale of the Church lands; their consciences were wounded by the system of popular election, which was condemned by the Pope. In half the pulpits of France the principles of the Revolution were anathematised, and the vengeance of heaven denounced against the purchasers of the secularised Church lands. Beyond the frontier the emigrant nobles, who might have tempered the Revolution by combining with the many liberal men of their order who remained at home, gathered in arms, and sought the help of foreigners against a nation in which they could see nothing but rebellious dependents of their own. The head-quarters of the emigrants were at Coblentz in the dominions of the Elector of Trèves. They formed themselves into regiments, numbering in all some few thousands, and occupied themselves with extravagant schemes of vengeance against all Frenchmen who had taken part in the destruction of the privileges of their caste.

[Legislative Assembly. Oct. 1791.]

[War policy of the Gironde.]

Had the elections which followed the dissolution of the National Assembly sent to the Legislature a body of men bent only on maintaining the advantages already won, it would have been no easy task to preserve the peace of France in the presence of the secret or open hostility of the Court, the Church, and the emigrants. But the trial was not made. The leading spirits among the new representatives were not men of compromise. In the Legislative Body which met in 1791 there were all the passions of the Assembly of 1789, without any of the experience which that Assembly had gained. A decree, memorable among the achievements of political folly, had prohibited members of the late Chamber from seeking re-election. The new Legislature was composed of men whose political creed had been drawn almost wholly from literary sources; the most dangerous theorists of the former Assembly were released from Parliamentary restraints, and installed, like Robespierre, as the orators of the clubs. Within the Chamber itself the defenders of the Monarchy and of the Constitution which had just been given to France were far outmatched by the party of advance. The most conspicuous of the new deputies formed the group named after the district of the Gironde, where several of their leaders had been elected. The orator Vergniaud, pre-eminent among companions of singular eloquence, the philosopher Condorcet, the veteran journalist Brissot, gave to this party an ascendancy in the Chamber and an influence in the country the more dangerous because it appeared to belong to men elevated above the ordinary regions of political strife. Without the fixed design of turning the monarchy into a republic, the orators of the Gironde sought to carry the revolutionary movement over the barrier erected against it in the Constitution of 1791. From the moment of the opening of the Assembly it was clear that the Girondins intended to precipitate the conflict between the Court and the nation by devoting all the wealth of their eloquence to the subjects which divided France the most. To Brissot and the men who furnished the ideas of the party, it would have seemed a calamity that the Constitution of 1791, with its respect for the prerogative of the Crown and its tolerance of mediæval superstition, should fairly get underway. In spite of Robespierre's prediction that war would give France a strong sovereign in the place of a weak one, the Girondins persuaded themselves that the best means of diminishing or overthrowing monarchical power in France was a war with the sovereigns of Europe; and henceforward they laboured for war with scarcely any disguise.  [5]

[Notes of Kaunitz, Dec. 21, Feb. 17.]

Nor were occasions wanting, if war was needful for France. The protection which the Elector of Trèves gave to the emigrant army at Coblentz was so flagrant a violation of international law that the Gironde had the support of the whole nation when they called upon the King to demand the dispersal of the emigrants in the most peremptory form. National feeling was keenly excited by debates in which the military preparations of the emigrants and the encouragement given to them by foreign princes were denounced with all the energy of southern eloquence. On the 13th of December Louis declared to the Electors of Trèves and Mainz that he would treat them as enemies unless the armaments within their territories were dispersed by January 15th; and at the same time he called upon the Emperor Leopold, as head of the Germanic body, to use his influence in bringing the Electors to reason. The demands of France were not resisted. On the 16th January, 1792, Louis informed the Assembly that the emigrants had been expelled from the electorates, and acknowledged the good offices of Leopold in effecting this result. The substantial cause of war seemed to have disappeared; but another had arisen in its place. In a note of December 21st the Austrian Minister Kaunitz used expressions which implied that a league of the Powers was still in existence against France. Nothing could have come more opportunely for the war-party in the Assembly. Brissot cried for an immediate declaration of war, and appealed to the French nation to vindicate its honour by an attack both upon the emigrants and upon their imperial protector. The issue depended upon the relative power of the Crown and the Opposition. Leopold saw that war was inevitable unless the Constitutional party, which was still in office, rallied for one last effort, and gained a decisive victory over its antagonists. In the hope of turning public opinion against the Gironde, he permitted Kaunitz to send a despatch to Paris which loaded the leaders of the war-party with abuse, and exhorted the French nation to deliver itself from men who would bring upon it the hostility of Europe. (Feb. 17.)  [6] The despatch gave singular proof of the inability of the cleverest sovereign and the most experienced minister of the age to distinguish between the fears of a timid cabinet and the impulses of an excited nation. Leopold's vituperations might have had the intended effect if they had been addressed to the Margrave of Baden or the Doge of Venice; addressed to the French nation and its popular Assembly in the height of civil conflict, they were as oil poured upon the flames. Leopold ruined the party which he meant to reinforce; he threw the nation into the arms of those whom he attacked. His despatch was received in the Assembly with alternate murmurs and bursts of laughter; in the clubs it excited a wild outburst of rage. The exchange of diplomatic notes continued for a few weeks more; but the real answer of France to Austria was the "Marseillaise," composed at Strasburg almost simultaneously with Kaunitz' attack upon the Jacobins. The sudden death of the Emperor on March 1st produced no pause in the controversy. Delessart, the Foreign Minister of Louis, was thrust from office, and replaced by Dumouriez, the representative of the war-party.

[War declared, April 20th, 1792.]

Expostulation took a sharper tone; old subjects of complaint were revived; and the armies on each side were already pressing towards the frontier when the unhappy Louis was brought down to the Assembly by his Ministers, and compelled to propose the declaration of war.

[Pretended grounds of war.]

[Expectation of foreign attack real among the French people; not real among the French politicians.]

It is seldom that the professed grounds correspond with the real motives of a war; nor was this the case in 1792. The ultimatum of the Austrian Government demanded that compensation should be made to certain German nobles whose feudal rights over their peasantry had been abolished in Alsace; that the Pope should be indemnified for Avignon and the Venaissin, which had been taken from him by France; and that a Government should be established at Paris capable of affording the Powers of Europe security against the spread of democratic agitation. No one supposed the first two grievances to be a serious ground for hostilities. The rights of the German nobles in Alsace over their villagers were no doubt protected by the treaties which ceded those districts to France; but every politician in Europe would have laughed at a Government which allowed the feudal system to survive in a corner of its dominions out of respect for a settlement a century and a half old: nor had the Assembly refused to these foreign seigneurs a compensation claimed in vain by King Louis for the nobles of France. As to the annexation of Avignon and the Venaissin, a power which, like Austria, had joined in dismembering Poland, and had just made an unsuccessful attempt to dismember Turkey, could not gravely reproach France for incorporating a district which lay actually within it, and whose inhabitants, or a great portion of them, were anxious to become citizens of France. The third demand, the establishment of such a government as Austria should deem satisfactory, was one which no high-spirited people could be expected to entertain. Nor was this, in fact, expected by Austria. Leopold had no desire to attack France, but he had used threats, and would not submit to the humiliation of renouncing them. He would not have begun a war for the purpose of delivering the French Crown; but, when he found that he was himself certain to be attacked, he accepted a war with the Revolution without regret. On the other side, when the Gironde denounced the league of the Kings, they exaggerated a far-off danger for the ends of their domestic policy. The Sovereigns of the Continent had indeed made no secret of their hatred to the Revolution. Catherine of Russia had exhorted every Court in Europe to make war; Gustavus of Sweden was surprised by a violent death in the midst of preparations against France; Spain, Naples, and Sardinia were ready to follow leaders stronger than themselves. But the statesmen of the French Assembly well understood the interval that separates hostile feeling from actual attack; and the unsubstantial nature of the danger to France, whether from the northern or the southern Powers, was proved by the very fact that Austria, the hereditary enemy of France, and the country of the hated Marie Antoinette, was treated as the main enemy. Nevertheless, the Courts had done enough to excite the anger of millions of French people who knew of their menaces, and not of their hesitations and reserves. The man who composed the "Marseillaise" was no maker of cunningly-devised fables; the crowds who first sang it never doubted the reality of the dangers which the orators of the Assembly denounced. The Courts of Europe had heaped up the fuel; the Girondins applied the torch. The mass of the French nation had little means of appreciating what passed in Europe; they took their facts from their leaders, who considered it no very serious thing to plunge a nation into war for the furtherance of internal liberty. Events were soon to pass their own stern and mocking sentence upon the wisdom of the Girondin statesmanship.

[Germany follows Austria into the war.]

[State of Germany.]

After voting the Declaration of War the French Assembly accepted a manifesto, drawn up by Condorcet, renouncing in the name of the French people all intention of conquest. The manifesto expressed what was sincerely felt by men like Condorcet, to whom the Revolution was still too sacred a cause to be stained with the vulgar lust of aggrandisement. But the actual course of the war was determined less by the intentions with which the French began it than by the political condition of the States which bordered upon the French frontier. The war was primarily a war with Austria, but the Sovereign of Austria was also the head of Germany. The German Ecclesiastical Princes who ruled in the Rhenish provinces had been the most zealous protectors of the emigrants; it was impossible that they should now find shelter in neutrality. Prussia had made an alliance with the Emperor against France; other German States followed in the wake of one or other of the great Powers. If France proved stronger than its enemy, there were governments besides that of Austria which would have to take their account with the Revolution. Nor indeed was Austria the power most exposed to violent change. The mass of its territory lay far from France; at the most, it risked the loss of Lombardy and the Netherlands. Germany at large was the real area threatened by the war, and never was a political community less fitted to resist attack than Germany at the end of the eighteenth century. It was in the divisions of the German people, and in the rivalries of the two leading German governments, that France found its surest support throughout the Revolutionary war, and its keenest stimulus to conquest. It will throw light upon the sudden changes that now began to break over Europe if we pause to make a brief survey of the state of Germany at the outbreak of the war, to note the character and policy of its reigning sovereigns, and to cast a glance over the circumstances which had brought the central district of Europe into its actual condition.

[Since 1648, all the German States independent of the Emperor.]

[Holy Roman Empire.]

Germany at large still preserved the mediæval name and forms of the Holy Roman Empire. The members of this so-called Empire were, however, a multitude of independent States; and the chief of these States, Austria, combined with its German provinces a large territory which did not even in name form part of the Germanic body. The motley of the Empire was made up by governments of every degree of strength and weakness. Austria and Prussia possessed both political traditions and resources raising them to the rank of great European Powers; but the sovereignties of the second order, such as Saxony and Bavaria, had neither the security of strength nor the free energy often seen in small political communities; whilst in the remaining petty States of Germany, some hundreds in number, all public life had long passed out of mind in a drowsy routine of official benevolence or oppression. In theory there still existed a united Germanic body; in reality Germany was composed of two great monarchies in embittered rivalry with one another, and of a multitude of independent principalities and cities whose membership in the Empire involved little beyond a liability to be dragged into the quarrels of their more powerful neighbours. A German national feeling did not exist, because no combination existed uniting the interests of all Germany. The names and forms of political union had come down from a remote past, and formed a grotesque anachronism amid the realities of the eighteenth century. The head of the Germanic body held office not by hereditary right, but as the elected successor of Charlemagne and the Roman Cæsars. Since the fifteenth century the imperial dignity had rested with the Austrian House of Hapsburg; but, with the exception of Charles V., no sovereign of that House had commanded forces adequate to the creation of a united German state, and the opportunity which then offered itself was allowed to pass away. The Reformation severed Northern Germany from the Catholic monarchy of the south. The Thirty Years' War, terminating in the middle of the seventeenth century, secured the existence of Protestantism on the Continent of Europe, but it secured it at the cost of Germany, which was left exhausted and disintegrated. By the Treaty of Westphalia, A.D. 1648, the independence of every member of the Empire was recognised, and the central authority was henceforth a mere shadow. The Diet of the Empire, where the representatives of the Electors, of the Princes, and of the Free Cities, met in the order of the Middle Ages, sank into a Heralds' College, occupied with questions of title and precedence; affairs of real importance were transacted by envoys from Court to Court. For purposes of war the Empire was divided into Circles, each Circle supplying in theory a contingent of troops; but this military organisation existed only in letter. The greater and the intermediate States regulated their armaments, as they did their policy, without regard to the Diet of Ratisbon; the contingents of the smaller sovereignties and free cities were in every degree of inefficiency, corruption, and disorder; and in spite of the courage of the German soldier, it could make little difference in a European war whether a regiment which had its captain appointed by the city of Gmünd, its lieutenant by the Abbess of Rotenmünster, and its ensign by the Abbot of Gegenbach, did or did not take the field with numbers fifty per cent. below its statutory contingent.[7] How loose was the connection subsisting between the members of the Empire, how slow and cumbrous its constitutional machinery, was strikingly proved after the first inroads of the French into Germany in 1792, when the Diet deliberated for four weeks before calling out the forces of the Empire, and for five months before declaring war.

[Austria.]

[Catholic policy of the Hapsburgs.]

The defence of Germany rested in fact with the armies of Austria and Prussia. The Austrian House of Hapsburg held the imperial title, and gathered around it the sovereigns of the less progressive German States. While the Protestant communities of Northern Germany identified their interests with those of the rising Prussian Monarchy, religious sympathy and the tradition of ages attached the minor Catholic Courts to the political system of Vienna. Austria gained something by its patronage; it was, however, no real member of the German family. Its interests were not the interests of Germany; its power, great and enduring as it proved, was not based mainly upon German elements, nor used mainly for German ends. The title of the Austrian monarch gave the best idea of the singular variety of races and nationalities which owed their political union only to their submission to a common head. In the shorter form of state the reigning Hapsburg was described as King of Hungary, Bohemia, Croatia, Slavonia, and Galicia; Archduke of Austria; Grand Duke of Transylvania; Duke of Styria, Carinthia, and Carniola; and Princely Count of Hapsburg and Tyrol. At the outbreak of the war of 1792 the dominions of the House of Austria included the Southern Netherlands and the Duchy of Milan, in addition to the great bulk of the territory which it still governs. Eleven distinct languages were spoken in the Austrian monarchy, with countless varieties of dialects. Of the elements of the population the Slavic was far the largest, numbering about ten millions, against five million Germans and three million Magyars; but neither numerical strength nor national objects of desire coloured the policy of a family which looked indifferently upon all its subject races as instruments for its own aggrandisement. Milan and the Netherlands had come into the possession of Austria since the beginning of the eighteenth century, but the destiny of the old dominions of the Hapsburg House had been fixed for many generations in the course of the Thirty Years' War. In that struggle, as it affected Austria, the conflict of the ancient and the reformed faith had become a conflict between the Monarchy, allied with the Church, and every element of national life and independence, allied with the Reformation. Protestantism, then dominant in almost all the Hapsburg territories, was not put down without extinguishing the political liberties of Austrian Germany, the national life of Bohemia, the spirit and ambition of the Hungarian nobles. The detestable desire of the Emperor Ferdinand, "Rather a desert than a country full of heretics," was only too well fulfilled in the subsequent history of his dominions. In the German provinces, except the Tyrol, the old Parliaments, and with them all trace of liberty, disappeared; in Bohemia the national Protestant nobility lost their estates, or retained them only at the price of abandoning the religion, the language, and the feelings of their race, until the country of Huss passed out of the sight of civilised Europe, and Bohemia represented no more than a blank, unnoticed mass of tillers of the soil. In Hungary, where the nation was not so completely crushed in the Thirty Years' War, and Protestantism survived, the wholesale executions in 1686, ordered by the Tribunal known as the "Slaughter-house of Eperies," illustrated the traditional policy of the Monarchy towards the spirit of national independence. Two powers alone were allowed to subsist in the Austrian dominions, the power of the Crown and the power of the Priesthood; and, inasmuch as no real national unity could exist among the subject races, the unity of a blind devotion to the Catholic Church was enforced over the greater part of the Monarchy by all the authority of the State.

[Reforms of Maria Theresa, 1740-1780.]

Under the pressure of this soulless despotism the mind of man seemed to lose all its finer powers. The seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, in which no decade passed in England and France without the production of some literary masterpiece, some scientific discovery, or some advance in political reasoning, are marked by no single illustrious Austrian name, except that of Haydn the musician. When, after three generations of torpor succeeding the Thirty Years' War, the mind of North Germany awoke again in Winckelmann and Lessing, and a widely-diffused education gave to the middle class some compensation for the absence of all political freedom, no trace of this revival appeared in Austria. The noble hunted and slept; the serf toiled heavily on; where a school existed, the Jesuit taught his schoolboys ecclesiastical Latin, and sent them away unable to read their mother-tongue. To this dull and impenetrable society the beginnings of improvement could only be brought by military disaster. The loss of Silesia in the first years of Maria Theresa disturbed the slumbers of the Government, and reform began. Although the old provincial Assemblies, except in Hungary and the Netherlands, had long lost all real power, the Crown had never attempted to create a uniform system of administration: the collection of taxes, the enlistment of recruits, was still the business of the feudal landowners of each district. How such an antiquated order was likely to fare in the presence of an energetic enemy was clearly enough shown in the first attack made upon Austria by Frederick the Great. As the basis of a better military organisation, and in the hope of arousing a stronger national interest among her subjects, Theresa introduced some of the offices of a centralised monarchy, at the same time that she improved the condition of the serf, and substituted a German education and German schoolmasters for those of the Jesuits. The peasant, hitherto in many parts of the monarchy attached to the soil, was now made free to quit his lord's land, and was secured from ejectment so long as he fulfilled his duty of labouring for the lord on a fixed number of days in the year. Beyond this Theresa's reform did not extend. She had no desire to abolish the feudal character of country life; she neither wished to temper the sway of Catholicism, nor to extinguish those provincial forms which gave to the nobles within their own districts a shadow of political independence. Herself conservative in feeling, attached to aristocracy, and personally devout, Theresa consented only to such change as was recommended by her trusted counsellors, and asked no more than she was able to obtain by the charm of her own queenly character.

[Joseph II., 1780-1790.]

With the accession of her son Joseph II. in 1780 a new era began for Austria. The work deferred by Theresa was then taken up by a monarch whose conceptions of social and religious reform left little for the boldest innovators of France ten years later to add. There is no doubt that the creation of a great military force for enterprises of foreign conquest was an end always present in Joseph's mind, and that the thirst for uncontrolled despotic power never left him; but by the side of these coarser elements there was in Joseph's nature something of the true fire of the man who lives for ideas. Passionately desirous of elevating every class of his subjects at the same time that he ignored all their habits and wishes, Joseph attempted to transform the motley and priest-ridden collection of nations over whom he ruled into a single homogeneous body, organised after the model of France and Prussia, worshipping in the spirit of a tolerant and enlightened Christianity, animated in its relations of class to class by the humane philosophy of the eighteenth century. In the first year of his reign Joseph abolished every jurisdiction that did not directly emanate from the Crown, and scattered an army of officials from Ostend to the Dniester to conduct the entire public business of his dominions under the immediate direction of the central authority at Vienna. In succeeding years edict followed edict, dissolving monasteries, forbidding Church festivals and pilgrimages, securing the protection of the State to every form of Christian worship, abolishing the exemption from land-tax and the monopoly of public offices enjoyed by the nobility, transforming the Universities from dens of monkish ignorance into schools of secular learning, converting the peasant's personal service into a rent-charge, and giving him in the officer of the Crown a protector and an arbiter in all his dealings with his lord. Noble and enlightened in his aims, Joseph, like every other reformer of the eighteenth century, underrated the force which the past exerts over the present; he could see nothing but prejudice and unreason in the attachment to provincial custom or time-honoured opinion; he knew nothing of that moral law which limits the success of revolutions by the conditions which precede them. What was worst united with what was best in resistance to his reforms. The bigots of the University of Louvain, who still held out against the discoveries of Newton, excited the mob to insurrection against Joseph, as the enemy of religion; the Magyar landowners in Hungary resisted a system which extinguished the last vestiges of their national independence at the same time that it destroyed the harsh dominion which they themselves exercised over their peasantry. Joseph alternated between concession and the extreme of autocratic violence. At one moment he resolved to sweep away every local right that fettered the exercise of his power; then, after throwing the Netherlands into successful revolt, and forcing Hungary to the verge of armed resistance, he revoked his unconstitutional ordinances (January 28, 1790), and restored all the institutions of the Hungarian monarchy which existed at the date of his accession.

[Leopold II., 1790-1792.]

A month later, death removed Joseph from his struggle and his sorrows. His successor, Leopold II., found the monarchy involved as Russia's ally in an attack upon Turkey; threatened by the Northern League of Prussia, England, and Holland; exhausted in finance; weakened by the revolt of the Netherlands; and distracted in every province by the conflict of the ancient and the modern system of government, and the assertion of new social rights that seemed to have been created only in order to be extinguished. The recovery of Belgium and the conclusion of peace with Turkey were effected under circumstances that brought the adroit and guarded statesmanship of Leopold into just credit. His settlement of the conflict between the Crown and the Provinces, between the Church and education, between the noble and the serf, marked the line in which, for better or for worse, Austrian policy was to run for sixty years. Provincial rights, the privileges of orders and corporate bodies, Leopold restored; the personal sovereignty of his house he maintained unimpaired. In the more liberal part of Joseph's legislation, the emancipation of learning from clerical control, the suppression of unjust privilege in taxation, the abolition of the feudal services of the peasant, Leopold was willing to make concessions to the Church and the aristocracy; to the spirit of national independence which his predecessor's aggression had excited in Bohemia as well as in Hungary, he made no concession beyond the restoration of certain cherished forms. An attempt of the Magyar nobles to affix conditions to their acknowledgment of Leopold as King of Hungary was defeated; and, by creating new offices at Vienna for the affairs of Illyria and Transylvania, and making them independent of the Hungarian Diet, Leopold showed that the Crown possessed an instrument against the dominant Magyar race in the Slavic and Romanic elements of the Hungarian Kingdom.  [8] On the other hand, Leopold consented to restore to the Church its control over the higher education, and to throw back the burden of taxation upon land not occupied by noble owners. He gave new rigour to the censorship of the press; but the gain was not to the Church, to which the censorship had formerly belonged, but to the Government, which now employed it as an instrument of State. In the great question of the emancipation of the serf Leopold was confronted by a more resolute and powerful body of nobility in Hungary than existed in any other province. The right of the lord to fetter the peasant to the soil and to control his marriage Leopold refused to restore in any part of his dominions; but, while in parts of Bohemia he succeeded in maintaining the right given by Joseph to the peasant to commute his personal service for a money payment, in Hungary he was compelled to fall back upon the system of Theresa, and to leave the final settlement of the question to the Diet. Twenty years later the statesman who emancipated the peasants of Prussia observed that Hungary was the only part of the Austrian dominions in which the peasant was not in a better condition than his fellows in North Germany;  [9] and so torpid was the humanity of the Diet that until the year 1835 the prison and the flogging-board continued to form a part of every Hungarian manor.

[Death of Leopold, March 1, 1792.]

[Francis II., 1792.]

Of the self-sacrificing ardour of Joseph there was no trace in Leopold's character; yet his political aims were not low. During twenty-four years' government of Tuscany he had proved himself almost an ideal ruler in the pursuit of peace, of religious enlightenment, and of the material improvement of his little sovereignty. Raised to the Austrian throne, the compromise which he effected with the Church and the aristocracy resulted more from a supposed political necessity than from his own inclination. So long as Leopold lived, Austria would not have wanted an intelligence capable of surveying the entire field of public business, nor a will capable of imposing unity of action upon the servants of State. To the misfortune of Europe no less than of his own dominions, Leopold was carried off by sickness at the moment when the Revolutionary War broke out. An uneasy reaction against Joseph's reforms and a well-grounded dread of the national movements in Hungary and the Netherlands were already the principal forces in the official world at Vienna; in addition to these came the new terror of the armed proselytism of the Revolution. The successor of Leopold, Francis II., was a sickly prince, in whose homely and unimaginative mind the great enterprises of Joseph, amidst which he had been brought up, excited only aversion. Amongst the men who surrounded him, routine and the dread of change made an end of the higher forms of public life. The Government openly declared that all change should cease so long as the war lasted; even the pressing question of the peasant's relation to his lord was allowed to remain unsettled by the Hungarian Diet, lest the spirit of national independence should find expression in its debates. Over the whole internal administration of Austria the torpor of the days before Theresa seemed to be returning. Its foreign policy, however, bore no trace of this timorous, conservative spirit. Joseph, as restless abroad as at home, had shared the ambition of the Russian Empress Catherine, and troubled Europe with his designs upon Turkey, Venice, and Bavaria. These and similar schemes of territorial extension continued to fill the minds of Austrian courtiers and ambassadors. Shortly after the outbreak of war with France the aged minister Kaunitz, who had been at the head of the Foreign Office during three reigns, retired from power. In spite of the first partition of Poland, made in combination with Russia and Prussia in 1772, and in spite of subsequent attempts of Joseph against Turkey and Bavaria, the policy of Kaunitz had not been one of mere adventure and shifting attack. He had on the whole remained true to the principle of alliance with France and antagonism to Prussia; and when the revolution brought war within sight, he desired to limit the object of the war to the restoration of monarchical government in France. The conditions under which the young Emperor and the King of Prussia agreed to turn the war to purposes of territorial aggrandisement caused Kaunitz, with a true sense of the fatal import of this policy, to surrender the power which he had held for forty years. It was secretly agreed between the two courts that Prussia should recoup itself for its expenses against France by seizing part of Poland. On behalf of Austria it was demanded that the Emperor should annex Bavaria, giving Belgium to the Elector as compensation. Both these schemes violated what Kaunitz held to be sound policy. He believed that the interests of Austria required the consolidation rather than the destruction of Poland; and he declared the exchange of the Netherlands for Bavaria to be, in the actual state of affairs, impracticable.  [10] Had the coalition of 1792 been framed on the principles advocated by Kaunitz, though Austria might not have effected the restoration of monarchial power in France, the alliance would not have disgracefully shattered on the crimes and infamies attending the second partition of Poland.

From the moment when Kaunitz retired from office, territorial extension became the great object of the Austrian Court. To prudent statesmen the scattered provinces and varied population of the Austrian State would have suggested that Austria had more to lose than any European Power; to the men of 1792 it appeared that she had more to gain. The Netherlands might be increased with a strip of French Flanders; Bavaria, Poland, and Italy were all weak neighbours, who might be made to enrich Austria in their turn. A sort of magical virtue was attached to the acquisition of territory. If so many square miles and so many head of population were gained, whether of alien or kindred race, mutinous or friendly, the end of all statesmanship was realised, and the heaviest sacrifice of life and industry repaid. Austria affected to act as the centre of a defensive alliance, and to fight for the common purpose of giving a Government to France which would respect the rights of its neighbours. In reality, its own military operations were too often controlled, and an effective common warfare frustrated, at one moment by a design upon French Flanders, at another by the course of Polish or Bavarian intrigue, at another by the hope of conquests in Italy. Of all the interests which centred in the head of the House of Hapsburg, the least befriended at Vienna was the interest of the Empire and of Germany.

[Prussia.]

Nor, if Austria was found wanting, had Germany any permanent safeguard in the rival Protestant State. Prussia, the second great German Power and the ancient enemy of Austria, had been raised to an influence in Europe quite out of proportion to its scanty resources by the genius of Frederick the Great and the earlier Princes of the House of Hohenzollern. Its population was not one-third of that of France or Austria; its wealth was perhaps not superior to that of the Republic of Venice. That a State so poor in men and money should play the part of one of the great Powers of Europe was possible only so long as an energetic ruler watched every movement of that complicated machinery which formed both army and nation after the prince's own type. Frederick gave his subjects a just administration of the law; he taught them productive industries; he sought to bring education to their doors  [11]; but he required that the citizen should account himself before all the servant of the State. Every Prussian either worked in the great official hierarchy or looked up to it as the providence which was to direct all his actions and supply all his judgments. The burden of taxation imposed by the support of an army relatively three times as great as that of any other Power was wonderfully lightened by Frederick's economy: far more serious than the tobacco-monopoly and the forage-requisitions, at which Frederick's subjects grumbled during his life-time, was the danger that a nation which had only attained political greatness by its obedience to a rigorous administration should fall into political helplessness, when the clear purpose and all-controlling care of its ruler no longer animated a system which, without him, was only a pedantic routine. What in England we are accustomed to consider as the very substance of national life,-the mass of political interest and opinion, diffused in some degree amongst all classes, at once the support and the judge of the servants of the State,-had in Prussia no existence. Frederick's subjects obeyed and trusted their Monarch; there were probably not five hundred persons outside the public service who had any political opinions of their own. Prussia did not possess even the form of a national representation; and, although certain provincial assemblies continued to meet, they met only to receive the instructions of the Crown-officers of their district. In the absence of all public criticism, the old age of Frederick must in itself have endangered the efficiency of the military system which had raised Prussia to its sudden eminence.[12] The impulse of Frederick's successor was sufficient to reverse the whole system of Prussian foreign policy, and to plunge the country in alliance with Austria into a speculative and unnecessary war.

[Frederick William II., 1786.]

[Alliance with Austria against France, Feb., 1792.]

On the death of Frederick in 1786, the crown passed to Frederick William II., his nephew. Frederick William was a man of common type, showy and pleasure-loving, interested in public affairs, but incapable of acting on any fixed principle. His mistresses gave the tone to political society. A knot of courtiers intrigued against one another for the management of the King; and the policy of Prussia veered from point to point as one unsteady impulse gave place to another. In countries less dependent than Prussia upon the personal activity of the monarch, Frederick William's faults might have been neutralised by able Ministers; in Prussia the weakness of the King was the decline of the State. The whole fabric of national greatness had been built up by the royal power; the quality of the public service, apart from which the nation was politically non-existent, was the quality of its head. When in the palace profusion and intrigue took the place of Frederick the Great's unflagging labour, the old uprightness, industry, and precision which had been the pride of Prussian administration fell out of fashion everywhere. Yet the frivolity of the Court was a less active cause of military decline than the abandonment of the first principles of Prussian policy.  [13] If any political sentiment existed in the nation, it was the sentiment of antagonism to Austria. The patriotism of the army, with all the traditions of the great King, turned wholly in this direction. When, out of sympathy with the Bourbon family and the emigrant French nobles, Frederick William allied himself with Austria (Feb. 1792), and threw himself into the arms of his ancient enemy in order to attack a nation which had not wronged him, he made an end of all zealous obedience amongst his servants. Brunswick, the Prussian Commander-in-Chief, hated the French emigrants as much as he did the Revolution; and even the generals who did not originally share Brunswick's dislike to the war recovered their old jealousy of Austria after the first defeat, and exerted themselves only to get quit of the war at the first moment that Prussia could retire from it without disgrace. The very enterprise in which Austria had consented that the Court of Berlin should seek its reward-the seizure of a part of Poland-proved fatal to the coalition. The Empress Catherine was already laying her hand for the second time upon this unfortunate country. It was easy for the opponents of the Austrian alliance who surrounded King Frederick William to contrast the barren effort of a war against France with the cheap and certain advantages to be won by annexation, in concert with Russia, of Polish territory. To pursue one of these objects with vigour it was necessary to relinquish the other. Prussia was not rich enough to maintain armies both on the Vistula and the Rhine. Nor, in the opinion of its rulers, was it rich enough to be very tender of its honour or very loyal towards its allies.  [14]

[Social system of Prussia.]

In the institutions of Prussia two opposite systems existed side by side, exhibiting in the strongest form a contrast which in a less degree was present in most Continental States. The political independence of the nobility had long been crushed; the King's Government busied itself with every detail of town and village administration; yet along with this rigorous development of the modern doctrine of the unity and the authority of the State there existed a social order more truly archaic than that of the Middle Ages at their better epochs. The inhabitants of Prussia were divided into the three classes of nobles, burghers, and peasants, each confined to its own stated occupations, and not marrying outside its own order. The soil of the country bore the same distinction; peasant's land could not be owned by a burgher; burgher's land could not be owned by a noble. No occupation was lawful for the noble, who was usually no more than a poor gentleman, but the service of the Crown; the peasant, even where free, might not practise the handicraft of a burgher. But the mass of the peasantry in the country east of the Elbe were serfs attached to the soil; and the noble, who was not permitted to exercise the slightest influence upon the government of his country, inherited along with his manor a jurisdiction and police-control over all who were settled within it. Frederick had allowed serfage to continue because it gave him in each manorial lord a task-master whom he could employ in his own service. System and obedience were the sources of his power; and if there existed among his subjects one class trained to command and another trained to obey, it was so much the easier for him to force the country into the habits of industry which he required of it. In the same spirit, Frederick officered his army only with men of the noble caste. They brought with them the habit of command ready-formed; the peasants who ploughed and threshed at their orders were not likely to disobey them in the presence of the enemy. It was possible that such a system should produce great results so long as Frederick was there to guard against its abuses; Frederick gone, the degradation of servitude, the insolence of caste, was what remained. When the army of France, led by men who had worked with their fathers in the fields, hunted a King of Prussia amidst his capitulating grandees from the centre to the verge of his dominions, it was seen what was the permanent value of a system which recognised in the nature of the poor no capacity but one for hereditary subjection. The French peasant, plundered as he was by the State, and vexed as he was with feudal services, knew no such bondage as that of the Prussian serf, who might not leave the spot where he was born; only in scattered districts in the border-provinces had serfage survived in France. It is significant of the difference in self-respect existing in the peasantry of the two countries that the custom of striking the common soldier, universal in Germany, was in France no more than an abuse, practised by the admirers of Frederick, and condemned by the better officers themselves.

[Minor States of Germany.]

[Ecclesiastical States.]

In all the secondary States of Germany the government was an absolute monarchy; though, here and there, as in Würtemberg, the shadow of the old Assembly of the Estates survived; and in Hanover the absence of the Elector, King George III., placed power in the hands of a group of nobles who ruled in his name. Society everywhere rested on a sharp division of classes similar in kind to that of Prussia; the condition of the peasant ranging from one of serfage, as it existed in Mecklenburg,[15] to one of comparative freedom and comfort in parts of the southern and western States. The sovereigns differed widely in the enlightenment or selfishness of their rule; but, on the whole, the character of government had changed for the better of late years; and, especially in the Protestant States, efforts to improve the condition of the people were not wanting. Frederick the Great had in fact created a new standard of monarchy in Germany. Forty years earlier, Versailles, with its unfeeling splendours, its glorification of the personal indulgence of the monarch, had been the ideal which, with a due sense of their own inferiority, the German princes had done their best to imitate. To be a sovereign was to cover acres of ground with state apartments, to lavish the revenues of the country upon a troop of mistresses and adventurers, to patronise the arts, to collect with the same complacency the masterpieces of ancient painting that adorn the Dresden Gallery, or an array of valuables scarcely more interesting than the chests of treasure that were paid for them. In the ecclesiastical States, headed by the Electorates of Mainz, Trèves, and Cologne, the affectations of a distinctive Christian or spiritual character had long been abandoned. The prince-bishop and canons, who were nobles appointed from some other province, lived after the gay fashion of the time, at the expense of a land in which they had no interest extending beyond their own lifetime. The only feature distinguishing the ecclesiastical residence from that of one of the minor secular princes was that the parade of state was performed by monks in the cathedral instead of by soldiers on the drill-ground, and that even the pretence of married life was wanting among the flaunting harpies who frequented a celibate Court. Yet even on the Rhine and on the Moselle the influence of the great King of Prussia had begun to make itself felt. The intense and penetrating industry of Frederick was not within the reach of every petty sovereign who might envy its results; but the better spirit of the time was seen under some of the ecclesiastical princes in the encouragement of schools, the improvement of the roads, and a retrenchment in courtly expenditure. That deeply-seated moral disease which resulted from centuries of priestly rule was not to be so lightly shaken off. In a district where Nature most bountifully rewards the industry of man, twenty-four out of every hundred of the population were monks, nuns, or beggars.  [16]

[Petty States. Free Cities. Knights.]

Two hundred petty principalities, amongst which Weimar, the home of Goethe, stood out in the brightest relief from the level of princely routine and self-indulgence; fifty imperial cities, in most of which the once vigorous organism of civic life had shrivelled to the type of the English rotten borough, did not exhaust the divisions of Germany. Several hundred Knights of the Empire, owing no allegiance except to the Emperor, exercised, each over a domain averaging from three to four hundred inhabitants, all the rights of sovereignty, with the exception of the right to make war and treaties. The districts in which this order survived were scattered over the Catholic States of the south-west of Germany, where the knights maintained their prerogatives by federations among themselves and by the support of the Emperor, to whom they granted sums of money. There were instances in which this union of the rights of the sovereign and the landlord was turned to good account; but the knight's land was usually the scene of such poverty and degradation that the traveller needed no guide to inform him when he entered it. Its wretched tracks interrupted the great lines of communication between the Rhine and further Germany; its hovels were the refuge of all the criminals and vagabonds of the surrounding country; for no police existed but the bailiffs of the knight, and the only jurisdiction was that of the lawyer whom the knight brought over from the nearest town. Nor was the disadvantage only on the side of those who were thus governed. The knight himself, even if he cherished some traditional reverence for the shadow of the Empire, was in the position of a man who belongs to no real country. If his sons desired any more active career than that of annuitants upon the family domains, they could obtain it only by seeking employment at one or other of the greater Courts, and by identifying themselves with the interests of a land which they entered as strangers.

Such was in outline the condition of Germany at the moment when it was brought into collision with the new and unknown forces of the French Revolution. A system of small States, which in the past of Greece and Italy had produced the finest types of energy and genius, had in Germany resulted in the extinction of all vigorous life, and in the ascendancy of all that was stagnant, little, and corrupt. If political disorganisation, the decay of public spirit, and the absence of a national idea, are the signs of impending downfall, Germany was ripe for foreign conquest. The obsolete and dilapidated fabric of the Empire had for a century past been sustained only by the European tradition of the Balance of Power, or by the absence of serious attack from without. Austria once overpowered, the Empire was ready to fall to pieces by itself: and where, among the princes or the people of Germany, were the elements that gave hope of its renovation in any better form of national life?

CHAPTER II.

French and Austrian armies on the Flemish frontier-Prussia enters the war-Brunswick invades France-His Proclamation-Insurrection of Aug. 10 at Paris-Massacres of September-Character of the war-Brunswick, checked at Valmy, retreats-The War becomes a Crusade of France-Neighbours of France-Custine enters Mainz-Dumouriez conquers the Austrian Netherlands -Nice and Savoy annexed-Decree of the Convention against all Governments -Execution of Louis XVI.-War with England, followed by war with the Mediterranean States-Condition of England-English Parties, how affected by the Revolution-The Gironde and the Mountain-Austria recovers the Netherlands-The Allies invade France-La Vendée-Revolutionary System of 1793-Errors of the Allies-New French Commanders and Democratic Army- Victories of Jourdan, Hoche, and Pichegru-Prussia withdrawing from the War -Polish Affairs-Austria abandons the Netherlands-Treaties of Basle-France in 1795-Insurrection of 13 Vendémiaire-Constitution of 1795-The Directory-Effect of the Revolution on the spirit of Europe up to 1795.

[Fighting on Flemish frontier, April, 1792.]

[Prussian army invades France, July, 1792. Proclamation.]

The war between France and Austria opened in April, 1792, on the Flemish frontier. The first encounters were discreditable to the French soldiery, who took to flight and murdered one of their generals. The discouragement with which the nation heard of these reverses deepened into sullen indignation against the Court, as weeks and months passed by, and the forces lay idle on the frontier or met the enemy only in trifling skirmishes which left both sides where they were before. If at this crisis of the Revolution, with all the patriotism, all the bravery, all the military genius of France burning for service, the Government conducted the war with results scarcely distinguishable from those of a parade, the suggestion of treason on the part of the Court was only too likely to be entertained. The internal difficulties of the country were increasing. The Assembly had determined to banish from France the priests who rejected the new ecclesiastical system, and the King had placed his veto upon their decree. He had refused to permit the formation of a camp of volunteers in the neighbourhood of Paris. He had dismissed the popular Ministry forced upon him by the Gironde. A tumult on the 20th of June, in which the mob forced their way into the Tuileries, showed the nature of the attack impending upon the monarchy if Louis continued to oppose himself to the demands of the nation; but the lesson was lost upon the King. Louis was as little able to nerve himself for an armed conflict with the populace as to reconcile his conscience to the Ecclesiastical Decrees, and he surrendered himself to a pious inertia at a moment when the alarm of foreign invasion doubled revolutionary passion all over France. Prussia, in pursuance of a treaty made in February, united its forces to those of Austria. Forty thousand Prussian troops, under the Duke of Brunswick, the best of Frederick's surviving generals, advanced along the Moselle. From Belgium and the upper Rhine two Austrian armies converged upon the line of invasion; and the emigrant nobles were given their place among the forces of the Allies.

On the 25th of July the Duke of Brunswick, in the name of the Emperor and the King of Prussia, issued a proclamation to the French people, which, but for the difference between violent words and violent deeds, would have left little to be complained of in the cruelties that henceforward stained the popular cause. In this manifesto, after declaring that the Allies entered France in order to deliver Louis from captivity, and that members of the National Guard fighting against the invaders would be punished as rebels against their king, the Sovereigns addressed themselves to the city of Paris and to the representatives of the French nation:-"The city of Paris and its inhabitants are warned to submit without delay to their King; to set that Prince at entire liberty, and to show to him and to all the Royal Family the inviolability and respect which the law of nature and of nations imposes on subjects towards their Sovereigns. Their Imperial and Royal Majesties will hold all the members of the National Assembly, of the Municipality, and of the National Guard of Paris responsible for all events with their heads, before military tribunals, without hope of pardon. They further declare that, if the Tuileries be forced or insulted, or the least violence offered to the King, the Queen, or the Royal Family, and if provision be not at once made for their safety and liberty, they will inflict a memorable vengeance, by delivering up the city of Paris to military execution and total overthrow, and the rebels guilty of such crimes to the punishment they have merited."  [17]

[Insurrection August 10, 1792.]

This challenge was not necessary to determine the fate of Louis. Since the capture of the Bastille in the first days of the Revolution the National Government had with difficulty supported itself against the populace of the capital; and, even before the foreigner threatened Paris with fire and sword, Paris had learnt to look for the will of France within itself. As the columns of Brunswick advanced across the north-eastern frontier, Danton and the leaders of the city-democracy marshalled their army of the poor and the desperate to overthrow that monarchy whose cause the invader had made his own. The Republic which had floated so long in the thoughts of the Girondins was won in a single day by the populace of Paris, amid the roar of cannons and the flash of bayonets. On the 10th of August Danton let loose the armed mob upon the Tuileries. Louis quitted the Palace without giving orders to the guard either to fight or to retire; but the guard were ignorant that their master desired them to offer no resistance, and one hundred and sixty of the mob were shot down before an order reached the troops to abandon the Palace. The cruelties which followed the victory of the people indicated the fate in store for those whom the invader came to protect. It is doubtful whether the foreign Courts would have made any serious attempt to undo the social changes effected by the Revolution in France; but no one supposed that those thousands of self-exiled nobles who now returned behind the guns of Brunswick had returned in order to take their places peacefully in the new social order. In their own imagination, as much as in that of the people, they returned with fire and sword to repossess themselves of rights of which they had been despoiled, and to take vengeance upon the men who were responsible for the changes made in France since 1789.[18] In the midst of a panic little justified by the real military situation, Danton inflamed the nation with his own passionate courage and resolution; he unhappily also thought it necessary to a successful national defence that the reactionary party at Paris should be paralysed by a terrible example. The prisons were filled with persons suspected of hostility to the national cause, and in the first days of September many hundreds of these unfortunate persons were massacred by gangs of assassins paid by a committee of the Municipality. Danton did not disguise his approval of the act. He had made up his mind that the work of the Revolution could only be saved by striking terror into its enemies, and by preventing the Royalists from co-operating with the invader. But the multitudes who flocked to the standards of 1792 carried with them the patriotism of Danton unstained by his guilt. Right or wrong in its origin, the war was now unquestionably a just one on the part of France, a war against a privileged class attempting to recover by force the unjust advantages that they had not been able to maintain, a war against the foreigner in defence of the right of the nation to deal with its own government. Since the great religious wars there had been no cause so rooted in the hearts, so close to the lives of those who fought for it. Every soldier who joined the armies of France in 1792 joined of his own free will. No conscription dragged the peasant to the frontier. Men left their homes in order that the fruit of the poor man's labour should be his own, in order that the children of France should inherit some better birthright than exaction and want, in order that the late-won sense of human right should not be swept from the earth by the arms of privilege and caste. It was a time of high-wrought hope, of generous and pathetic self-sacrifice; a time that left a deep and indelible impression upon those who judged it as eye-witnesses. Years afterwards the poet Wordsworth, then alienated from France and cold in the cause of liberty, could not recall without tears the memories of 1792.  [19]

[Brunswick checked at Valmy, Sept. 20.]

[Retreat of Brunswick.]

The defence of France rested on General Dumouriez. The fortresses of Longwy and Verdun, covering the passage of the Meuse, had fallen after the briefest resistance; the troops that could be collected before Brunswick's approach were too few to meet the enemy in the open field. Happily for France the slow advance of the Prussian general permitted Dumouriez to occupy the difficult country of the Argonne, where, while waiting for his reinforcements, he was able for some time to hold the invaders in check. At length Brunswick made his way past the defile which Dumouriez had chosen for his first line of defence; but it was only to find the French posted in such strength on his flank that any further advance would imperil his own army. If the advance was to be continued, Dumouriez must be dislodged. Accordingly, on the 20th of September, Brunswick directed his artillery against the hills of Valmy, where the French left was encamped. The cannonade continued for some hours, but it was followed by no general attack. The firmness of the French under Brunswick's fire made it clear that they would not be displaced without an obstinate battle; and, disappointed of victory, the King of Prussia began to listen to proposals of peace sent to him by Dumouriez.  [20] A week spent in negotiation served only to strengthen the French and to aggravate the scarcity and sickness within the German camp. Dissensions broke out between the Prussian and Austrian commanders; a retreat was ordered; and to the astonishment of Europe the veteran forces of Brunswick fell back before the mutinous soldiery and unknown generals of the Revolution, powerless to delay for a single month the evacuation of France and the restoration of the fortresses which they had captured.

[The Convention meets. Proclaims Republic, Sept. 21.]

[The war becomes a crusade of democracy.]

In the meantime the Legislative Assembly had decreed its own dissolution in consequence of the overthrow of the monarchy on August both, and had ordered the election of representatives to frame a constitution for France. The elections were held in the crisis of invasion, in the height of national indignation against the alliance of the aristocracy with the foreigner, and, in some districts, under the influence of men who had not shrunk from ordering the massacres in the prisons. At such a moment a Constitutional Royalist had scarcely more chance of election than a detected spy from the enemy's camp. The Girondins, who had been the party of extremes in the Legislative Assembly, were the party of moderation and order in the Convention. By their side there were returned men whose whole being seemed to be compounded out of the forces of conflict, men who, sometimes without conscious depravity, carried into political and social struggles that direct, unquestioning employment of force which has ordinarily been reserved for war or for the diffusion of religious doctrines. The moral differences that separated this party from the Gironde were at once conspicuous: the political creed of the two parties appeared at first to be much the same. Monarchy was abolished, and France declared a Republic (Sept. 21). Office continued in the hands of the Gironde; but the vehement, uncompromising spirit of their rivals, the so-called party of the Mountain, quickly made itself felt in all the relations of France to foreign Powers. The intention of conquest might still be disavowed, as it had been five months before; but were the converts to liberty to be denied the right of uniting themselves to the French people by their own free will? When the armies of the Republic had swept its assailants from the border-provinces that gave them entrance into France, were those provinces to be handed back to a government of priests and nobles? The scruples which had condemned all annexation of territory vanished in that orgy of patriotism which followed the expulsion of the invader and the discovery that the Revolution was already a power in other lands than France. The nation that had to fight the battle of European freedom must appeal to the spirit of freedom wherever it would answer the call: the conflict with sovereigns must be maintained by arming their subjects against them in every land. In this conception of the universal alliance of the nations, the Governments with which France was not yet at war were scarcely distinguished from those which had pronounced against her. The frontier-lines traced by an obsolete diplomacy, the artificial guarantees of treaties, were of little account against the living and inalienable sovereignty of the people. To men inflamed with the passions of 1792 an argument of international law scarcely conveyed more meaning than to Peter the Hermit. Among the statesmen of other lands, who had no intention of abandoning all the principles recognised as the public right of Europe, the language now used by France could only be understood as the avowal of indiscriminate aggression.

[The neighbors of France.]

The Revolution had displayed itself in France as a force of union as well as of division. It had driven the nobles across the frontier; it had torn the clergy from their altars; but it had reconciled sullen Corsica; and by abolishing feudal rights it had made France the real fatherland of the Teutonic peasant in Alsace and Lorraine. It was now about to prove its attractive power in foreign lands. At the close of the last century the nationalities of Europe were far less consolidated than they are at present; only on the Spanish and the Swiss frontier had France a neighbour that could be called a nation. On the north, what is now the kingdom of Belgium was in 1792 a collection of provinces subject to the House of Austria. The German population both of the districts west of the Rhine and of those opposite to Alsace was parcelled out among a number of petty principalities. Savoy, though west of the chain of the Alps and French in speech, formed part of the kingdom of Piedmont, which was itself severed by history and by national character from the other States of Northern Italy. Along the entire frontier, from Dunkirk to the Maritime Alps, France nowhere touched a strong, united, and independent people; and along this entire frontier, except in the country opposite Alsace, the armed proselytism of the French Revolution proved a greater force than the influences on which the existing order of things depended. In the Low Countries, in the Principalities of the Rhine, in Switzerland, in Savoy, in Piedmont itself, the doctrines of the Revolution were welcomed by a more or less numerous class, and the armies of France appeared, though but for a moment, as the missionaries of liberty and right rather than as an invading enemy.

[Custine enters Mainz, Oct. 20.]

No sooner had Brunswick been brought to a stand by Dumouriez at Valmy than a French division under Custine crossed the Alsatian frontier and advanced upon Spires, where Brunswick had left large stores of war. The garrison was defeated in an encounter outside the town; Spires and Worms surrendered to Custine. In the neighbouring fortress of Mainz, the key to Western Germany, Custine's advance was watched by a republican party among the inhabitants, from whom the French general learnt that he had only to appear before the city to become its master. Brunswick had indeed apprehended the failure of his invasion of France, but he had never given a thought to the defence of Germany; and, although the King of Prussia had been warned of the defenceless state of Mainz, no steps had been taken beyond the payment of a sum of money for the repair of the fortifications, which money the Archbishop expended in the purchase of a wood belonging to himself and the erection of a timber patchwork. On news arriving of the capture of Spires, the Archbishop fled, leaving the administration to the Dean, the Chancellor, and the Commandant. The Chancellor made a speech, calling upon his "beloved brethren" the citizens to defend themselves to the last extremity, and daily announced the overthrow of Dumouriez and the approaching entry of the Allies into Paris, until Custine's soldiers actually came into sight.  [21] Then a council of war declared the city to be untenable; and before Custine had brought up a single siege-gun the garrison capitulated, and the French were welcomed into Mainz by the partisans of the Republic (Oct. 20). With the French arms came the French organisation of liberty. A club was formed on the model of the Jacobin Club of Paris; existing officers and distinctions of rank were abolished; and although the mass of the inhabitants held aloof, a Republic was finally proclaimed, and incorporated with the Republic of France.

[Dumouriez invades the Netherlands.]

[Battle of Jemappes, Nov. 6.]

The success of Custine's raid into Germany did not divert the Convention from the design of attacking Austria in the Netherlands, which Dumouriez had from the first pressed upon the Government. It was not three years since the Netherlands had been in revolt against the Emperor Joseph. In its origin the revolt was a reactionary movement of the clerical party against Joseph's reforms; but there soon sprang up ambitions and hopes at variance with the first impulses of the insurrection; and by the side of monks and monopolists a national party came into existence, proclaiming the sovereignty of the people, and imitating all the movements of the French Revolution. During the brief suspension of Austrian rule the popular and the reactionary parties attacked one another; and on the restoration of Leopold's authority in 1791 the democratic leaders, with a large body of their followers, took refuge beyond the frontier, looking forward to the outbreak of war between Austria and France. Their partisans formed a French connection in the interior of the country; and by some strange illusion, the priests themselves and the close corporations which had been attacked by Joseph supposed that their interests would be respected by Revolutionary France.  [22] Thus the ground was everywhere prepared for a French invasion. Dumouriez crossed the frontier. The border fortresses no longer existed; and after a single battle won by the French at Jemappes on the 6th of November,  [23] the Austrians, finding the population universally hostile, abandoned the Netherlands without a struggle.

[Nice and Savoy annexed.]

[Decree of Dec. 15.]

The victory of Jemappes, the first pitched battle won by the Republic, excited an outburst of revolutionary fervour in the Convention which deeply affected the relations of France to Great Britain, hitherto a neutral spectator of the war. A manifesto was published declaring that the French nation offered its alliance to all peoples who wished to recover their freedom, and charging the generals of the Republic to give their protection to all persons who might suffer in the cause of liberty (Nov. 19). A week later Savoy and Nice were annexed to France, the population of Savoy having declared in favour of France and Sardinia. On the 15th of December the Convention proclaimed that social and political revolution was henceforth to accompany every movement of its armies on foreign soil. "In every country that shall be occupied by the armies of the French Republic"-such was the substance of the Decree of December 15th-"the generals shall announce the abolition of all existing authorities; of nobility, of serfage, of every feudal right and every monopoly; they shall proclaim the sovereignty of the people, and convoke the inhabitants in assemblies to form a provisional Government, to which no officer of a former Government, no noble, nor any member of the former privileged corporations shall be eligible. They shall place under the charge of the French Republic all property belonging to the Sovereign or his adherents, and the property of every civil or religious corporation. The French nation will treat as enemies any people which, refusing liberty and equality, desires to preserve its prince and privileged castes, or to make any accommodation with them."

[England arms.]

[The Schelde.]

[Execution of Louis XVI., Jan. 21, 1793.]

This singular announcement of a new crusade caused the Government of Great Britain to arm. Although the decree of the Convention related only to States with which France was at war, the Convention had in fact formed connections with the English revolutionary societies; and the French Minister of Marine informed his sailors that they were about to carry fifty thousand caps of liberty to their English brethren. No prudent statesman would treat a mere series of threats against all existing authorities as ground for war; but the acts of the French Government showed that it intended to carry into effect the violent interference in the affairs of other nations announced in its manifestoes. Its agents were stirring up dissatisfaction in every State; and although the annexation of Savoy and the occupation of the Netherlands might be treated as incidental to the conflict with Austria and Sardinia, in which Great Britain had pledged itself to neutrality, other acts of the Convention were certainly infringements of the rights of allies of England. A series of European treaties, oppressive according to our own ideas, but in keeping with the ideas of that age, prohibited the navigation of the River Schelde, on which Antwerp is situated, in order that the commerce of the North Sea might flow exclusively into Dutch ports. On the conquest of Belgium the French Government gave orders to Dumouriez to send a flotilla down the river, and to declare Antwerp an open port in right of the law of nature, which treaties cannot abrogate. Whatever the folly of commercial restraints, the navigation of the Schelde was a question between the Antwerpers and the Dutch, and one in which France had no direct concern. The incident, though trivial, was viewed in England as one among many proofs of the intention of the French to interfere with the affairs of neighbouring States at their pleasure. In ordinary times it would not have been easy to excite much interest in England on behalf of a Dutch monopoly; but the feeling of this country towards the French Revolution had been converted into a passionate hatred by the massacres of September, and by the open alliance between the Convention and the Revolutionary societies in England itself. Pitt indeed, whom the Parisians imagined to be their most malignant enemy, laboured against the swelling national passion, and hoped against all hope for peace. Not only was Pitt guiltless of the desire to add this country to the enemies of France, but he earnestly desired to reconcile France with Austria, in order that the Western States, whose embroilment left Eastern Europe at the mercy of Catherine of Russia, might unite to save both Poland and Turkey from falling into the hands of a Power whose steady aggression threatened Europe more seriously than all the noisy and outspoken excitement of the French Convention. Pitt, moreover, viewed with deep disapproval the secret designs of Austria and Prussia.  [24] If the French executive would have given any assurance that the Netherlands should not be annexed, or if the French ambassador, Chauvelin, who was connected with English plotters, had been superseded by a trustworthy negotiator, it is probable that peace might have been preserved. But when, on the execution of King Louis (Jan. 21, 1793), Chauvelin was expelled from England as a suspected alien, war became a question of days.  [25]

[Holland and Mediterranean States enter the war.]

[War with England, Feb. 1st, 1793.]

Points of technical right figured in the complaints of both sides; but the real ground of war was perfectly understood. France considered itself entitled to advance the Revolution and the Rights of Man wherever its own arms or popular insurrection gave it the command. England denied the right of any Power to annul the political system of Europe at its pleasure. No more serious, no more sufficient, ground of war ever existed between two nations; yet the event proved that, with the highest justification for war, the highest wisdom would yet have chosen peace. England's entry into the war converted it from an affair of two or three campaigns into a struggle of twenty years, resulting in more violent convulsions, more widespread misery, and more atrocious crimes, than in all probability would have resulted even from the temporary triumph of the revolutionary cause in 1793. But in both nations political passion welcomed impending calamity; and the declaration of war by the Convention on February 1st only anticipated the desire of the English people. Great Britain once committed to the struggle, Pitt spared neither money nor intimidation in his efforts to unite all Europe against France. Holland was included with England in the French declaration of war. The Mediterranean States felt that the navy of England was nearer to them than the armies of Austria and Prussia; and before the end of the summer of 1793, Spain, Portugal, Naples, Tuscany, and the Papal States had joined the Coalition.

[French wrongly think England inclined to revolution.]

The Jacobins of Paris had formed a wrong estimate of the political condition of England. At the outbreak of the war they believed that England itself was on the verge of revolution. They mistook the undoubted discontent of a portion of the middle and lower classes, which showed itself in the cry for parliamentary reform, for a general sentiment of hatred towards existing institutions, like that which in France had swept away the old order at a single blow. The Convention received the addresses of English Radical societies, and imagined that the abuses of the parliamentary system under George III. had alienated the whole nation. What they had found in Belgium and in Savoy-a people thankful to receive the Rights of Man from the soldiers of the Revolution-they expected to find among the dissenting congregations of London and the factory-hands of Sheffield. The singular attraction exercised by each class in England upon the one below it, as well as the indifference of the nation generally to all ideals, was little understood in France, although the Revolutions of the two countries bore this contrast on their face. A month after the fall of the Bastille, the whole system of class-privilege and monopoly had vanished from French law; fifteen years of the English Commonwealth had left the structure of English society what it had been at the beginning. But political observation vanished in the delirium of 1793; and the French only discovered, when it was too late, that in Great Britain the Revolution had fallen upon an enemy of unparalleled stubbornness and inexhaustible strength.

[The Whigs not democratic.]

[Political condition of England.]

In the first Assembly of the Revolution it was usual to speak of the English as free men whom the French ought to imitate; in the Convention it was usual to speak of them as slaves whom the French ought to deliver. The institutions of England bore in fact a very different aspect when compared with the absolute monarchy of the Bourbons and when compared with the democracy of 1793. Frenchmen who had lived under the government of a Court which made laws by edict and possessed the right to imprison by letters-patent looked with respect upon the Parliament of England, its trial by jury, and its freedom of the press. The men who had sent a king to prison and confiscated the estates of a great part of the aristocracy could only feel compassion for a land where three-fourths of the national representatives were nominees of the Crown or of wealthy peers. Nor, in spite of the personal sympathy of Fox with the French revolutionary movement, was there any real affinity between the English Whig party and that which now ruled in the Convention. The event which fixed the character of English liberty during the eighteenth century, the Revolution of 1688, had nothing democratic in its nature. That revolution was directed against a system of Roman Catholic despotism; it gave political power not to the mass of the nation, which had no desire and no capacity to exercise it, but to a group of noble families and their retainers, who, during the reigns of the first two Georges, added all the patronage and influence of the Crown to their social and constitutional weight in the country. The domestic history of England since the accession of George III. had turned chiefly upon the obstinate struggle of this monarch to deliver himself from all dependence upon party. The divisions of the Whigs, their jealousies, but, above all, their real alienation from the mass of the people whose rights they professed to defend, ultimately gave the King the victory, when, after twenty years of errors, be found in the younger Pitt a Minister capable of uniting the interests of the Crown with the ablest and most patriotic liberal statesmanship. Bribes, threats, and every species of base influence had been employed by King George to break up the great Coalition of 1783, which united all sections of the Whigs against him under the Ministry of Fox and North; but the real support of Pitt, whom the King placed in office with a minority in the House of Commons, was the temper of the nation itself, wearied with the exclusiveness, the corruption, and the party-spirit of the Whigs, and willing to believe that a popular Minister, even if he had entered upon power unconstitutionally, might do more for the country than the constitutional proprietors of the rotten boroughs.

[Pitt Minister, 1783.]

[Effect of French Revolution on English Parties.]

From 1783 down to the outbreak of the French Revolution, Pitt, as a Tory Minister confronted by a Whig Opposition, governed England on more liberal principles than any statesman who had held power during the eighteenth century. These years were the last of the party-system of England in its original form. The French Revolution made an end of that old distinction in which the Tory was known as the upholder of Crown-prerogative and the Whig as the supporter of a constitutional oligarchy of great families. It created that new political antagonism in which, whether under the names of Whig and Tory, or of Liberal and Conservative, two great parties have contended, one for a series of beneficial changes, the other for the preservation of the existing order. The convulsions of France and the dread of revolutionary agitation in England transformed both Pitt and the Whigs by whom he was opposed. Pitt sacrificed his schemes of peaceful progress to foreign war and domestic repression, and set his face against the reform of Parliament which he had once himself proposed. The Whigs broke up into two sections, led respectively by Burke and by Fox, the one denouncing the violence of the Revolution, and ultimately uniting itself with Pitt; the other friendly to the Revolution, in spite of its excesses, as the cause of civil and religious liberty, and identifying itself, under the healthy influence of parliamentary defeat and disappointment, with the defence of popular rights in England and the advocacy of enlightened reform.

[Burke's "Reflections," Oct. 1790.]

[Most of the Whigs support Pitt against France.]

The obliteration of the old dividing-line in English politics may be said to date from the day when the ancient friendship of Burke and Fox was bitterly severed by the former in the House of Commons (May 6, 1791). The charter of the modern Conservative party was that appeal to the nation which Burke had already published, in the autumn of 1790, under the title of "Reflections on the French Revolution." In this survey of the political forces which he saw in action around him, the great Whig writer, who in past times had so passionately defended the liberties of America and the constitutional tradition of the English Parliament against the aggression of George III., attacked the Revolution as a system of violence and caprice more formidable to freedom than the tyranny of any Crown. He proved that the politicians and societies of England who had given it their sympathy had given their sympathy to measures and to theories opposed to every principle of 1688. Above all, he laid bare that agency of riot and destructiveness which, even within the first few months of the Revolution, filled him with presentiment of the calamities about to fall upon France. Burke's treatise was no dispassionate inquiry into the condition of a neighbouring state: it was a denunciation of Jacobinism as fierce and as little qualified by political charity as were the maledictions of the Hebrew prophets upon their idolatrous neighbours; and it was intended, like these, to excite his own countrymen against innovations among themselves. It completely succeeded. It expressed, and it heightened, the alarm arising among the Liberal section of the propertied class, at first well inclined to the Revolution; and, although the Whigs of the House of Commons pronounced in favour of Fox upon his first rupture with Burke, the tide of public feeling, rising higher with every new outrage of the Revolution, soon invaded the legislature, and carried the bulk of the Whig party to the side of the Minister, leaving to Fox and his few faithful adherents the task of maintaining an unheeded protest against the blind passions of war, and the increasing rigour with which Pitt repressed every symptom of popular disaffection.

[The Gironde and the Mountain in the Convention.]

[The Gironde and the Commune of Paris.]

The character of violence which Burke traced and condemned in the earliest acts of the Revolution displayed itself in a much stronger light after the overthrow of the Monarchy by the insurrection of August 10th. That event was the work of men who commanded the Parisian democracy, not the work of orators and party-leaders in the Assembly. The Girondins had not hesitated to treat the victory as their own, by placing the great offices of State, with one exception, in the hands of their leaders; they instantly found that the real sovereignty lay elsewhere. The Council of the Commune, or Municipality, of Paris, whose members had seized their post at the moment of the insurrection, was the only administrative body that possessed the power to enforce its commands; in the Ministries of State one will alone made itself felt, that of Danton, whom the Girondins had unwillingly admitted to office along with themselves. The massacres of September threw into full light the powerlessness of the expiring Assembly. For five successive days it was unable to check the massacres; it was unable to bring to justice the men who had planned them, and who called upon the rest of France to follow their example. With the meeting of the Convention, however, the Girondins, who now regarded themselves as the legitimate government, and forgot that they owed office to an insurrection, expected to reduce the capital to submission. They commanded an overwhelming majority in the new chamber; they were supported by the middle class in all the great cities of France. The party of the Mountain embraced at first only the deputies of Paris, and a group of determined men who admitted no criticism on the measures which the democracy of Paris had thought necessary for the Revolution. In the Convention they were the assailed, not the assailants. Without waiting to secure themselves by an armed force, the orators of the Gironde attempted to crush both the Municipality and the deputies who ruled at the Clubs. They reproached the Municipality with the murders of September; they accused Robespierre of aiming at the Dictatorship. It was under the pressure of these attacks that the party of the Mountain gathered its strength within the Convention, and that the populace of Paris transferred to the Gironde the passionate hatred which it had hitherto borne to the King and the aristocracy. The gulf that lay between the people and those who had imagined themselves to be its leaders burst into view. The Girondins saw with dismay that the thousands of hungry workmen whose victory had placed them in power had fought for something more tangible than Republican phrases from Tacitus and Plutarch. On one side was a handful of orators and writers, steeped in the rhetoric and the commonplace of ancient Rome, and totally strange to the real duties of government; on the other side the populace of Paris, such as centuries of despotism, privilege, and priestcraft had made it: sanguinary, unjust, vindictive; convulsed since the outbreak of the Revolution with every passion that sways men in the mass; taught no conception of progress but the overthrow of authority, and acquainted with no title to power but that which was bestowed by itself. If the Girondins were to remain in power, they could do so only by drawing an army from the departments, or by identifying themselves with the multitude. They declined to take either course. Their audience was in the Assembly alone; their support in the distant provinces. Paris, daily more violent, listened to men of another stamp. The Municipality defied the Government; the Mountain answered the threats and invectives of the majority in the Assembly by displays of popular menace and tumult. In the eyes of the common people, who after so many changes of government found themselves more famished and more destitute than ever, the Gironde was now but the last of a succession of tyrannies; its statesmen but impostors who stood between the people and the enjoyment of their liberty.

Among the leaders of the Mountain, Danton aimed at the creation of a central Revolutionary Government, armed with absolute powers for the prosecution of the war; and he attacked the Girondins only when they themselves had rejected his support. Robespierre, himself the author of little beyond destruction, was the idol of those whom Rousseau's writings had filled with the idea of a direct exercise of sovereignty by the people. It was in the trial of the King that the Gironde first confessed its submission to the democracy of Paris. The Girondins in their hearts desired to save the King; they voted for his death with the hope of maintaining their influence in Paris, and of clearing themselves from the charge of lukewarmness in the cause of the Revolution. But the sacrifice was as vain as it was dishonourable. The populace and the party of the Mountain took the act in its true character, as an acknowledgment of their own victory. A series of measures was brought forward providing for the poorer classes at the expense of the wealthy. The Gironde, now forced to become the defenders of property, encountered the fatal charge of deserting the cause of the people; and from this time nothing but successful foreign warfare could have saved their party from ruin.

[Defeat and treason of Dumouriez, March, 1793.]

Instead of success came inaction, disaster, and treason. The army of Flanders lay idle during January and February for want of provisions and materials of war; and no sooner had Dumouriez opened the campaign against Holland than he was recalled by intelligence that the Austrians had fallen upon his lieutenant, Miranda, at Maestricht, and driven the French army before them. Dumouriez returned, in order to fight a pitched battle before Brussels. He attacked the Austrians at Neerwinden (March 18), and suffered a repulse inconsiderable in itself, but sufficient to demoralise an army composed in great part of recruits and National Guards.  [26] His defeat laid Flanders open to the Austrians; but Dumouriez intended that it should inflict upon the Republic a far heavier blow. Since the execution of the King, he had been at open enmity with the Jacobins. He now proposed to the Austrian commander to unite with him in an attack upon the Convention, and in re-establishing monarchy in France. The first pledge of Dumouriez's treason was the surrender of three commissioners sent by the Convention to his camp; the second was to have been the surrender of the fortress of Condé. But Dumouriez had overrated his influence with the army. Plainer minds than his own knew how to deal with a general who intrigues with the foreigner. Dumouriez's orders were disregarded; his movements watched; and he fled to the Austrian lines under the fire of his own soldiers. About thirty officers and eight hundred men passed with him to the enemy.

[Defeats on the North and East. Revolt of La Vendée, March, 1793.]

[The Commune crushes the Gironde, June 2.]

The defeat and treason of Dumouriez brought the army of Austria over the northern frontier. Almost at the same moment Custine was overpowered in the Palatinate; and the conquests of the previous autumn, with the exception of Mainz, were lost as rapidly as they had been won. Custine fell back upon the lines of Weissenburg, leaving the defence of Mainz to a garrison of 17,000 men, which, alone among the Republican armies, now maintained its reputation. In France itself civil war broke out. The peasants of La Vendée, a district destitute of large towns, and scarcely touched either by the evils which had produced the Revolution or by the hopes which animated the rest of France, had seen with anger the expulsion of the parish priests who refused to take the oath to the Constitution. A levy of 300,000 men, which was ordered by the Convention in February, 1793, threw into revolt the simple Vendeans, who cared for nothing outside their own parishes, and preferred to fight against their countrymen rather than to quit their homes. The priests and the Royalists fanned these village outbreaks into a religious war of the most serious character. Though poorly armed, and accustomed to return to their homes as soon as fighting was over, the Vendean peasantry proved themselves a formidable soldiery in the moment of attack, and cut to pieces the half-disciplined battalions which the Government sent against them. On the north, France was now assailed by the English as well as by the Austrians. The Allies laid siege to Condé and Valenciennes, and drove the French army back in disorder at Famars. Each defeat was a blow dealt to the Government of the Gironde at Paris. With foreign and civil war adding disaster to disaster, with the general to whom the Gironde had entrusted the defence of the Republic openly betraying it to its enemies, the fury of the capital was easily excited against the party charged with all the misfortunes of France. A threatening movement of the middle classes in resistance to a forced loan precipitated the struggle. The Girondins were accused of arresting the armies of the Republic in the midst of their conquests, of throwing the frontier open to the foreigner, and of kindling the civil war of La Vendée. On the 31st of May a raging mob invaded the Convention. Two days later the representatives of France were surrounded by the armed forces of the Commune; the twenty-four leading members of the Gironde were placed under arrest, and the victory of the Mountain was completed.  [27]

[Civil War. The Committee of Public Safety.]

The situation of France, which was serious before, now became desperate; for the Girondins, escaping from their arrest, called the departments to arms against Paris. Normandy, Bordeaux, Marseilles, Lyons, rose in insurrection against the tyranny of the Mountain, and the Royalists of the south and west threw themselves into a civil war which they hoped to turn to their own advantage. But a form of government had now arisen in France well fitted to cope with extraordinary perils. It was a form of government in which there was little trace of the constitutional tendencies of 1789, one that had come into being as the stress of conflict threw into the background the earlier hopes and efforts of the Revolution. In the two earlier Assemblies it had been a fixed principle that the representatives of the people were to control the Government, but were not to assume executive powers themselves. After the overthrow of Monarchy on the 10th August, the Ministers, though still nominally possessed of powers distinct from the representative body, began to be checked by Committees of the Convention appointed for various branches of the public service; and in March, 1793, in order to meet the increasing difficulties of the war, a Committee of Public Safety was appointed, charged with the duty of exercising a general surveillance over the administration. In this Committee, however, as in all the others, the Gironde were in the majority; and the twenty-four members who composed it were too numerous a body to act with effect. The growing ascendancy of the Mountain produced that concentration of force which the times required. The Committee was reduced in April to nine members, and in this form it ultimately became the supreme central power. It was not until after the revolt of Lyons that the Committee, exchanging Danton's influence for that of Robespierre, adopted the principle of Terror which has made the memory of their rule one of the most sinister in history. Their authority steadily increased. The members divided among themselves the great branches of government. One directed the army, another the navy, another foreign affairs; the signature of three members practically gave to any measure the force of law, for the Convention accepted and voted their reports as a matter of course.

[Commissioners of the Convention]

Whilst the Committee gave orders as the supreme executive, eighty of the most energetic of the Mountain spread themselves over France, in parties of two and three, with the title of Commissioners of the Convention, and with powers over-riding those of all the local authorities. They were originally appointed for the purpose of hastening on the levy ordered by the Convention in March, but their powers were gradually extended over the whole range of administration. Their will was absolute, their authority supreme. Where the councillors of the Departments or the municipal officers were good Jacobins, the Commissioners availed themselves of local machinery; where they suspected their principles, they sent them to the scaffold, and enforced their own orders by whatever means were readiest. They censured and dismissed the generals; one of them even directed the movements of a fleet at sea. What was lost by waste and confusion and by the interference of the Commissioners in military movements was more than counterbalanced by the vigour which they threw into all the preparations of war, and by the unity of purpose which, at the price of unsparing bloodshed, they communicated to every group where Frenchmen met together.

[Local revolutionary system of 1793]

But no individual energy could have sustained these dictatorships without the support of a popular organisation. All over France a system of revolutionary government sprang up, which superseded all existing institutions just as the authority of the Commissioners of the Convention superseded all existing local powers. The local revolutionary administration consisted of a Committee, a Club, and a Tribunal.  [28] In each of 21,000 communes a committee of twelve was elected by the people, and entrusted by the Convention, as the Terror gained ground, with boundless powers of arrest and imprisonment. Popular excitement was sustained by clubs, where the peasants and labourers assembled at the close of their day's work, and applauded the victories or denounced the enemies of the Revolution. A Tribunal with swift procedure and powers of life and death sat in each of the largest towns, and judged the prisoners who were sent to it by the committees of the neighbouring district. Such was the government of 1793-an executive of uncontrolled power drawn from the members of a single Assembly, and itself brought into immediate contact with the poorest of the people in their assemblies and clubs. The balance of interests which creates a constitutional system, the security of life, liberty, and property, which is the essence of every recognised social order, did not now exist in France. One public purpose, the defence of the Revolution, became the law before which all others lost their force. Treating all France like a town in a state of siege, the Government took upon itself the duty of providing support for the poorest classes by enactments controlling the sale and possession of the necessaries of life.

[Law of the Maximum]

The price of corn and other necessaries was fixed; and, when the traders and producers consequently ceased to bring their goods to market, the Commissioners of the Convention were empowered to make requisition of a certain quantity of corn for every acre of ground. Property was thus placed at the disposal of the men who already exercised absolute political power. "The state of France," said Burke, "is perfectly simple. It consists of but two descriptions, the oppressors and the oppressed." It is in vain that the attempt has been made to extenuate the atrocious and senseless cruelties of this time by extolling the great legislative projects of the Convention, or pleading the dire necessity of a land attacked on every side by the foreigner, and rent with civil war. The more that is known of the Reign of Terror, the more hateful, the meaner and more disgusting is the picture unveiled. France was saved not by the brutalities, but by the energy, of the faction that ruled it. It is scarcely too much to say that the cause of European progress would have been less injured by the military overthrow of the Republic, by the severance of the border provinces from France and the restoration of some shadow of the ancient régime, than by the traditions of horror which for the next fifty years were inseparably associated in men's minds with the victory of the people over established power.

[French disasters, March-Sept., 1793.]

The Revolutionary organisation did not reach its full vigour till the autumn of 1793, when the prospects of France were at their worst. Custine, who was brought up from Alsace to take command of the Army of the North, found it so demoralised that he was unable to attempt the relief of the fortresses which were now besieged by the Allies. Condé surrendered to the Austrians on the 10th of July; Valenciennes capitulated to the Duke of York a fortnight later. In the east the fortune of war was no better. An attack made on the Prussian army besieging Mainz totally failed; and on the 23rd of July this great fortress, which had been besieged since the middle of April, passed back into the hands of the Germans. On every side the Republic seemed to be sinking before its enemies. Its frontier defences had fallen before the victorious Austrians and English; Brunswick was ready to advance upon Alsace from conquered Mainz; Lyons and Toulon were in revolt; La Vendée had proved the grave of the forces sent to subdue it. It was in this crisis of misfortune that the Convention placed the entire male population of France between the ages of eighteen and twenty-five at the disposal of the Government, and turned the whole country into one great camp and arsenal of war. Nor was there wanting a mind equal to the task of giving order to this vast material. The appointment of Carnot, an officer of engineers, to a seat on the Committee of Public Safety placed the military administration of France in the hands of a man who, as an organiser, if not as a strategist, was soon to prove himself without equal in Europe.

[The Allies seek each their separate ends.]

Nevertheless, it was to the dissensions and to the bad policy of the Allies more than to the energy of its own Government that France owed its safety. The object for which the Allies professed to be carrying on the war, the establishment of a pacific Government in France, was subordinated to schemes of aggrandisement, known as the acquisition of just indemnities. While Prussia, bent chiefly on preventing the Emperor from gaining Bavaria in exchange for Belgium, kept its own army inactive on the Rhine,  [29] Austria, with the full approval of Pitt's Cabinet, claimed annexations in Northern France, as well as Alsace, and treated the conquered town of Condé as Austrian territory.  [30] Henceforward all the operations of the northern army were directed to the acquisition of frontier territory, not to the pursuit and overthrow of the Republican forces. The war was openly converted from a war of defence into a war of spoliation. It was a change which mocked the disinterested professions with which the Allies had taken up arms; in its military results it was absolutely ruinous. In face of the immense levies which promised the French certain victory in a long war, the only hope for the Allies lay in a rapid march to Paris; they preferred the extreme of division and delay. No sooner had the advance of their united armies driven Custine from his stronghold at Famars, than the English commander led off his forces to besiege Dunkirk, while the Austrians, under Prince Coburg, proceeded to invest Cambray and Le Quesnoy. The line of the invaders thus extended from the Channel to Brunswick's posts at Landau, on the border of Alsace; the main armies were out of reach of one another, and their strength was diminished by the corps detached to keep up their communications. The French held the inner circle; and the advantage which this gave them was well understood by Carnot, who now inspired the measures of the Committee. In steadiness and precision the French recruits were no match for the trained armies of Germany; but the supply of them was inexhaustible, and Carnot knew that when they were thrown in sufficient masses upon the enemy their courage and enthusiasm would make amends for their inexperience. The successes of the Allies, unbroken from February to August, now began to alternate with defeats; the flood of invasion was first slowly and obstinately repelled, then swept away before a victorious advance.

[York driven from Dunkirk Sept. 8.]

It was on the British commander that the first blow was struck. The forces that could be detached from the French Northern army were not sufficient to drive York from before Dunkirk; but on the Moselle there were troops engaged in watching an enemy who was not likely to advance; and the Committee did not hesitate to leave this side of France open to the Prussians in order to deal a decisive stroke in the north. Before the movement was noticed by the enemy, Carnot had transported 30,000 men from Metz to the English Channel; and in the first week of September the German corps covering York was assailed by General Houchard with numbers double its own. The Germans were driven back upon Dunkirk; York only saved his own army from destruction by hastily raising the siege and abandoning his heavy artillery. The victory of the French, however, was ill followed up. Houchard was sent before the Revolutionary Tribunal, and he paid with his life for his mistakes. Custine had already perished, unjustly condemned for the loss of Mainz and Valenciennes.

[Commands given to men of the people.]

[Jourdan's victory at Wattignies, Oct 15.]

It was no unimportant change for France when the successors of Custine and Houchard received their commands from the Committee of Public Safety. The levelling principle of the Reign of Terror left its effect on France through its operation in the army, and through this almost alone. Its executions produced only horror and reaction; its confiscations were soon reversed; but the creation of a thoroughly democratic army, the work of the men who overthrew the Gironde, gave the most powerful and abiding impulse to social equality in France. The first generals of the Revolution had been officers of the old army, men, with a few exceptions, of noble birth, who, like Custine, had enrolled themselves on the popular side when most of their companions quitted the country. These generals were connected with the politicians of the Gironde, and were involved in its fall. The victory of the Mountain brought men of another type into command. Almost all the leaders appointed by the Committee of Public Safety were soldiers who had served in the ranks. In the levies of 1792 and 1793 the officers of the newly-formed battalions were chosen by the recruits themselves. Patriotism, energy of character, acquaintance with warfare, instantly brought men into prominence. Soldiers of the old army, like Massena, who had reached middle life with their knapsacks on their backs; lawyers, like the Breton Moreau; waiters at inns, like Murat, found themselves at the head of their battalions, and knew that Carnot was ever watching for genius and ability to call it to the highest commands. With a million of men under arms, there were many in whom great natural gifts supplied the want of professional training. It was also inevitable that at the outset command should sometimes fall into the hands of mere busy politicians; but the character of the generals steadily rose as the Committee gained the ascendancy over a knot of demagogues who held the War Ministry during the summer of 1793; and by the end of the year there was scarcely one officer in high command who had not proved himself worthy of his post. In the investigation into Houchard's conduct at Dunkirk, Carnot learnt that the victory had in fact been won by Jourdan, one of the generals of division. Jourdan had begun life as a common soldier fifteen years before. Discharged at the end of the American War, he had set up a draper's shop in Limoges, his native town. He joined the army a second time on the outbreak of the Revolutionary War, and the men of his battalion elected him captain. His ability was noticed; he was made successively general of brigade and general of division; and, upon the dismissal of Houchard, Carnot summoned him to the command of the Army of the North. The Austrians were now engaged in the investment of Maubeuge. On the 15th of October Jourdan attacked and defeated their covering army at Wattignies. His victory forced the Austrians to raise the siege, and brought the campaign to an end for the winter.

[Lyons, Toulon, La Vendée, conquered, Oct.-Dec. 1793.]

Thus successful on the northern frontier, the Republic carried on war against its internal enemies without pause and without mercy. Lyons surrendered in October; its citizens were slaughtered by hundreds in cold blood. Toulon had thrown itself into the hands of the English, and proclaimed King Louis XVII. It was besieged by land; but the operations produced no effect until Napoleon Bonaparte, captain of artillery, planned the capture of a ridge from which the cannon of the besiegers would command the English fleet in the harbour. Hood, the British admiral, now found his position hopeless. He took several thousands of the inhabitants on board his ships, and put out to sea, blowing up the French ships which he left in the harbour. Hood had received the fleet from the Royalists in trust for their King; its destruction gave England command of the Mediterranean and freed Naples from fear of attack; and Hood thought too little of the consequences which his act would bring down upon those of the inhabitants of Toulon whom he left behind.  [31]

The horrors that followed the entry of the Republican army into the city did not prevent Pitt from including among the subjects of congratulation in the King's Speech of 1794 "the circumstances attending the evacuation of Toulon." It was perhaps fortunate for the Royalists in other parts of France that they failed to receive the assistance of England. Help was promised to the Vendeans, but it arrived too late. The appearance of Kleber at the head of the army which had defended Mainz had already turned the scale. Brave as they were, the Vendeans could not long resist trained armies. The war of pitched battles ended on the Loire with the year 1793. It was succeeded by a war of merciless and systematic destruction on the one side, and of ambush and surprises on the other.

[Prussia withdrawing from the war on account of Polish affairs.]

At home the foes of the Republic were sinking; its invaders were too much at discord with one another to threaten it any longer with serious danger. Prussia was in fact withdrawing from the war. It has been seen that when King Frederick William and the Emperor concerted the autumn campaign of 1792, the understanding was formed that Prussia, in return for its efforts against France, should be allowed to seize part of western Poland, if the Empress Catherine should give her consent. With this prospect before it, the thoughts of the Prussian Government had been from the first busied more with Poland, where it hoped to enter into possession, than with France, where it had only to fight Austria's battles. Negotiations on the Polish question had been actively carried on between Berlin and St. Petersburg during the first months of the war; and in January, 1793, the Empress Catherine had concluded a Treaty of Partition with King Frederick William, in virtue of which a Prussian army under General Möllendorf immediately entered western Poland. It was thought good policy to keep the terms of this treaty secret from Austria, as it granted a much larger portion of Poland to Prussia than Austria was willing that it should receive. Two months passed before the Austrian Sovereign learnt how he had been treated by his ally. He then denounced the treaty, and assumed so threatening an attitude that the Prussians thought it necessary to fortify the territory that they had seized.  [32] The Ministers who had been outwitted by the Court of Berlin were dismissed; Baron Thugut, who from the first had prophesied nothing but evil of the Prussian alliance, was called to power. The history of this statesman, who for the next eight years directed the war-policy of Austria, and filled a part in Europe subordinate only to those of Pitt and Bonaparte, has until a recent date been drawn chiefly from the representations of his enemies. Humbly born, scornful and inaccessible, Thugut was detested by the Viennese aristocracy; the French emigrants hated and maligned him on account of his indifference to their cause; the public opinion of Austria held him responsible for unparalleled military disasters; Prussian generals and ambassadors, whose reports have formed the basis of Prussian histories, pictured him as a Satanic antagonist. It was long believed of Thugut that while ambassador at Constantinople he had sold the Austrian cypher to the French; that in 1794 he prevented his master's armies from winning victories because he had speculated in the French funds; and that in 1799 he occasioned the murder of the French envoys at Rastadt, in order to recover documents incriminating himself. Better sources of information are now opened, and a statesman, jealous, bitter, and over-reaching, but not without great qualities of character, stands in the place of the legendary criminal. It is indeed clear that Thugut's hatred of Prussia amounted almost to mania; it is also clear that his designs of aggression, formed in the school of the Emperor Joseph, were fatally in conflict with the defensive principles which Europe ought to have opposed to the aggressions of France. Evidence exists that during the eight years of Thugut's ministry he entertained, together or successively, projects for the annexation of French Flanders, Bavaria, Alsace, part of Poland, Venice and Dalmatia, Salzburg, the Papal Legations, the Republic of Genoa, Piedmont, and Bosnia; and to this list Tuscany and Savoy ought probably to be added. But the charges brought against Thugut of underhand dealings with France, and of the willing abandonment of German interests in return for compensation to Austria in Italy, rest on insufficient ground. Though, like every other politician at Vienna and Berlin, he viewed German affairs not as a matter of nationality but in subordination to the general interests of his own Court, Thugut appears to have been, of all the Continental statesmen of that time, the steadiest enemy of French aggression, and to have offered the longest resistance to a peace that was purchased by the cession of German soil.  [33]

[Victories of Hoche and Pichegru at Wörth and Weissenburg, Dec. 23, 26.]

Nevertheless, from the moment when Thugut was called to power the alliance between Austria and Prussia was doomed. Others might perhaps have averted a rupture; Thugut made no attempt to do so. The siege of Mainz was the last serious operation of war which the Prussian army performed. The mission of an Austrian envoy, Lehrbach, to the Prussian camp in August, 1793, and his negotiations on the Polish and the Bavarian questions, only widened the breach between the two Courts. It was known that the Austrians were encouraging the Polish Diet to refuse the cession of the provinces occupied by Prussia; and the advisers of King Frederick William in consequence recommended him to quit the Rhine, and to place himself at the head of an army in Poland. At the headquarters of the Allies, between Mainz and the Alsatian frontier, all was dissension and intrigue. The impetuosity of the Austrian general, Wurmser, who advanced upon Alsace without consulting the King, was construed as a studied insult. On the 29th of September, after informing the allied Courts that Prussia would henceforth take only a subordinate part in the war, King Frederick William quitted the army, leaving orders with the Duke of Brunswick to fight no great battle. It was in vain that Wurmser stormed the lines of Weissenburg (Oct. 13), and victoriously pushed forward into Alsace. The hopes of a Royalist insurrection in Strasburg proved illusory. The German sympathies shown by a portion of the upper and middle classes of Alsace only brought down upon them a bloody vengeance at the hands of St. Just, commissioner of the Convention. The peasantry, partly from hatred of the feudal burdens of the old régime, partly from fear of St. Just and the guillotine, thronged to the French camp. In place of the beaten generals came Hoche and Pichegru: Hoche, lately a common soldier in the Guards, earning by a humble industry little sums for the purchase of books, now, at the age of twenty-six, a commander more than a match for the wrangling veterans of Germany; Pichegru, six years older, also a man sprung from the people, once a teacher in the military school of Brienne, afterwards a private of artillery in the American War. A series of harassing encounters took place during December. At length, with St. Just cheering on the Alsatian peasants in the hottest of the fire, these generals victoriously carried the Austrian positions at Wörth and at Weissenburg (Dec. 23, 26). The Austrian commander declared his army to be utterly ruined; and Brunswick, who had abstained from rendering his ally any real assistance, found himself a second time back upon the Rhine.  [34]

[Pitt's bargain with Prussia, April, 1794.]

[Revolt of Kosciusko. April, 1794.]

[Möllendorf refuses to help in Flanders.]

The virtual retirement of Prussia from the Coalition was no secret to the French Government: amongst the Allies it was viewed in various lights. The Empress Catherine, who had counted on seeing her troublesome Prussian friend engaged with her detested French enemy, taunted the King of Prussia with the loss of his personal honour. Austria, conscious of the antagonism between Prussian and Austrian interests and of the hollow character of the Coalition, would concede nothing to keep Prussia in arms. Pitt alone was willing to make a sacrifice, in order to prevent the rupture of the alliance. The King of Prussia was ready to continue the struggle with France if his expenses were paid, but not otherwise. Accordingly, after Austria had refused to contribute the small sum which Pitt asked, a bargain was struck between Lord Malmesbury and the Prussian Minister Haugwitz, by which Great Britain undertook to furnish a subsidy, provided that 60,000 Prussian troops, under General Möllendorf, were placed at the disposal of the Maritime Powers.  [35] It was Pitt's intention that the troops which he subsidised should be massed with Austrian and English forces for the defence of Belgium: the Prussian Ministry, availing themselves of an ambiguous expression in the treaty, insisted on keeping them inactive upon the Upper Rhine. Möllendorf wished to guard Mainz: other men of influence longed to abandon the alliance with Austria, and to employ the whole of Prussia's force in Poland. At the moment when Haugwitz was contracting to place Möllendorf's army at Pitt's disposal, Poland had risen in revolt under Kosciusko, and the Russian garrison which occupied Warsaw had been overpowered and cut to pieces. Catherine called upon the King of Prussia for assistance; but it was not so much a desire to rescue the Empress from a momentary danger that excited the Prussian Cabinet as the belief that her vengeance would now make an absolute end of what remained of the Polish kingdom. The prey was doomed; the wisdom of Prussia was to be the first to seize and drag it to the ground. So large a prospect offered itself to the Power that should crush Poland during the brief paralysis of the Russian arms, that, on the first news of the outbreak, the King's advisers urged him instantly to make peace with France and to throw his whole strength into the Polish struggle. Frederick William could not reconcile himself to making peace with the Jacobins; but he ordered an army to march upon Warsaw, and shortly afterwards placed himself at its head (May, 1794). When the King, who was the only politician in Prussia who took an interest in the French war, thus publicly acknowledged the higher importance of the Polish campaign, his generals upon the Rhine made it their only object to do nothing which it was possible to leave undone without actually forfeiting the British subsidy. Instead of fighting, Möllendorf spent his time in urging other people to make peace. It was in vain that Malmesbury argued that the very object of Pitt's bargain was to keep the French out of the Netherlands: Möllendorf had made up his mind that the army should not be committed to the orders of Pitt and the Austrians. He continued in the Palatinate, alleging that any movement of the Prussian army towards the north would give the French admittance to southern Germany. Pitt's hope of defending the Netherlands now rested on the energy and on the sincerity of the Austrian Cabinet, and on this alone.

[Battles on the Sambre, May-June, 1794.]

After breaking up from winter quarters in the spring of 1794, the Austrian and English allied forces had successfully laid siege to Landrecies, and defeated the enemy in its neighbourhood.  [36] Their advance, however, was checked by a movement of the French Army of the North, now commanded by Pichegru, towards the Flemish coast. York and the English troops were exposed to the attack, and suffered a defeat at Turcoing. The decision of the campaign lay, however, not in the west of Flanders, but at the other end of the Allies' position, at Charleroi on the Sambre, where a French victory would either force the Austrians to fall back eastwards, leaving York to his fate, or sever their communications with Germany. This became evident to the French Government; and in May the Commissioners of the Convention forced the generals on the Sambre to fight a series of battles, in which the French repeatedly succeeded in crossing the Sambre, and were repeatedly driven back again. The fate of the Netherlands depended, however, on something beside victory or defeat on the Sambre. The Emperor had come with Baron Thugut to Belgium in the hope of imparting greater unity and energy to the allied forces, but his presence proved useless. Among the Austrian generals and diplomatists there were several who desired to withdraw from the contest in the Netherlands, and to follow the example of Prussia in Poland. The action of the army was paralysed by intrigues. "Every one," wrote Thugut, "does exactly as he pleases: there is absolute anarchy and disorder."  [37] At the beginning of June the Emperor quitted the army; the combats on the Sambre were taken up by Jourdan and 50,000 fresh troops brought from the army of the Moselle; and on the 26th of June the French defeated Coburg at Fleurus, as he advanced to the relief of Charleroi, unconscious that Charleroi had surrendered on the day before. Even now the defence of Belgium was not hopeless; but after one council of war had declared in favour of fighting, a second determined on a retreat. It was in vain that the representatives of England appealed to the good faith and military honour of Austria. Namur and Louvain were abandoned; the French pressed onwards; and before the end of July the Austrian army had fallen back behind the Meuse. York, forsaken by the allies, retired northwards before the superior forces of Pichegru, who entered Antwerp and made himself master of the whole of the Netherlands up to the Dutch frontier.  [38]

[England disappointed by the Allies.]

Such was the result of Great Britain's well-meant effort to assist the two great military Powers to defend Europe against the Revolution. To the aim of the English Minister, the defence of existing rights against democratic aggression, most of the public men alike of Austria and Prussia were now absolutely indifferent. They were willing to let the French seize and revolutionise any territory they pleased, provided that they themselves obtained their equivalent in Poland. England was in fact in the position of a man who sets out to attack a highway robber, and offers each of his arms to a pickpocket. The motives and conduct of these politicians were justly enough described by the English statesmen and generals who were brought into closest contact with them. In the councils of Prussia, Malmesbury declared that he could find no quality but "great and shabby art and cunning; ill-will, jealousy, and every sort of dirty passion." From the head quarters of Möllendorf he wrote to a member of Pitt's Cabinet: "Here I have to do with knavery and dotage.... If we listened only to our feelings, it would be difficult to keep any measure with Prussia. We must consider it an alliance with the Algerians, whom it is no disgrace to pay, or any impeachment of good sense to be cheated by." To the Austrian commander the Duke of York addressed himself with royal plainness: "Your Serene Highness, the British nation, whose public opinion is not to be despised, will consider that it has been bought and sold."  [39]

[French reach the Rhine, Oct., 1794.]

[Pichegru conquers Holland, Dec., 1794.]

The sorry concert lasted for a few months longer. Coburg, the Austrian commander, was dismissed at the peremptory demand of Great Britain; his successor, Clerfayt, after losing a battle on the Ourthe, offered no further resistance to the advance of the Republican army, and the campaign ended in the capture of Cologne by the French, and the disappearance of the Austrians behind the Rhine. The Prussian subsidies granted by England resulted in some useless engagements between Möllendorf's corps in the Palatinate and a French army double its size, followed by the retreat of the Prussians into Mainz. It only remained for Great Britain to attempt to keep the French out of Holland. The defence of the Dutch, after everything south of the river Waal had been lost, Pitt determined to entrust to abler hands than those of the Duke of York; but the presence of one high-born blunderer more or less made little difference in a series of operations conceived in indifference and perversity. Clerfayt would not, or could not, obey the Emperor's orders and succour his ally. City after city in Holland welcomed the French. The very elements seemed to declare for the Republic. Pichegru's army marched in safety over the frozen rivers; and, when the conquest of the land was completed, his cavalry crowned the campaign by the capture of the Dutch fleet in the midst of the ice-bound waters of the Texel. The British regiments, cut off from home, made their way eastward through the snow towards the Hanoverian frontier, in a state of prostrate misery which is compared by an eye-witness of both events to that of the French on their retreat in 1813 after the battle of Leipzig.  [40]

[Treaties of Basle with Prussia, April 5, and Spain, July 22, 1795.]

The first act of the struggle between France and the Monarchies of Europe was concluded. The result of three years of war was that Belgium, Nice, and Savoy had been added to the territory of the Republic, and that French armies were in possession of Holland, and the whole of Germany west of the Rhine. In Spain and in Piedmont the mountain-passes and some extent of country had been won. Even on the seas, in spite of the destruction of the fleet at Toulon, and of a heavy defeat by Lord Howe off Ushant on the 1st of June, 1794, the strength of France was still formidable; and the losses which she inflicted on the commercial marine of her enemies exceeded those which she herself sustained. England, which had captured most of the French West Indian Islands, was the only Power that had wrested anything from the Republic. The dream of suppressing the Revolution by force of arms had vanished away; and the States which had entered upon the contest in levity, in fanaticism, or at the bidding of more powerful allies, found it necessary to make peace upon such terms as they could obtain. Holland, in which a strong Republican party had always maintained connection with France, abolished the rule of its Stadtholder, and placed its resources at the disposal of its conquerors. Sardinia entered upon abortive negotiations. Spain, in return for peace, ceded to the Republic the Spanish half of St. Domingo (July 22, 1795). Prussia concluded a Treaty at Basle (April 5), which marked and perpetuated the division of Germany by providing that, although the Empire as a body was still at war with France, the benefit of Prussia's neutrality should extend to all German States north of a certain line. A secret article stipulated that, upon the conclusion of a general peace, if the Empire should cede to France the principalities west of the Rhine, Prussia should cede its own territory lying in that district, and receive compensation elsewhere.  [41]

[Austria and England continue the war, 1795.]

Humiliating such a peace certainly was; yet it would probably have been the happiest issue for Europe had every Power been forced to accept its conditions. The territory gained by France was not much more than the very principle of the Balance of Power would have entitled it to demand, at a moment when Russia, victorious over the Polish rebellion, was proceeding to make the final partition of Poland among the three Eastern Monarchies; and, with all its faults, the France of 1795 would have offered to Europe the example of a great free State, such as the growth of the military spirit made impossible after the first of Napoleon's campaigns. But the dark future was withdrawn from the view of those British statesmen who most keenly felt the evils of the present; and England, resolutely set against the course of French aggression, still found in Austria an ally willing to continue the struggle. The financial help of Great Britain, the Russian offer of a large share in the spoils of Poland, stimulated the flagging energy of the Emperor's government. Orders were sent to Clerfayt to advance from the Rhine at whatever risk, in order to withdraw the troops of the Republic from the west of France, where England was about to land a body of Royalists. Clerfayt, however, disobeyed his instructions, and remained inactive till the autumn. He then defeated a French army pushing beyond the Rhine, and drove back the besiegers of Mainz; but the British expedition had already failed, and the time was passed when Clerfayt's successes might have produced a decisive result.  [42]

[Landing at Quiberon, June 27, 1795.]

[France in 1795.]

A new Government was now entering upon power in France. The Reign of Terror had ended in July, 1794, with the life of Robespierre. The men by whom Robespierre was overthrown were Terrorists more cruel and less earnest than himself, who attacked him only in order to save their own lives, and without the least intention of restoring a constitutional Government to France. An overwhelming national reaction forced them, however, to represent themselves as the party of clemency. The reaction was indeed a simple outburst of human feeling rather than a change in political opinion. Among the victims of the Terror the great majority had been men of the lower or middle class, who, except in La Vendée and Brittany, were as little friendly to the old régime as their executioners. Every class in France, with the exception of the starving city mobs, longed for security, and the quiet routine of life. After the disorders of the Republic a monarchical government naturally seemed to many the best guarantee of peace; but the monarchy so contemplated was the liberal monarchy of 1791, not the ancient Court, with its accessories of a landed Church and privileged noblesse. Religion was still a power in France; but the peasant, with all his superstition and all his desire for order, was perfectly free from any delusions about the good old times. He liked to see his children baptised; but he had no desire to see the priest's tithe-collector back in his barn: he shuddered at the summary marketing of Conventional Commissioners; but he had no wish to resume his labours on the fields of his late seigneur. To be a Monarchist in 1795, among the shopkeepers of Paris or the farmers of Normandy, meant no more than to wish for a political system capable of subsisting for twelve months together, and resting on some other basis than forced loans and compulsory sales of property. But among the men of the Convention, who had abolished monarchy and passed sentence of death upon the King, the restoration of the Crown seemed the bitterest condemnation of all that the Convention had done for France, and a sentence of outlawry against themselves. If the will of the nation was for the moment in favour of a restored monarchy, the Convention determined that its will must be overpowered by force or thwarted by constitutional forms. Threatened alternately by the Jacobin mob of Paris and by the Royalist middle class, the Government played off one enemy against the other, until an ill-timed effort of the emigrant noblesse gave to the Convention the prestige of a decisive victory over Royalists and foreigners combined. On the 27th of June, 1795, an English fleet landed the flower of the old nobility of France at the Bay of Quiberon in southern Brittany. It was only to give one last fatal proof of their incapacity that these unhappy men appeared once more on French soil. Within three weeks after their landing, in a region where for years together the peasantry, led by their landlords, baffled the best generals of the Republic, this invading army of the nobles, supported by the fleet, the arms, and the money of England, was brought to utter ruin by the discord of its own leaders. Before the nobles had settled who was to command and who was to obey, General Hoche surprised their fort, beat them back to the edge of the peninsula where they had landed, and captured all who were not killed fighting or rescued by English boats (July 20). The Commissioner Tallien, in order to purge himself from the just suspicion of Royalist intrigues, caused six hundred prisoners to be shot in cold blood.  [43]

[Project of Constitution, 1795.]

At the moment when the emigrant army reached France, the Convention was engaged in discussing the political system which was to succeed its own rule. A week earlier, the Committee appointed to draw up a new constitution for France had presented its report. The main object of the new constitution in its original form was to secure France against a recurrence of those evils which it had suffered since 1792. The calamities of the last three years were ascribed to the sovereignty of a single Assembly. A vote of the Convention had established the Revolutionary Tribunal, proscribed the Girondins, and placed France at the mercy of eighty individuals selected by the Convention from itself. The legislators of 1795 desired a guarantee that no party, however determined, should thus destroy its enemies by a single law, and unite supreme legislative and executive power in its own hands. With the object of dividing authority, the executive was, in the new draft-constitution, made independent of the legislature, and the legislature itself was broken up into two chambers. A Directory of five members, chosen by the Assemblies, but not responsible except under actual impeachment, was to conduct the administration, without the right of proposing laws; a Chamber of five hundred was to submit laws to the approval of a Council of two hundred and fifty Ancients, or men of middle life; but neither of these bodies was to exercise any influence upon the actual government. One director and a third part of each of the legislative bodies were to retire every year.  [44]

[Constitution of 1795. Insurrection of Vendémiaire, Oct. 4.]

The project thus outlined met with general approval, and gained even that of the Royalists, who believed that a popular election would place them in a majority in the two new Assemblies. Such an event was, however, in the eyes of the Convention, the one fatal possibility that must be averted at every cost. In the midst of the debates upon the draft-constitution there arrived the news of Hoche's victory at Quiberon. The Convention gained courage to add a clause providing that two-thirds of the new deputies should be appointed from among its own members, thus rendering a Royalist majority in the Chambers impossible. With this condition attached to it, the Constitution was laid before the country. The provinces accepted it; the Royalist middle class of Paris rose in insurrection, and marched against the Convention in the Tuileries. Their revolt was foreseen; the defence of the Convention was entrusted to General Bonaparte, who met the attack of the Parisians in a style unknown in the warfare of the capital. Bonaparte's command of trained artillery secured him victory; but the struggle of the 4th of October (13 Vendémiaire) was the severest that took place in Paris during the Revolution, and the loss of life in fighting greater than on the day that overthrew the Monarchy.

[The Directory, Oct., 1795.]

The new Government of France now entered into power. Members of the Convention formed two-thirds of the new legislative bodies; the one-third which the country was permitted to elect consisted chiefly of men of moderate or Royalist opinions. The five persons who were chosen Directors were all Conventionalists who had voted for the death of the King; Carnot, however, who had won the victories without sharing in the cruelties of the Reign of Terror, was the only member of the late Committee of Public Safety who was placed in power. In spite of the striking homage paid to the great act of regicide in the election of the five Directors, the establishment of the Directory was accepted by Europe as the close of revolutionary disorder. The return of constitutional rule in France was marked by a declaration on the part of the King of England of his willingness to treat for peace. A gentler spirit seemed to have arisen in the Republic. Although the laws against the emigrants and non-juring priests were still unrepealed, the exiles began to return unmolested to their homes. Life resumed something of its old aspect in the capital. The rich and the gay consoled themselves with costlier luxury for all the austerities of the Reign of Terror. The labouring classes, now harmless and disarmed, were sharply taught that they must be content with such improvement in their lot as the progress of society might bring.

[What was new to Europe in the Revolution.]

[Absolute governments of 18th century engaged in reforms.]

At the close of this first period of the Revolutionary War we may pause to make an estimate of the new influences which the French Revolution had brought into Europe, and of the effects which had thus far resulted from them. The opinion current among the French people themselves, that the Revolution gave birth to the modern life not of France only but of the Western Continent generally, is true of one great set of facts; it is untrue of another. There were conceptions in France in 1789 which made France a real contrast to most of the Continental monarchies; there were others which it shared in common with them. The ideas of social, legal, and ecclesiastical reform which were realised in 1789 were not peculiar to France; what was peculiar to France was the idea that these reforms were to be effected by the nation itself. In other countries reforms had been initiated by Governments, and forced upon an unwilling people. Innovation sprang from the Crown; its agents were the servants of the State. A distinct class of improvements, many of them identical with the changes made by the Revolution in France, attracted the attention in a greater or less degree of almost all the Western Courts of the eighteenth century. The creation of a simple and regular administrative system; the reform of the clergy; the emancipation of the Church from the jurisdiction of the Pope, and of all orders in the State from the jurisdiction of the Church; the amelioration of the lot of the peasant; the introduction of codes of law abolishing both the cruelties and the confusion of ancient practice,-all these were purposes more or less familiar to the absolute sovereigns of the eighteenth century, whom the French so summarily described as benighted tyrants. It was in Austria, Prussia, and Tuscany that the civilising energy of the Crown had been seen in its strongest form, but even the Governments of Naples and Spain had caught the spirit of change. The religious tolerance which Joseph gave to Austria, the rejection of Papal authority and the abolition of the punishment of death which Leopold effected in Tuscany, were bolder efforts of the same political rationalism which in Spain minimised the powers of the Inquisition and in Naples attempted to found a system of public education. In all this, however, there was no trace of the action of the people, or of any sense that a nation ought to raise itself above a state of tutelage. Men of ideas called upon Governments to impose better institutions upon the people, not upon the people to wrest them from the Governments.

[In France, the nation itself acted.]

In France alone a view of public affairs had grown up which impelled the nation to create its reforms for itself. If the substance of many of the French revolutionary changes coincided with the objects of Austrian or of Tuscan reform, there was nothing similar in their method. In other countries reform sprang from the command of an enlightened ruler; in France it started with the Declaration of the Rights of Man, and aimed at the creation of local authority to be exercised by the citizens themselves. The source of this difference lay partly in the influence of England and America upon French opinion, but much more in the existence within France of a numerous and energetic middle class, enriched by commerce, and keenly interested in all the speculation and literary activity of the age. This was a class that both understood the wrongs which the other classes inflicted or suffered, and felt itself capable of redressing them. For the flogged and over-driven peasant in Naples or Hungary no ally existed but the Crown. In most of those poor and backward States which made up monarchical Europe, the fraction of the inhabitants which neither enjoyed privilege nor stood in bondage to it was too small to think of forcing itself into power. The nobles sought to preserve their feudal rights: the Crown sought to reduce them; the nation, elsewhere than in France, did not intervene and lay hands upon power for itself, because the nation was nothing but the four mutually exclusive classes of the landlords who commanded, the peasants who served, the priests who idled, and the soldiers who fought. France differed from all the other monarchies of the Continent in possessing a public which blended all classes and was dominated by none; a public comprehending thousands of men who were familiar with the great interests of society, and who, whether noble or not noble, possessed the wealth and the intelligence that made them rightly desire a share in power.

[Movements against governments outside France.]

Liberty, the right of the nation to govern itself, seemed at the outset to be the great principle of the Revolution. The French people themselves believed the question at issue to be mainly between authority and popular right; the rest of Europe saw the Revolution under the same aspect. Hence, in those countries where the example of France produced political movements, the effect was in the first instance to excite agitation against the Government, whatever might be the form of the latter. In England the agitation was one of the middle class against the aristocratic parliamentary system; in Hungary, it was an agitation of the nobles against the Crown; on the Rhine it was an agitation of the commercial classes against ecclesiastical rule. But in every case in which the reforming movement was not supported by the presence of French armies, the terrors which succeeded the first sanguine hopes of the Revolution struck the leaders of these movements with revulsion and despair, and converted even the better Governments into engines of reaction. In France itself it was seen that the desire for liberty among an enlightened class could not suddenly transform the habits of a nation accustomed to accept everything from authority. Privilege was destroyed, equality was advanced; but instead of self-government the Revolution brought France the most absolute rule it had ever known. It was not that the Revolution had swept by, leaving things where they were before: it had in fact accomplished most of those great changes which lay the foundation of a sound social life: but the faculty of self-government, the first condition of any lasting political liberty, remained to be slowly won.

[Reaction.]

Outside France reaction set in without the benefit of previous change. At London, Vienna, Naples, and Madrid, Governments gave up all other objects in order to devote themselves to the suppression of Jacobinism. Pitt, whose noble aims had been the extinction of the slave-trade, the reform of Parliament, and the advance of national intercourse by free trade, surrendered himself to men whose thoughts centred upon informers, Gagging Acts, and constructive treasons, and who opposed all legislation upon the slave-trade because slaves had been freed by the Jacobins of the Convention. State trials and imprisonments became the order of the day; but the reaction in England at least stopped short of the scaffold. At Vienna and Naples fear was more cruel. The men who either were, or affected to be, in such fear of revolution that they discovered a Jacobinical allegory in Mozart's last opera,  [45] did not spare life when the threads of anything like a real conspiracy were placed in their hands. At Vienna terror was employed to crush the constitutional opposition of Hungary to the Austrian Court. In Naples a long reign of cruelty and oppression began with the creation of a secret tribunal to investigate charges of conspiracy made by informers. In Mainz, the Archbishop occupied the last years of his government, after his restoration in 1793, with a series of brutal punishments and tyrannical precautions.

These were but instances of the effect which the first epoch of the Revolution produced upon the old European States. After a momentary stimulus to freedom it threw the nations themselves into reaction and apathy; it totally changed the spirit of the better governments, attaching to all liberal ideas the stigma of Revolution, and identifying the work of authority with resistance to every kind of reform. There were States in which this change, the first effect of the Revolution, was also its only one; States whose history, as in the case of England, is for a whole generation the history of political progress unnaturally checked and thrown out of its course. There were others, and these the more numerous, where the first stimulus and the first reaction were soon forgotten in new and penetrating changes produced by the successive victories of France. The nature of these changes, even more than the warfare which introduced them, gives its interest to the period on which we are about to enter.

CHAPTER III.

Triple attack on Austria-Moreau, Jourdan-Bonaparte in Italy-Condition of the Italian States-Professions and real intentions of Bonaparte and the Directory-Battle of Montenotte-Armistice with Sardinia-Campaign in Lombardy-Treatment of the Pope, Naples, Tuscany-Siege of Mantua- Castiglione, Moreau and Jourdan in Germany Their retreat-Secret Treaty with Prussia-Negotiations with England-Cispadane Republic-Rise of the idea of Italian Independence-Battles of Arcola and Rivoli-Peace with the Pope at Tolentino-Venice-Preliminaries of Leoben-The French in Venice-The French take the Ionian Islands and give Venice to Austria-Genoa-Coup d'état of 17 Fructidor in Paris-Treaty of Campo Formio-Victories of England at sea-Bonaparte's project against Egypt.

[Armies of Italy, the Danube, and the Main, 1796.]

With the opening of the year 1796 the leading interest of European history passes to a new scene. Hitherto the progress of French victory had been in the direction of the Rhine: the advance of the army of the Pyrenees had been cut short by the conclusion of peace with Spain; the army of Italy had achieved little beyond some obscure successes in the mountains. It was the appointment of Napoleon Bonaparte to the command of the latter force, in the spring of 1796, that first centred the fortunes of the Republic in the land beyond the Alps. Freed from Prussia by the Treaty of Basle, the Directory was now able to withdraw its attention from Holland and from the Lower Rhine, and to throw its whole force into the struggle with Austria. By the advice of Bonaparte a threefold movement was undertaken against Vienna, by way of Lombardy, by the valley of the Danube, and by the valley of the Main. General Jourdan, in command of the army that had conquered the Netherlands, was ordered to enter Germany by Frankfort; Moreau crossed the Rhine at Strasburg: Bonaparte himself, drawing his scanty supplies along the coast-road from Nice, faced the allied forces of Austria and Sardinia upon the slopes of the Maritime Apennines, forty miles to the west of Genoa. The country in which he was about to operate was familiar to Bonaparte from service there in 1794; his own descent and language gave him singular advantages in any enterprise undertaken in Italy. Bonaparte was no Italian at heart; but he knew at least enough of the Italian nature to work upon its better impulses, and to attach its hopes, so long as he needed the support of Italian opinion, to his own career of victory.

[Condition of Italy.]

Three centuries separated the Italy of that day from the bright and vigorous Italy which, in the glow of its Republican freedom, had given so much to Northern Europe in art, in letters, and in the charm of life. A long epoch of subjection to despotic or foreign rule, of commercial inaction, of decline in mind and character, had made the Italians of no account among the political forces of Europe. Down to the peace of Aix-la-Chapelle in 1748 their provinces were bartered between the Bourbons and the Hapsburgs; and although the settlement of that date left no part of Italy, except the Duchy of Milan, incorporated in a foreign empire, yet the crown of Naples was vested in a younger branch of the Spanish Bourbons, and the marriage of Maria Theresa with the Archduke Francis made Tuscany an appanage of the House of Austria. Venice and Genoa retained their independence and their republican government, but little of their ancient spirit. At the outbreak of the Revolutionary War, Austrian influence was dominant throughout the peninsula, Marie Caroline, the Queen and the ruler of Ferdinand of Naples, being the sister of the Emperor Leopold and Marie Antoinette. With the exception of Piedmont, which preserved a strong military sentiment and the tradition of an active and patriotic policy, the Italian States were either, like Venice and Genoa, anxious to keep themselves out of danger by seeming to hear and see nothing that passed around them, or governed by families in the closest connection with the great reigning Houses of the Continent. Neither in Italy itself, nor in the general course of European affairs during the Napoleonic period, was anything determined by the sentiment of the Italian people. The peasantry at times fought against the French with energy; but no strong impulse, like that of the Spaniards, enlisted the upper class of Italians either on the side of Napoleon or on that of his enemies. Acquiescence and submission had become the habit of the race; the sense of national unity and worth, the personal pride which makes the absence of liberty an intolerable wrong, only entered the Italian character at a later date.

[Revival after 1740.]

Yet, in spite of its political nullity, Italy was not in a state of decline. Its worst days had ended before the middle of the eighteenth century. The fifty years preceding the French Revolution, if they had brought nothing of the spirit of liberty, had in all other respects been years of progress and revival. In Lombardy the government of Maria Theresa and Joseph awoke life and motion after ages of Spanish torpor and misrule. Traditions of local activity revived; the communes were encouraged in their works of irrigation and rural improvement; a singular liberality towards public opinion and the press made the Austrian possessions the centre of the intellectual movement of Italy. In the south, progress began on the day when the last foreign Viceroy disappeared from Naples (1735), and King Charles III., though a member of the Spanish House, entered upon the government of the two Sicilies as an independent kingdom. Venice and the Papal States alone seemed to be untouched by the spirit of material and social improvement, so active in the rest of Italy before the interest in political life had come into being.

Nor was the age without its intellectual distinction. If the literature of Italy in the second half of the eighteenth century had little that recalled the inspiration of its splendid youth, it showed at least a return to seriousness and an interest in important things. The political economists of Lombardy were scarcely behind those of England; the work of the Milanese Beccaria on "Crimes and Punishments" stimulated the reform of criminal law in every country in Europe; an intelligent and increasing attention to problems of agriculture, commerce, and education took the place of the fatuous gallantries and insipid criticism which had hitherto made up the life of Italians of birth and culture. One man of genius, Vittorio Alfieri, the creator of Italian tragedy, idealised both in prose and verse a type of rugged independence and resistance to tyrannical power. Alfieri was neither a man of political judgment himself nor the representative of any real political current in Italy; but the lesson which he taught to the Italians, the lesson of respect for themselves and their country, was the one which Italy most of all required to learn; and the appearance of this manly and energetic spirit in its literature gave hope that the Italian nation would not long be content to remain without political being.

[Social condition.]

[Tuscany.]

Italy, to the outside world, meant little more than the ruins of the Roman Forum, the galleries of Florence, the paradise of Capri and the Neapolitan coast; the singular variety in its local conditions of life gained little attention from the foreigner. There were districts in Italy where the social order was almost of a Polish type of barbarism; there were others where the rich and the poor lived perhaps under a happier relation than in any other country in Europe. The difference depended chiefly upon the extent to which municipal life had in past time superseded the feudal order under which the territorial lord was the judge and the ruler of his own domain. In Tuscany the city had done the most in absorbing the landed nobility; in Naples and Sicily it had done the least. When, during the middle ages, the Republic of Florence forced the feudal lords who surrounded it to enter its walls as citizens, in some cases it deprived them of all authority, in others it permitted them to retain a jurisdiction over their peasants; but even in these instances the sovereignty of the city deprived the feudal relation of most of its harshness and force. After the loss of Florentine liberty, the Medici, aping the custom of older monarchies, conferred the title of marquis and count upon men who preferred servitude to freedom, and accompanied the grant of rank with one of hereditary local authority; but the new institutions took no deep hold on country life, and the legislation of the first Archduke of the House of Lorraine (1749) left the landed aristocracy in the position of mere country gentlemen.  [46] Estates were not very large: the prevalent agricultural system was, as it still is, that of the mezzeria, a partnership between the landlord and tenant; the tenant holding by custom in perpetuity, and sharing the produce with the landlord, who supplied a part of the stock and materials for farming. In Tuscany the conditions of the mezzeria were extremely favourable to the tenant; and if a cheerful country life under a mild and enlightened government were all that a State need desire, Tuscany enjoyed rare happiness.

[Naples and Sicily.]

[Piedmont.]

Far different was the condition of Sicily and Naples. Here the growth of city life had never affected the rough sovereignty which the barons exercised over great tracts of country withdrawn from the civilised world. When Charles III. ascended the throne in 1735, he found whole provinces in which there was absolutely no administration of justice on the part of the State. The feudal rights of the nobility were in the last degree oppressive, the barbarism of the people was in many districts extreme. Out of two thousand six hundred towns and villages in the kingdom, there were only fifty that were not subject to feudal authority. In the manor of San Gennaro di Palma, fifteen miles from Naples, even down to the year 1786 the officers of the baron were the only persons who lived in houses; the peasants, two thousand in number, slept among the corn-ricks.  [47] Charles, during his tenure of the Neapolitan crown, from 1735 to 1759, and the Ministers Tanucci and Caraccioli under his feeble successor Ferdinand IV., enforced the authority of the State in justice and administration, and abolished some of the most oppressive feudal rights of the nobility; but their legislation, though bold and even revolutionary according to an English standard, could not in the course of two generations transform a social system based upon centuries of misgovernment and disorder. At the outbreak of the French Revolution the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies was, as it still in a less degree is, a land of extreme inequalities of wealth and poverty, a land where great estates wasted in the hands of oppressive or indolent owners, and the peasantry, untrained either by remunerative industry or by a just and regular enforcement of the law, found no better guide than a savage and fanatical priesthood. Over the rest of Italy the conditions of life varied through all degrees between the Tuscan and the Neapolitan type. Piedmont, in military spirit and patriotism far superior to the other Italian States, was socially one of the most backward of all. It was a land of priests, nobles, and soldiers, where a gloomy routine and the repression of all originality of thought and character drove the most gifted of its children, like the poet Alfieri, to seek a home on some more liberal soil.

[Professions and real intentions of the Directory and Bonaparte, 1796.]

During the first years of the Revolution, an attempt had been made by French enthusiasts to extend the Revolution into Italy by means of associations in the principal towns; but it met with no great success. A certain liberal movement arose among the young men of the upper classes at Naples, where, under the influence of Queen Marie Caroline, the Government had now become reactionary; and in Turin and several of the Lombard cities the French were not without partisans; but no general disaffection like that of Savoy existed east of the Alps. The agitation of 1789 and 1792 had passed by without bringing either liberty or national independence to the Italians. When Bonaparte received his command, that fervour of Republican passion which, in the midst of violence and wrong, had seldom been wanting in the first leaders of the Revolutionary War, had died out in France. The politicians who survived the Reign of Terror and gained office in the Directory repeated the old phrases about the Rights of Man and the Liberation of the Peoples only as a mode of cajolery. Bonaparte entered Italy proclaiming himself the restorer of Italian freedom, but with the deliberate purpose of using Italy as a means of recruiting the exhausted treasury of France. His correspondence with the Directory exposes with brazen frankness this well-considered system of pillage and deceit, in which the general and the Government were cordially at one. On the further question, how France should dispose of any territory that might be conquered in Northern Italy, Bonaparte and the Directory had formed no understanding, and their purposes were in fact at variance. The Directory wished to conquer Lombardy in order to hand it back to Austria in return for the Netherlands; Bonaparte had at least formed the conception that an Italian State was possible, and he intended to convert either Austrian Lombardy itself, or some other portion of Northern Italy, into a Republic, serving as a military outwork for France.

[Bonaparte separates the Austrian and Sardinian Armies, April, 1796.]

[Armistice and peace with Sardinia.]

The campaign of 1796 commenced in April, in the mountains above the coast-road connecting Nice and Genoa. Bonaparte's own army numbered 40,000 men; the force opposed to it consisted of 38,000 Austrians, under Beaulieu, and a smaller Sardinian army, so placed upon the Piedmontese Apennines as to block the passes from the coast-road into Piedmont, and to threaten the rear of the French if they advanced eastward against Genoa. The Piedmontese army drew its supplies from Turin, the Austrian from Mantua; to sever the two armies was to force them on to lines of retreat conducting them farther and farther apart from one another. Bonaparte foresaw the effect which such a separation of the two armies would produce upon the Sardinian Government. For four days he reiterated his attacks at Montenotte and Millesimo, until he had forced his own army into a position in the centre of the Allies; then, leaving a small force to watch the Austrians, he threw the mass of his troops upon the Piedmontese, and drove them back to within thirty miles of Turin. The terror-stricken Government, anticipating an outbreak in the capital itself, accepted an armistice from Bonaparte at Cherasco (April 28), and handed over to the French the fortresses of Coni, Ceva, and Tortona, which command the entrances of Italy. It was an unworthy capitulation for Turin could not have been taken before the Austrians returned in force; but Bonaparte had justly calculated the effect of his victory; and the armistice, which was soon followed by a treaty of peace between France and Sardinia, ceding Savoy to the Republic, left him free to follow the Austrians, untroubled by the existence of some of the strongest fortresses of Europe behind him.

[Bridge of Lodi, May 10.]

In the negotiations with Sardinia Bonaparte demanded the surrender of the town of Valenza, as necessary to secure his passage over the river Po. Having thus led the Austrian Beaulieu to concentrate his forces at this point, he suddenly moved eastward along the southern bank of the river, and crossed at Piacenza, fifty miles below the spot where Beaulieu was awaiting him. It was an admirable movement. The Austrian general, with the enemy threatening his communications, had to abandon Milan and all the country west of it, and to fall back upon the line of the Adda. Bonaparte followed, and on the 10th of May attacked the Austrians at Lodi. He himself stormed the bridge of Lodi at the head of his Grenadiers. The battle was so disastrous to the Austrians that they could risk no second engagement, and retired upon Mantua and the line of the Mincio.  [48]

[Bonaparte in Milan. Extortions.]

Bonaparte now made his triumphal entry into Milan (May 15). The splendour of his victories and his warm expressions of friendship for Italy excited the enthusiasm of a population not hitherto hostile to Austrian rule. A new political movement began. With the French army there came all the partisans of the French Republic who had been expelled from other parts of Italy. Uniting with the small revolutionary element already existing in Milan, they began to form a new public opinion by means of journals and patriotic meetings. It was of the utmost importance to Bonaparte that a Republican party should be organised among the better classes in the towns of Lombardy; for the depredations of the French army exasperated the peasants, and Bonaparte's own measures were by no means of a character to win him unmixed goodwill. The instructions which he received from the Directory were extremely simple. "Leave nothing in Italy," they wrote to him on the day of his entry into Milan, "which will be useful to us, and which the political situation will allow you to remove." If Bonaparte had felt any doubt as to the meaning of such an order, the pillage of works of art in Belgium and Holland in preceding years would have shown him that it was meant to be literally interpreted. Accordingly, in return for the gift of liberty, the Milanese were invited to offer to their deliverers twenty million francs, and a selection from the paintings in their churches and galleries. The Dukes of Parma and Modena, in return for an armistice, were required to hand over forty of their best pictures, and a sum of money proportioned to their revenues. The Dukes and the townspeople paid their contributions with good grace: the peasantry of Lombardy, whose cattle were seized in order to supply an army that marched without any stores of its own, rose in arms, and threw themselves into Pavia, killing all the French soldiers who fell in their way. The revolt was instantly suppressed, and the town of Pavia given up to pillage. In deference to the Liberal party of Italy, the movement was described as a conspiracy of priests and nobles.

[Venice.]

[Battle on the Mincio, May 29.]

The way into Central Italy now lay open before Bonaparte. Rome and Naples were in no condition to offer resistance; but with true military judgment the French general declined to move against this feeble prey until the army of Austria, already crippled, was completely driven out of the field. Instead of crossing the Apennines, Bonaparte advanced against the Austrian positions upon the Mincio. It suited him to violate the neutrality of the adjacent Venetian territory by seizing the town of Brescia. His example was followed by Beaulieu, who occupied Peschiera, at the foot of the Lake of Garda, and thus held the Mincio along its whole course from the lake to Mantua. A battle was fought and lost by the Austrians half-way between the lake and the fortress. Beaulieu's strength was exhausted; he could meet the enemy no more in the field, and led his army out of Italy into the Tyrol, leaving Mantua to be invested by the French. The first care of the conqueror was to make Venice pay for the crime of possessing territory intervening between the eastern and western extremes of the Austrian district. Bonaparte affected to believe that the Venetians had permitted Beaulieu to occupy Peschiera before he seized upon Brescia himself. He uttered terrifying threats to the envoys who came from Venice to excuse an imaginary crime. He was determined to extort money from the Venetian Republic; he also needed a pretext for occupying Verona, and for any future wrongs. "I have purposely devised this rupture," he wrote to the Directory (June 7th), "in case you should wish to obtain five or six millions of francs from Venice. If you have more decided intentions, I think it would be well to keep up the quarrel." The intention referred to was the disgraceful project of sacrificing Venice to Austria in return for the cession of the Netherlands, a measure based on plans familiar to Thugut as early as the year 1793.  [49]

[Armistice with Naples, June 6.]

[Armistice with the Pope, June 23.]

The Austrians were fairly driven out of Lombardy, and Bonaparte was now free to deal with southern Italy. He advanced into the States of the Church, and expelled the Papal Legate from Bologna. Ferdinand of Naples, who had lately called heaven and earth to witness the fury of his zeal against an accursed horde of regicides, thought it prudent to stay Bonaparte's hand, at least until the Austrians were in a condition to renew the war in Lombardy. He asked for a suspension of hostilities against his own kingdom. The fleet and the sea-board of Naples gave it importance in the struggle between France and England, and Bonaparte granted the king an armistice on easy terms. The Pope, in order to gain a few months' truce, had to permit the occupation of Ferrara, Ravenna, and Ancona, and to recognise the necessities, the learning, the taste, and the virtue of his conquerors by a gift of twenty million francs, five hundred manuscripts, a hundred pictures, and the busts of Marcus and Lucius Brutus. The rule of the Pope was unpopular in Bologna, and a Senate which Bonaparte placed in power, pending the formation of a popular Government gladly took the oath of fidelity to the French Republic. Tuscany was the only State that remained to be dealt with. Tuscany had indeed made peace with the Republic a year before, but the ships and cargoes of the English merchants at Leghorn were surely fair prey; and, with the pretence of punishing insults offered by the English to the French flag, Bonaparte descended upon Leghorn, and seized upon everything that was not removed before his approach. Once established in Leghorn, the French declined to quit it. By way of adjusting the relations of the Grand Duke, the English seized his harbour of Porto Ferraio, in the island of Elba.

[Battles of Lonato and Castiglione, July, Aug., 1796.]

Mantua was meanwhile invested, and thither, after his brief incursion into Central Italy, Bonaparte returned. Towards the end of July an Austrian relieving army, nearly double the strength of Bonaparte's, descended from the Tyrol. It was divided into three corps: one, under Quosdanovich, advanced by the road on the west of Lake Garda; the others, under Wurmser, the commander-in-chief, by the roads between the lake and the river Adige. The peril of the French was extreme; their outlying divisions were defeated and driven in; Bonaparte could only hope to save himself by collecting all his forces at the foot of the lake, and striking at one or other of the Austrian armies before they effected their junction on the Mincio. He instantly broke up the siege of Mantua, and withdrew from every position east of the river. On the 30th of July, Quosdanovich was attacked and checked at Lonato, on the west of the Lake of Garda. Wurmser, unaware of his colleague's repulse, entered Mantua in triumph, and then set out, expecting to envelop Bonaparte between two fires. But the French were ready for his approach. Wurmser was stopped and defeated at Castiglione, while the western Austrian divisions were still held in check at Lonato. The junction of the Austrian armies had become impossible. In five days the skill of Bonaparte and the unsparing exertions of his soldiery had more than retrieved all that appeared to have been lost.  [50] The Austrians retired into the Tyrol, beaten and dispirited, and leaving 15,000 prisoners in the hands of the enemy.

Bonaparte now prepared to force his way into Germany by the Adige, in fulfilment of the original plan of the campaign. In the first days of September he again routed the Austrians, and gained possession of Roveredo and Trent. Wurmser hereupon attempted to shut the French up in the mountains by a movement southwards; but, while he operated with insufficient forces between the Brenta and the Adige, he was cut off from Germany, and only escaped capture by throwing himself into Mantua with the shattered remnant of his army. The road into Germany through the Tyrol now lay open; but in the midst of his victories Bonaparte learnt that the northern armies of Moreau and Jourdan, with which he had intended to co-operate in an attack upon Vienna, were in full retreat.

[Invasion of Germany by Moreau and Jourdan, June-Oct., 1796.]

[The Archduke Charles overpowers Jourdan.]

Moreau's advance into the valley of the Danube had, during the months of July and August, been attended with unbroken military and political success. The Archduke Charles, who was entrusted with the defence of the Empire, found himself unable to bring two armies into the field capable of resisting those of Moreau and Jourdan separately, and he therefore determined to fall back before Moreau towards Nuremberg, ordering Wartensleben, who commanded the troops facing Jourdan on the Main, to retreat in the same direction, in order that the two armies might throw their collected force upon Jourdan while still at some distance north of Moreau.  [51] The design of the Archduke succeeded in the end, but it opened Germany to the French for six weeks, and showed how worthless was the military constitution of the Empire, and how little the Germans had to expect from one another. After every skirmish won by Moreau some neighbouring State abandoned the common defence and hastened to make its terms with the invader. On the 17th of July the Duke of Würtemberg purchased an armistice at the price of four million francs; a week later Baden gained the French general's protection in return for immense supplies of food and stores. The troops of the Swabian Circle of the Empire, who were ridiculed as "harlequins" by the more martial Austrians, dispersed to their homes; and no sooner had Moreau entered Bavaria than the Bavarian contingent in its turn withdrew from the Archduke. Some consideration was shown by Moreau's soldiery to those districts which had paid tribute to their general; but in the region of the Main, Jourdan's army plundered without distinction and without mercy. They sacked the churches, they maltreated the children, they robbed the very beggars of their pence. Before the Archduke Charles was ready to strike, the peasantry of this country, whom their governments were afraid to arm, had begun effective reprisals of their own. At length the retreating movement of the Austrians stopped. Leaving 30,000 men on the Lech to disguise his motions from Moreau, Charles turned suddenly northwards from Neuburg on the 17th August, met Wartensleben at Amberg, and attacked Jourdan at this place with greatly superior numbers. Jourdan was defeated and driven back in confusion towards the Rhine. The issue of the campaign was decided before Moreau heard of his colleague's danger. It only remained for him to save his own army by a skilful retreat. Jourdan's soldiers, returning through districts which they had devastated, suffered heavier losses from the vengeance of the peasantry than from the army that pursued them. By the autumn of 1796 no Frenchman remained beyond the Rhine. The campaign had restored the military spirit of Austria and given Germany a general in whom soldiers could trust; but it had also shown how willing were the Governments of the minor States to become the vassals of a foreigner, how little was wanting to convert the western half of the Empire into a dependency of France.

[Secret Treaty with Prussia, Aug. 5.]

With each change in the fortunes of the campaign of 1796 the diplomacy of the Continent had changed its tone. When Moreau won his first victories, the Court of Prussia, yielding to the pressure of the Directory, substituted for the conditional clauses of the Treaty of Basle a definite agreement to the cession of the left bank of the Rhine, and a stipulation that Prussia should be compensated for her own loss by the annexation of the Bishopric of Münster. Prussia could not itself cede provinces of the Empire: it could only agree to their cession. In this treaty, however, Prussia definitely renounced the integrity of the Empire, and accepted the system known as the Secularisation of Ecclesiastical States, the first step towards an entire reconstruction of Germany.  [52] The engagement was kept secret both from the Emperor and from the ecclesiastical princes. In their negotiations with Austria the Directory were less successful. Although the long series of Austrian disasters had raised a general outcry against Thugut's persistence in the war, the resolute spirit of the Minister never bent; and the ultimate victory of the Archduke Charles more than restored his influence over the Emperor. Austria refused to enter into any negotiation not conducted in common with England, and the Directory were for the present foiled in their attempts to isolate England from the Continental Powers. It was not that Thugut either hoped or cared for that restoration of Austrian rule in the Netherlands which was the first object of England's Continental policy. The abandonment of the Netherlands by France was, however, in his opinion necessary for Austria, as a step towards the acquisition of Bavaria, which was still the cherished hope of the Viennese Government. It was in vain that the Directory suggested that Austria should annex Bavaria without offering Belgium or any other compensation to its ruler. Thugut could hardly be induced to listen to the French overtures. He had received the promise of immediate help from the Empress Catherine; he was convinced that the Republic, already anxious for peace, might by one sustained effort be forced to abandon all its conquests; and this was the object for which, in the winter of 1796, army after army was hurled against the positions where Bonaparte kept his guard on the north of the still unconquered Mantua.  [53]

[Malmesbury sent to Paris, Oct., 1796.]

In England itself the victory of the Archduke Charles raised expectations of peace. The war had become unpopular through the loss of trade with France, Spain, and Holland, and petitions for peace daily reached Parliament. Pitt so far yielded to the prevalent feeling as to enter into negotiations with the Directory, and despatched Lord Malmesbury to Paris; but the condition upon which Pitt insisted, the restoration of the Netherlands to Austria, rendered agreement hopeless; and as soon as Pitt's terms were known to the Directory, Malmesbury was ordered to leave Paris. Nevertheless, the negotiation was not a mere feint on Pitt's part. He was possessed by a fixed idea that the resources of France were exhausted, and that, in spite of the conquest of Lombardy and the Rhine, the Republic must feel itself too weak to continue the war. Amid the disorders of Revolutionary finance, and exaggerated reports of suffering and distress, Pitt failed to recognise the enormous increase of production resulting from the changes which had given the peasant full property in his land and labour, and thrown vast quantities of half-waste domain into the busy hands of middling and small proprietors.  [54]

Whatever were the resources of France before the Revolution, they were now probably more than doubled. Pitt's belief in the economic ruin of France, the only ground on which he could imagine that the Directory would give up Belgium without fighting for it, was wholly erroneous, and the French Government would have acted strangely if they had listened to his demand.

[Bonaparte creates a Cispadane Republic, Oct., 1796.]

Nevertheless, though the Directory would not hear of surrendering Belgium, they were anxious to conclude peace with Austria, and unwilling to enter into any engagements in the conquered provinces of Italy which might render peace with Austria more difficult. They had instructed Bonaparte to stir up the Italians against their Governments, but this was done with the object of paralysing the Governments, not of emancipating the peoples. They looked with dislike upon any scheme of Italian reconstruction which should bind France to the support of newly-formed Italian States. Here, however, the scruples of the Directory and the ambition of Bonaparte were in direct conflict. Bonaparte intended to create a political system in Italy which should bear the stamp of his own mind and require his own strong hand to support it. In one of his despatches to the Directory he suggested the formation of a client Republic out of the Duchy of Modena, where revolutionary movements had broken out. Before it was possible for the Government to answer him, he published a decree, declaring the population of Modena and Reggio under the protection of the French army, and deposing all the officers of the Duke (Oct. 4). When, some days later, the answer of the Directory arrived, it cautioned Bonaparte against disturbing the existing order of the Italian States. Bonaparte replied by uniting to Modena the Papal provinces of Bologna and Ferrara, and by giving to the State which he had thus created the title of the Cispadane Republic.  [55]

[Idea of free Italy.]

The event was no insignificant one. It is from this time that the idea of Italian independence, though foreign to the great mass of the nation, may be said to have taken birth as one of those political hopes which wane and recede, but do not again leave the world. A class of men who had turned with dislike from the earlier agitation of French Republicans in Italy rightly judged the continued victories of Bonaparte over the Austrians to be the beginning of a series of great changes, and now joined the revolutionary movement in the hope of winning from the overthrow of the old Powers some real form of national independence. In its origin the French party may have been composed of hirelings and enthusiasts. This ceased to be the case when, after the passage of the Mincio, Bonaparte entered the Papal States. Among the citizens of Bologna in particular there were men of weight and intelligence who aimed at free constitutional government, and checked in some degree the more numerous popular party which merely repeated the phrases of French democracy. Bonaparte's own language and action excited the brightest hopes. At Modena he harangued the citizens upon the mischief of Italy's divisions, and exhorted them to unite with their brethren whom he had freed from the Pope. A Congress was held at Modena on the 16th of October. The representatives of Modena, Reggio, Bologna, and Ferrara declared themselves united in a Republic under the protection of France. They abolished feudal nobility, decreed a national levy, and summoned a General Assembly to meet at Reggio two months later, in order to create the Constitution of the new Cispadane Republic. It was in the Congress of Modena, and in the subsequent Assembly of Reggio (Dec. 23), that the idea of Italian unity and independence first awoke the enthusiasm of any considerable body of men. With what degree of sincerity Bonaparte himself acted may be judged from the circumstance that, while he harangued the Cispadanes on the necessity of Italian union, he imprisoned the Milanese who attempted to excite a popular movement for the purpose of extending this union to themselves. Peace was not yet made with Austria, and it was uncertain to what account Milan might best be turned.

[Rivoli, Jan. 14, 15, 1797.]

[Arcola, Nov. 15-17.]

Mantua still held out, and in November the relieving operations of the Austrians were renewed. Two armies, commanded by Allvintzy and Davidovich, descended the valleys of the Adige and the Piave, offering to Bonaparte, whose centre was at Verona, a new opportunity of crushing his enemy in detail. Allvintzy, coming from the Piave, brought the French into extreme danger in a three days' battle at Arcola, but was at last forced to retreat with heavy loss. Davidovich, who had been successful on the Adige, retired on learning the overthrow of his colleague. Two months more passed, and the Austrians for the third time appeared on the Adige. A feint made below Verona nearly succeeded in drawing Bonaparte away from Rivoli, between the Adige and Lake Garda, where Allvintzy and his main army were about to make the assault; but the strength of Allvintzy's force was discovered before it was too late, and by throwing his divisions from point to point with extraordinary rapidity, Bonaparte at length overwhelmed the Austrians in every quarter of the battle-field. This was their last effort. The surrender of Mantua on the 2nd February, 1797, completed the French conquest of Austrian Lombardy.  [56]

[Peace of Tolentino, Feb. 19, 1797.]

The Pope now found himself left to settle his account with the invaders, against whom, even after the armistice, he had never ceased to intrigue.  [57] His despatches to Vienna fell into the hands of Bonaparte, who declared the truce broken, and a second time invaded the Papal territory. A show of resistance was made by the Roman troops; but the country was in fact at the mercy of Bonaparte, who advanced as far as Tolentino, thirty miles south of Ancona. Here the Pope tendered his submission. If the Roman Court had never appeared to be in a more desperate condition, it had never found a more moderate or a more politic conqueror. Bonaparte was as free from any sentiment of Christian piety as Nero or Diocletian; but he respected the power of the Papacy over men's minds, and he understood the immense advantage which any Government of France supported by the priesthood would possess over those who had to struggle with its hostility. In his negotiations with the Papal envoys he deplored the violence of the French Executive, and consoled the Church with the promise of his own protection and sympathy. The terms of peace which he granted, although they greatly diminished the ecclesiastical territory were in fact more favourable than the Pope had any right to expect. Bologna, Ferrara, and the Romagna, which had been occupied in virtue of the armistice, were now ceded by the Papacy. But conditions affecting the exercise of the spiritual power which had been proposed by the Directory were withdrawn; and, beyond a provision for certain payments in money, nothing of importance was added to the stipulations of the armistice.

The last days of the Venetian Republic were now at hand. It was in vain that Venice had maintained its neutrality when all the rest of Italy joined the enemies of France; its refusal of a French alliance was made an unpardonable crime. So long as the war with Austria lasted, Bonaparte exhausted the Venetian territory with requisitions: when peace came within view, it was necessary that he should have some pretext for seizing it or handing it over to the enemy. In fulfilment of his own design of keeping a quarrel open, he had subjected the Government to every insult and wrong likely to goad it into an act of war. When at length Venice armed for the purpose of protecting its neutrality, the organs of the invader called upon the inhabitants of the Venetian mainland to rise against the oligarchy, and to throw in their lot with the liberated province of Milan. A French alliance was once more urged upon Venice by Bonaparte: it was refused, and the outbreak which the French had prepared instantly followed. Bergamo and Brescia, where French garrisons deprived the Venetian Government of all power of defence, rose in revolt, and renounced all connection with Venice. The Senate begged Bonaparte to withdraw the French garrisons; its entreaties drew nothing from him but repeated demands for the acceptance of the French alliance, which was only another name for subjection. Little as the Venetians suspected it, the only doubt now present to Bonaparte was whether he should add the provinces of Venetia to his own Cispadane Republic or hand them over to Austria in exchange for other cessions which France required.

[Preliminaries of Leoben, April 18.]

Austria could defend itself in Italy no longer. Before the end of March the mountain-passes into Carinthia were carried by Bonaparte. His army drove the enemy before it along the road to Vienna, until both pursuers and pursued were within eighty miles of the capital. At Leoben, on the 7th of April, Austrian commander asked for a suspension of arms. It was granted, and negotiations for peace commenced.  [58] Bonaparte offered the Venetian provinces, but not the city of Venice, to the Emperor. On the 18th of April preliminaries of peace were signed at Leoben, by which, in return for the Netherlands and for Lombardy west of the river Oglio, Bonaparte secretly agreed to hand over to Austria the whole of the territory of Venice upon the mainland east of the Oglio, in addition to its Adriatic provinces of Istria and Dalmatia. To disguise the act of spoliation, it was pretended that Bologna and Ferrara should be offered to Venice in return.  [59]

[French enter Venice.]

But worse was yet to come. While Bonaparte was in conference at Leoben, an outbreak took place at Verona, and three hundred French soldiers, including the sick in the hospital, perished by popular violence. The Venetian Senate despatched envoys to Bonaparte to express their grief and to offer satisfaction; in the midst of the negotiations intelligence arrived that the commander of a Venetian fort had fired upon a French vessel and killed some of the crew. Bonaparte drove the envoys from his presence, declaring that he could not treat with men whose hands were dripping with French blood. A declaration of war was published, charging the Senate with the design of repeating the Sicilian Vespers, and the panic which it was Bonaparte's object to inspire instantly followed. The Government threw themselves upon his mercy. Bonaparte pretended that he desired no more than to establish a popular government in Venice in the place of the oligarchy. His terms were accepted. The Senate consented to abrogate the ancient Constitution of the Republic, and to introduce a French garrison into Venice. On the 12th of May the Grand Council voted its own dissolution. Peace was concluded. The public articles of the treaty declared that there should be friendship between the French and the Venetian Republics; that the sovereignty of Venice should reside in the body of the citizens; and that the French garrison should retire so soon as the new Government announced that it had no further need of its support. Secret articles stipulated for a money payment, and for the usual surrender of works of art; an indefinite expression relating to an exchange of territory was intended to cover the surrender of the Venetian mainland, and the union of Bologna and Ferrara with what remained of Venice. The friendship and alliance of France, which Bonaparte had been so anxious to bestow on Venice, were now to bear their fruit. "I shall do everything in my power," he wrote to the new Government of Venice, "to give you proof of the great desire I have to see your liberty take root, and to see this unhappy Italy, freed from the rule of the stranger, at length take its place with glory on the scene of the world, and resume, among the great nations, the rank to which nature, destiny, and its own position call it." This was for Venice; for the French Directory Bonaparte had a very different tale. "I had several motives," he wrote (May 19), "in concluding the treaty:-to enter the city without difficulty; to have the arsenal and all else in our possession, in order to take from it whatever we needed, under pretext of the secret articles; ... to evade the odium attaching to the Preliminaries of Leoben; to furnish pretexts for them, and to facilitate their execution."

[French seize Ionian islands.]

[Venice to be given to Austria.]

As the first fruits of the Venetian alliance, Bonaparte seized upon Corfu and the other Ionian Islands. "You will start," he wrote to General Gentili, "as quickly and as secretly as possible, and take possession of all the Venetian establishments in the Levant.... If the inhabitants should be inclined for independence, you should flatter their tastes, and in all your proclamations you should not fail to allude to Greece, Athens, and Sparta." This was to be the French share in the spoil. Yet even now, though stripped of its islands, its coasts, and its ancient Italian territory, Venice might still have remained a prominent city in Italy. It was sacrificed in order to gain the Rhenish Provinces for France. Bonaparte had returned to the neighbourhood of Milan, and received the Austrian envoy, De Gallo, at the villa of Montebello. Wresting a forced meaning from the Preliminaries of Leoben, Bonaparte claimed the frontier of the Rhine, offering to Austria not only the territory of Venice upon the mainland, but the city of Venice itself. De Gallo yielded. Whatever causes subsequently prolonged the negotiation, no trace of honour or pity in Bonaparte led him even to feign a reluctance to betray Venice. "We have to-day had our first conference on the definitive treaty," he wrote to the Directory, on the night of the 26th of May, "and have agreed to present the following propositions: the line of the Rhine for France; Salzburg, Passau for the Emperor; ... the maintenance of the Germanic Body; ... Venice for the Emperor. Venice," he continued, "which has been in decadence since the discovery of the Cape of Good Hope and the rise of Trieste and Ancona, can scarcely survive the blows we have just struck. With a cowardly and helpless population in no way fit for liberty, without territory and without rivers, it is but natural that she should go to those to whom we give the mainland." Thus was Italy to be freed from foreign intervention; and thus was Venice to be regenerated by the friendship of France!

[Genoa.]

In comparison with the fate preparing for Venice, the sister-republic of Genoa met with generous treatment. A revolutionary movement, long prepared by the French envoy, overthrew the ancient oligarchical Government; but democratic opinion and French sympathies did not extend below the middle classes of the population; and, after the Government had abandoned its own cause, the charcoal-burners and dock-labourers rose in its defence, and attacked the French party with the cry of "Viva Maria," and with figures of the Virgin fastened to their hats, in the place where their opponents wore the French tricolour. Religious fanaticism won the day; the old Government was restored, and a number of Frenchmen who had taken part in the conflict were thrown into prison. The imprisonment of the Frenchmen gave Bonaparte a pretext for intervention. He disclaimed all desire to alter the Government, and demanded only the liberation of his countrymen and the arrest of the enemies of France. But the overthrow of the oligarchy had been long arranged with Faypoult, the French envoy; and Genoa received a democratic constitution which place the friends of France in power (June 5).

[France in 1797.]

While Bonaparte, holding Court in the Villa of Montebello, continued to negotiate with Austria upon the basis of the Preliminaries of Leoben, events took place in France which offered him an opportunity of interfering directly in the government of the Republic. The elections which were to replace one-third of the members of the Legislature took place in the spring of 1797. The feeling of the country was now much the same as it had been in 1795, when a large Royalist element was returned for those seats in the Councils which the Convention had not reserved for its own members. France desired a more equitable and a more tolerant rule. The Directory had indeed allowed the sanguinary laws against non-juring priests and returning emigrants to remain unenforced; but the spirit and traditions of official Jacobinism were still active in the Government. The Directors themselves were all regicides; the execution of the King was still celebrated by a national fête; offices, great and small, were held by men who had risen in the Revolution; the whole of the old gentry of France was excluded from participation in public life. It was against this revolutionary class-rule, against a system which placed the country as much at the mercy of a few directors and generals as it had been at the mercy of the Conventional Committee, that the elections of 1797 were a protest. Along with certain Bourbonist conspirators, a large majority of men were returned who, though described as Royalists, were in fact moderate Constitutionalists, and desired only to undo that part of the Revolution which excluded whole classes of the nation from public life.  [60]

[Opposition to the Directory.]

Such a party in the legislative body naturally took the character of an Opposition to the more violent section of the Directory. The Director retiring in 1797 was replaced by the Constitutionalist Barthélemy, negotiator of the treaty of Basle; Carnot, who continued in office, took part with the Opposition, justly fearing that the rule of the Directory would soon amount to nothing more than the rule of Bonaparte himself. The first debates in the new Chamber arose upon the laws relating to emigrants; the next, upon Bonaparte's usurpation of sovereign power in Italy. On the 23rd of June a motion for information on the affairs of Venice and Genoa was brought forward in the Council of Five Hundred. Dumolard, the mover, complained of the secrecy of Bonaparte's action, of the contempt shown by him to the Assembly, of his tyrannical and un-republican interference with the institutions of friendly States. No resolution was adopted by the Assembly; but the mere fact that the Assembly had listened to a hostile criticism of his own actions was sufficient ground in Bonaparte's eyes to charge it with Royalism and with treason. Three of the Directors, Barras, Rewbell, and Laréveillère, had already formed the project of overpowering the Assembly by force. Bonaparte's own interests led him to offer them his support. If the Constitutional party gained power, there was an end to his own unshackled rule in Italy; if the Bourbonists succeeded, a different class of men would hold all the honours of the State. However feeble the Government of the Directory, its continuance secured his own present ascendency, and left him the hope of gaining supreme power when the public could tolerate the Directory no longer.

[Coup d'état, 17 Fructidor (Sept. 3).]

The fate of the Assembly was sealed. On the anniversary of the capture of the Bastille, Bonaparte issued a proclamation to his army declaring the Republic to be threatened by Royalist intrigues. A banquet was held, and the officers and soldiers of every division signed addresses to the Directory full of threats and fury against conspiring aristocrats. "Indignation is at its height in the army," wrote Bonaparte to the Government; "the soldiers are asking with loud cries whether they are to be rewarded by assassination on their return home, as it appears all patriots are to be so dealt with. The peril is increasing every day, and I think, citizen Directors, you must decide to act one way or other." The Directors had no difficulty in deciding after such an exhortation as this; but, as soon as Bonaparte had worked up their courage, he withdrew into the background, and sent General Augereau, a blustering Jacobin, to Paris, to risk the failure or bear the odium of the crime. Augereau received the military command of the capital; the air was filled with rumours of an impending blow; but neither the majority in the Councils nor the two threatened Directors, Carnot and Barthélemy, knew how to take measures of defence. On the night of the 3rd September (17 Fructidor) the troops of Augereau surrounded the Tuileries. Barthélemy was seized at the Luxembourg; Carnot fled for his life; the members of the Councils, marching in procession to the Tuileries early the next morning, were arrested or dispersed by the soldiers. Later in the day a minority of the Councils was assembled to ratify the measures determined upon by Augereau and the three Directors. Fifty members of the Legislature, and the writers, proprietors, and editors of forty-two journals, were sentenced to exile; the elections of forty-eight departments were annulled; the laws against priests and emigrants were renewed; and the Directory was empowered to suppress all journals at its pleasure. This coup d'état was described as the suppression of a Royalist conspiracy. It was this, but it was something more. It was the suppression of all Constitutional government, and all but the last step to the despotism of the chief of the army.

[Peace signed with Austria, Oct. 17.]

The effect of the movement was instantly felt in the negotiations with Austria and with England. Lord Malmesbury was now again in France, treating for peace with fair hopes of success, since the Preliminaries of Leoben had removed England's opposition to the cession of the Netherlands, the discomfiture of the moderate party in the Councils brought his mission to an abrupt end. Austria, on the other hand, had prolonged its negotiations because Bonaparte claimed Mantua and the Rhenish Provinces in addition to the cessions agreed upon at Leoben. Count Ludwig Cobenzl, Austrian ambassador at St. Petersburg, who had protected his master's interests only too well in the last partition of Poland, was now at the head of the plenipotentiaries in Italy, endeavouring to bring Bonaparte back to the terms fixed in the Preliminaries, or to gain additional territory for Austria in Italy. The Jacobin victory at Paris depressed the Austrians as much as it elated the French leader. Bonaparte was resolved on concluding a peace that should be all his own, and this was only possible by anticipating an invasion of Germany, about to be undertaken by Augereau at the head of the Army of the Rhine. It was to this personal ambition of Bonaparte that Venice was sacrificed. The Directors were willing that Austria should receive part of the Venetian territory: they forbade the proposed cession of Venice itself. Within a few weeks more, the advance of the Army of the Rhine would have enabled France to dictate its own terms; but no consideration either for France or for Italy could induce Bonaparte to share the glory of the Peace with another. On the 17th of October he signed the final treaty of Campo Formio, which gave France the frontier of the Rhine, and made both the Venetian territory beyond the Adige and Venice itself the property of the Emperor. For a moment it seemed that the Treaty might be repudiated at Vienna as well as at Paris. Thugut protested against it, because it surrendered Mantua and the Rhenish Provinces without gaining for Austria the Papal Legations; and he drew up the ratification only at the absolute command of the Emperor. The Directory, on the other hand, condemned the cession of Venice. But their fear of Bonaparte and their own bad conscience left them impotent accessories of his treachery; and the French nation at large was too delighted with the peace to resent its baser conditions.  [61]

[Treaty of Campo Formio, Oct. 17.]

By the public articles of the Treaty of Campo Formio, the Emperor ceded to France the Austrian possessions in Lombardy and in the Netherlands, and agreed to the establishment of a Cisalpine Republic, formed out of Austrian Lombardy, the Venetian territory west of the Adige, and the districts hitherto composing the new Cispadane State. France took the Ionian Islands, Austria the City of Venice, with Istria and Dalmatia, and the Venetian mainland east of the Adige. For the conclusion of peace between France and the Holy Roman Empire, it was agreed that a Congress should meet at Rastadt; but a secret article provided that the Emperor should use his efforts to gain for France the whole left bank of the Rhine, except a tract including the Prussian Duchies of Cleve and Guelders. With humorous duplicity the French Government, which had promised Prussia the Bishopric of Münster in return for this very district, now pledged itself to Austria that Prussia should receive no extension whatever, and affected to exclude the Prussian Duchies from the Rhenish territory which was to be made over to France. Austria was promised the independent Bishopric of Salzburg, and that portion of Bavaria which lies between the Inn and the Salza. The secular princes dispossessed in the Rhenish Provinces were to be compensated in the interior of the Empire by a scheme framed in concert with France.

[Austria sacrifices Germany.]

The immense advantages which the Treaty of Campo Formio gave to France-its extension over the Netherlands and the Rhenish Provinces, and the virtual annexation of Lombardy, Modena, and the Papal Legations under the form of a client republic-were not out of proportion to its splendid military successes. Far otherwise was it with Austria. With the exception of the Archduke's campaign of 1796, the warfare of the last three years had brought Austria nothing but a series of disasters; yet Austria gained by the Treaty of Campo Formio as much as it lost. In the place of the distant Netherlands and of Milan it gained, in Venice and Dalmatia, a territory touching its own, nearly equal to the Netherlands and Milan together in population, and so situated as to enable Austria to become one of the naval Powers of the Mediterranean. The price which Austria paid was the abandonment of Germany, a matter which, in spite of Thugut's protests, disturbed the Court of Vienna as little as the betrayal of Venice disturbed Bonaparte. The Rhenish Provinces were surrendered to the stranger; German districts were to be handed over to compensate the ejected Sovereigns of Holland and of Modena; the internal condition and order of the Empire were to be superseded by one framed not for the purpose of benefiting Germany, but for the purpose of extending the influence of France.

[Policy of Bonaparte.]

As defenders of Germany, both Prussia and Austria had been found wanting. The latter Power seemed to have reaped in Italy the reward of its firmness in prolonging the war. Bonaparte ridiculed the men who, in the earlier spirit of the Revolution, desired to found a freer political system in Europe upon the ruins of Austria's power. "I have not drawn my support in Italy," he wrote to Talleyrand (Oct. 7), "from the love of the peoples for liberty and equality, or at least but a very feeble support. The real support of the army of Italy has been its own discipline, ... above all, our promptitude in repressing malcontents and punishing those who declared against us. This is history; what I say in my proclamations and speeches is a romance.... If we return to the foreign policy of 1793, we shall do so knowing that a different policy has brought us success, and that we have no longer the great masses of 1793 to enrol in our armies, nor the support of an enthusiasm which has its day and does not return." Austria might well, for the present, be left in some strength, and France was fortunate to have so dangerous an enemy off her hands. England required the whole forces of the Republic. "The present situation," wrote Bonaparte, after the Peace of Campo Formio, "offers us a good chance. We must set all our strength upon the sea; we must destroy England; and the Continent is at our feet."

[Battles of St. Vincent, Feb. 14, 1797, and Camperdown, Oct. 6.]

It had been the natural hope of the earlier Republicans that the Spanish and the Dutch navies, if they could be brought to the side of France, would make France superior to Great Britain as a maritime Power. The conquest of Holland had been planned by Carnot as the first step towards an invasion of England. For a while these plans seemed to be approaching their fulfilment, Holland was won; Spain first made peace, and then entered into alliance with the Directory (Aug. 1796). But each increase in the naval forces of the Republic only gave the admirals of Great Britain new material to destroy. The Spanish fleet was beaten by Jarvis off St. Vincent; even the mutiny of the British squadrons at Spithead and the Nore, in the spring and summer of 1797, caused no change in the naval situation in the North Sea. Duncan, who was blockading the Dutch fleet in the Texel when his own squadron joined the mutineers, continued the blockade with one ship beside his own, signalling all the while as if the whole fleet were at his back; until the misused seamen, who had lately turned their guns upon the Thames, returned to the admiral, and earned his forgiveness by destroying the Dutch at Camperdown as soon as they ventured out of shelter.

[Bonaparte about to invade Egypt.]

It is doubtful whether at any time after his return from Italy Bonaparte seriously entertained the project of invading England. The plan was at any rate soon abandoned, and the preparations, which caused great alarm in the English coast-towns, were continued only for the purpose of disguising Bonaparte's real design of an attack upon Egypt. From the beginning of his career Bonaparte's thoughts had turned towards the vast and undefended East. While still little known, he had asked the French Government to send him to Constantinople to organise the Turkish army; as soon as Venice fell into his hands, he had seized the Ionian Islands as the base for a future conquest of the Levant. Every engagement that confirmed the superiority of England upon the western seas gave additional reason for attacking her where her power was most precarious, in the East. Bonaparte knew that Alexander had conquered the country of the Indus by a land-march from the Mediterranean, and this was perhaps all the information which he possessed regarding the approaches to India; but it was enough to fix his mind upon the conquest of Egypt and Syria, as the first step towards the destruction of the Asiatic Empire of England. Mingled with the design upon India was a dream of overthrowing the Mohammedan Government of Turkey, and attacking Austria from the East with an army drawn from the liberated Christian races of the Ottoman Empire. The very vagueness of a scheme of Eastern conquest made it the more attractive to Bonaparte's genius and ambition. Nor was there any inclination on the part of the Government to detain the general at home. The Directory, little concerned with the real merits or dangers of the enterprise, consented to Bonaparte's project of an attack upon Egypt, thankful for any opportunity of loosening the grasp which was now closing so firmly upon themselves.

CHAPTER IV.

Congress of Rastadt-The Rhenish Provinces ceded-Ecclesiastical States of Germany suppressed-French intervention in Switzerland-Helvetic Republic- The French invade the Papal States-Roman Republic-Expedition to Egypt- Battle of the Nile-Coalition of 1798-Ferdinand of Naples enters Rome-Mack's defeats-French enter Naples-Parthenopean Republic-War with Austria and Russia-Battle of Stockach-Murder of the French Envoys at Rastadt-Campaign in Lombardy-Reign of Terror at Naples-Austrian designs upon Italy-Suvaroff and the Austrians-Campaign in Switzerland-Campaign in Holland-Bonaparte returns from Egypt-Coup d'état of 18 Brumaire- Constitution of 1799-System of Bonaparte in France-Its effect on the influence of France abroad.

[Congress of Rastadt, Nov. 1797.]

The public articles of the Treaty of Campo Formio contained only the terms which had been agreed upon by France and Austria in relation to Italy and the Netherlands: the conditions of peace between France and the Germanic Body, which had been secretly arranged between France and the two leading Powers, were referred by a diplomatic fiction to a Congress that was to assemble at Rastadt. Accordingly, after Prussia and Austria had each signed an agreement abandoning the Rhenish Provinces, the Congress was duly summoned. As if in mockery of his helpless countrymen, the Emperor informed the members of the Diet that "in unshaken fidelity to the great principle of the unity and indivisibility of the German Empire, they were to maintain the common interests of the Fatherland with noble conscientiousness and German steadfastness; and so, united with their imperial head, to promote a just and lasting peace, founded upon the basis of the integrity of the Empire and of its Constitution."  [62] Thus the Congress was convoked upon the pretence of preserving what the two greater States had determined to sacrifice; while its real object, the suppression of the ecclesiastical principalities and the curtailment of Bavaria, was studiously put out of sight.

[Rivalry of the Germans.]

The Congress was composed of two French envoys, of the representatives of Prussia and Austria, and of a committee, numbering with their secretaries seventy-four persons, appointed by the Diet of Ratisbon. But the recognised negotiators formed only a small part of the diplomatists who flocked to Rastadt in the hope of picking up something from the wreck of the Empire. Every petty German sovereign, even communities which possessed no political rights at all, thought it necessary to have an agent on the spot, in order to filch, if possible, some trifling advantage from a neighbour, or to catch the first rumour of a proposed annexation. It was the saturnalia of the whole tribe of busybodies and intriguers who passed in Germany for men of state. They spied upon one another; they bribed the secretaries and doorkeepers, they bribed the very cooks and coachmen, of the two omnipotent French envoys. Of the national humiliation of Germany, of the dishonour attaching to the loss of entire provinces and the reorganisation of what remained at the bidding of the stranger, there seems to have been no sense in the political circles of the day. The collapse of the Empire was viewed rather as a subject of merriment. A gaiety of life and language prevailed, impossible among men who did not consider themselves as the spectators of a comedy. Cobenzl, the chief Austrian plenipotentiary, took his travels in a fly, because his mistress, the citoyenne Hyacinthe, had decamped with all his carriages and horses. A witty but profane pamphlet was circulated, in which the impending sacrifice of the Empire was described in language borrowed from the Gospel narrative, Prussia taking the part of Judas Iscariot, Austria that of Pontius Pilate, the Congress itself being the chief priests and Pharisees assembling that they may take the Holy Roman Empire by craft, while the army of the Empire figures as the "multitude who smote upon their breasts and departed." In the utter absence of any German pride or patriotism the French envoys not only obtained the territory that they required, but successfully embroiled the two leading Powers with one another, and accustomed the minor States to look to France for their own promotion at the cost of their neighbours. The contradictory pledges which the French Government had given to Austria and to Prussia caused it no embarrassment. To deceive one of the two powers was to win the gratitude of the other; and the Directory determined to fulfil its engagement to Prussia at the expense of the bishoprics, and to ignore what it had promised to Austria at the expense of Bavaria.

[Rhenish Provinces.]

[Ecclesiastical States suppressed.]

A momentary difficulty arose upon the opening of the Congress, when it appeared that, misled by the Emperor's protestations, the Diet had only empowered its Committee to treat upon the basis of the integrity of the Empire (Dec. 9). The French declined to negotiate until the Committee had procured full powers: and the prospects of the integrity of the Empire were made clear enough a few days later by the entry of the French into Mainz, and the formal organisation of the Rhenish Provinces as four French Departments. In due course a decree of the Diet arrived, empowering the Committee to negotiate at their discretion: and for some weeks after the inhabitants of the Rhenish Provinces had been subjected to the laws, the magistracy, and the taxation of France, the Committee deliberated upon the proposal for their cession with as much minuteness and as much impartiality as if it had been a point of speculative philosophy. At length the French put an end to the tedious trifling, and proceeded to the question of compensation for the dispossessed lay Princes. This they proposed to effect by means of the disestablishment, or secularisation, of ecclesiastical States in the interior of Germany. Prussia eagerly supported the French proposal, both with a view to the annexation of the great Bishopric of Münster, and from ancient hostility to the ecclesiastical States as instruments and allies of Catholic Austria. The Emperor opposed the destruction of his faithful dependents; the ecclesiastical princes themselves raised a bitter outcry, and demonstrated that the fall of their order would unloose the keystone of the political system of Europe; but they found few friends. If Prussia coveted the great spoils of Münster, the minor sovereigns, as a rule, wore just as eager for the convents and abbeys that broke the continuity of their own territories: only the feeblest of all the members of the Empire, the counts, the knights, and the cities, felt a respectful sympathy for their ecclesiastical neighbours, and foresaw that in a system of annexation their own turn would come next. The principle of secularisation was accepted by the Congress without much difficulty, all the energy of debate being reserved for the discussion of details: arrangements which were to transfer a few miles of ground and half a dozen custom-houses from some bankrupt ecclesiastic to some French-bought duke excited more interest in Germany than the loss of the Rhenish Provinces, and the subjection of a tenth part of the German nation to a foreign rule.

[Austria determines on war, 1798.]

One more question was unexpectedly presented to the Congress. After proclaiming for six years that the Rhine was the natural boundary of France, the French Government discovered that a river cannot be a military frontier at all. Of what service, urged the French plenipotentiaries, were Strasburg and Mainz, so long as they were commanded by the guns on the opposite bank? If the Rhine was to be of any use to France, France must be put in possession of the fortresses of Kehl and Castel upon the German side. Outrageous as such a demand appears, it found supporters among the venal politicians of the smaller Courts, and furnished the Committee with material for arguments that extended over four months. But the policy of Austria was now taking a direction that rendered the resolutions of the Congress of very little importance. It had become clear that France was inclining to an alliance with Prussia, and that the Bavarian annexations promised to Austria by the secret articles of Campo Formio were to be withheld. Once convinced, by the failure of a private negotiation in Alsace, that the French would neither be content with their gains of 1797, nor permit Austria to extend its territory in Italy, Thugut determined upon a renewal of the war.  [63] In spite of a powerful opposition at Court, Thugut's stubborn will still controlled the fortune of Austria: and the aggressions of the French Republic in Switzerland and the Papal States, at the moment when it was dictating terms of peace to the Empire, gave only too much cause for the formation of a new European league.

[French intervention in Switzerland.]

At the close of the last century there was no country where the spirit of Republican freedom was so strong, or where the conditions of life were so level, as in Switzerland; its inhabitants, however, were far from enjoying complete political equality. There were districts which stood in the relation of subject dependencies to one or other of the ruling cantons: the Pays de Vaud was governed by an officer from Berne; the valley of the Ticino belonged to Uri; and in most of the sovereign cantons themselves authority was vested in a close circle of patrician families. Thus, although Switzerland was free from the more oppressive distinctions of caste, and the Governments, even where not democratic, were usually just and temperate, a sufficiently large class was excluded from political rights to give scope to an agitation which received its impulse from Paris. It was indeed among communities advanced in comfort and intelligence, and divided from those who governed them by no great barrier of wealth and prestige, that the doctrines of the Revolution found a circulation which they could never gain among the hereditary serfs of Prussia or the priest-ridden peasantry of the Roman States. As early as the year 1792 a French army had entered the territory of Geneva, in order to co-operate with the democratic party in the city. The movement was, however, checked by the resolute action of the Bernese Senate; and the relations of France to the Federal Government had subsequently been kept upon a friendly footing by the good sense of Barthélemy, the French ambassador at Berne, and the discretion with which the Swiss Government avoided every occasion of offence. On the conquest of Northern Italy, Bonaparte was brought into direct connection with Swiss affairs by a reference of certain points in dispute to his authority as arbitrator. Bonaparte solved the difficulty by annexing the district of the Valteline to the Cisalpine Republic; and from that time he continued in communication with the Swiss democratic leaders on the subject of a French intervention in Switzerland, the real purpose of which was to secure the treasure of Berne, and to organise a government, like that of Holland and the Cisalpine Republic, in immediate dependence upon France.

[Helvetic Republic, April 12.]

[War between France and Swiss Federation, June, 1798.]

At length the moment for armed interference arrived. On the 15th December, 1797, a French force entered the Bishopric of Basle, and gave the signal for insurrection in the Pays de Vaud. The Senate of Berne summoned the Diet of the Confederacy to provide for the common defence: the oath of federation was renewed, and a decree was passed calling out the Federal army. It was now announced by the French that they would support the Vaudois revolutionary party, if attacked. The Bernese troops, however, advanced; and the bearer of a flag of truce having been accidentally killed, war was declared between the French Republic and the Government of Berne. Democratic movements immediately followed in the northern and western cantons; the Bernese Government attempted to negotiate with the French invaders, but discovered that no terms would be accepted short of the entire destruction of the existing Federal Constitution. Hostilities commenced; and the Bernese troops, supported by contingents from most of the other cantons, offered a brave but ineffectual resistance to the advance of the French, who entered the Federal capital on the 6th of March, 1798. The treasure of Berne, amounting to about £800,000, accumulated by ages of thrift and good management, was seized in order to provide for Bonaparte's next campaign, and for a host of voracious soldiers and contractors. A system of robbery and extortion, more shameless even than that practised in Italy, was put in force against the cantonal governments, against the monasteries, and against private individuals. In compensation for the material losses inflicted upon the country, the new Helvetic Republic, one and indivisible, was proclaimed at Aarau. It conferred an equality of political rights upon all natives of Switzerland, and substituted for the ancient varieties of cantonal sovereignty a single national government, composed, like that of France, of a Directory and two Councils of Legislature.

The towns and districts which had been hitherto excluded from a share in government welcomed a change which seemed to place them on a level with their former superiors: the mountain-cantons fought with traditional heroism in defence of the liberties which they had inherited from their fathers; but they were compelled, one after another, to submit to the overwhelming force of France, and to accept the new constitution. Yet, even now, when peace seemed to have been restored, and the whole purpose of France attained, the tyranny and violence of the invaders exhausted the endurance of a spirited people. The magistrates of the Republic were expelled from office at the word of a French Commission; hostages were seized; at length an oath of allegiance to the new order was required as a condition for the evacuation of Switzerland by the French army. Revolt broke out in Unterwalden, and a handful of peasants met the French army at the village of Stanz, near the eastern shore of the Lake of Lucerne (Sept. 8). There for three days they fought with unyielding courage. Their resistance inflamed the French to a cruel vengeance; slaughtered families and burning villages renewed, in this so-called crusade of liberty, the savagery of ancient war.

[French intrigues in Rome.]

Intrigues at Rome paved the way for a French intervention in the affairs of the Papal States, coincident in time with the invasion of Switzerland. The residence of the French ambassador at Rome, Joseph Bonaparte, was the centre of a democratic agitation. The men who moved about him were in great part strangers from the north of Italy, but they found adherents in the middle and professional classes in Rome itself, although the mass of the poor people, as well as the numerous body whose salaries or profits depended upon ecclesiastical expenditure, were devoted to the priests and the Papacy. In anticipation of disturbances, the Government ordered companies of soldiers to patrol the city. A collision occurred on the 28th December, 1797, between the patrols and a band of revolutionists, who, being roughly handled by the populace as well as by the soldiers, made their way for protection to the courtyard of the Palazzo Corsini, where Joseph Bonaparte resided. Here, in the midst of a confused struggle, General Duphot, a member of the Embassy, was shot by a Papal soldier.  [64]

[Berthier enters Rome, Feb. 10, 1798.]

[Roman Republic, Feb. 15, 1798.]

The French had now the pretext against the Papal Government which they desired. Joseph Bonaparte instantly left the city, and orders were sent to Berthier, chief of the staff in northern Italy, to march upon Rome. Berthier advanced amid the acclamations of the towns and the curses of the peasantry, and entered Rome on the 10th of February, 1798. Events had produced in the capital a much stronger inclination towards change than existed on the approach of Bonaparte a year before. The treaty of Tolentino had shaken the prestige of Papal authority; the loss of so many well-known works of art, the imposition of new and unpopular taxes, had excited as much hatred against the defeated government as against the extortionate conquerors; even among the clergy and their retainers the sale of a portion of the Church-lands and the curtailment of the old Papal splendours had produced alienation and discontent. There existed too within the Italian Church itself a reforming party, lately headed by Ricci, bishop of Pistoia, which claimed a higher degree of independence for the clergy, and condemned the assumption of universal authority by the Roman See. The ill-judged exercise of the Pope's temporal power during the last six years had gained many converts to the opinion that the head of the Church would best perform his office if emancipated from a worldly sovereignty, and restored to his original position of the first among the bishops. Thus, on its approach to Rome, the Republican army found the city ripe for revolution. On the 15th of February an excited multitude assembled in the Forum, and, after planting the tree of liberty in front of the Capitol, renounced the authority of the Pope, and declared that the Roman people constituted itself a free Republic. The resolution was conveyed to Berthier, who recognised the Roman Commonwealth, and made a procession through the city with the solemnity of an ancient triumph. The Pope shut himself up in the Vatican. His Swiss guard was removed, and replaced by one composed of French soldiers, at whose hands the Pontiff, now in his eighty-first year, suffered unworthy insults. He was then required to renounce his temporal power, and, upon his refusal, was removed to Tuscany, and afterwards beyond the Alps to Valence, where in 1799 he died, attended by a solitary ecclesiastic.

In the liberated capital a course of spoliation began, more thorough and systematic than any that the French had yet effected. The riches of Rome brought all the brokers and contractors of Paris to the spot. The museums, the Papal residence, and the palaces of many of the nobility were robbed of every article that could be moved; the very fixtures were cut away, when worth the carriage. On the first meeting of the National Institute in the Vatican it was found that the doors had lost their locks; and when, by order of the French, masses were celebrated in the churches in expiation of the death of Duphot, the patrols who were placed at the gates to preserve order rushed in and seized the sacred vessels. Yet the general robbery was far less the work of the army than of the agents and contractors sent by the Government. In the midst of endless peculation the soldiers were in want of their pay and their food. A sense of the dishonour done to France arose at length in the subordinate ranks of the army; and General Massena, who succeeded Berthier, was forced to quit his command in consequence of the protests of the soldiery against a system to which Massena had conspicuously given his personal sanction. It remained to embody the recovered liberties of Rome in a Republican Constitution, which was, as a matter of course, a reproduction of the French Directory and Councils of Legislature, under the practical control of the French general in command. What Rome had given to the Revolution in the fashion of classical expressions was now more than repaid. The Directors were styled Consuls; the divisions of the Legislature were known as the Senate and the Tribunate; the Prætorship and the Quæstorship were recalled to life in the Courts of Justice. That the new era might not want its classical memorial, a medal was struck, with the image and superscription of Roman heroism, to "Berthier, the restorer of the city," and to "Gaul, the salvation of the human race."

[Expedition to Egypt, May, 1798.]

It was in the midst of these enterprises in Switzerland and Central Italy that the Directory assembled the forces which Bonaparte was to lead to the East. The port of Expedition to embarkation was Toulon; and there, on the 9th of May, 1798, Bonaparte took the command of the most formidable armament that had ever left the French shores. Great Britain was still but feebly represented in the Mediterranean, a detachment from St. Vincent's fleet at Cadiz, placed under the command of Nelson, being the sole British force in these waters. Heavy reinforcements were at hand; but in the meantime Nelson had been driven by stress of weather from his watch upon Toulon. On the 19th of May the French armament put out to sea, its destination being still kept secret from the soldiers themselves. It appeared before Malta on the 16th of June. By the treachery of the knights Bonaparte was put in possession of this stronghold, which he could not even have attempted to besiege. After a short delay the voyage was resumed, and the fleet reached Alexandria without having fallen in with the English, who had now received their reinforcements. The landing was safely effected, and Alexandria fell at the first assault. After five days the army advanced upon Cairo. At the foot of the Pyramids the Mameluke cavalry vainly threw themselves upon Bonaparte's soldiers. They were repulsed with enormous loss on their own side and scarcely any on that of the French. Their camp was stormed; Cairo was occupied; and there no longer existed a force in Egypt capable of offering any serious resistance to the invaders.

[Battle of the Nile, Aug. 1.]

But the fortune which had brought Bonaparte's army safe into the Egyptian capital was destined to be purchased by the utter destruction of his fleet. Nelson had passed the French in the night, when, after much perplexity, he decided on sailing in the direction of Egypt. Arriving at Alexandria before his prey, he had hurried off in an imaginary pursuit to Rhodes and Crete. At length he received information which led him to visit Alexandria a second time. He found the French fleet, numbering thirteen ships of the line and four frigates, at anchor in Aboukir Bay.  [65] His own fleet was slightly inferior in men and guns, but he entered battle with a presentiment of the completeness of his victory. Other naval battles have been fought with larger forces; no destruction was ever so complete as that of the Battle of the Nile (August 1). Two ships of the line and two frigates, out of the seventeen sail that met Nelson, alone escaped from his hands. Of eleven thousand officers and men, nine thousand were taken prisoners, or perished in the engagement. The army of Bonaparte was cut off from all hope of support or return; the Republic was deprived of communication with its best troops and its greatest general.

[Coalition of 1798.]

A coalition was now gathering against France superior to that of 1793 in the support of Russia and the Ottoman Empire, although Spain was now on the side of the Republic, and Prussia, in spite of the warnings of the last two years, refused to stir from its neutrality. The death of the Empress Catherine, and the accession of Paul, had caused a most serious change in the prospects of Europe. Hitherto the policy of the Russian Court had been to embroil the Western Powers with one another, and to confine its efforts against the French Republic to promises and assurances; with Paul, after an interval of total reaction, the professions became realities.  [66] No monarch entered so cordially into Pitt's schemes for a renewal of the European league; no ally had joined the English minister with a sincerity so like his own. On the part of the Ottoman Government, the pretences of friendship with which Bonaparte disguised the occupation of Egypt were taken at their real worth. War was declared by the Porte; and a series of negotiations, carried on during the autumn of 1798, united Russia, England, Turkey, and Naples in engagements of mutual support against the French Republic.

[Nelson at Naples, Sept., 1798.]

A Russian army set out on its long march towards the Adriatic: the levies of Austria prepared for a campaign in the spring of 1799; but to the English Government every moment that elapsed before actual hostilities was so much time given to uncertainties; and the man who had won the Battle of the Nile ridiculed the precaution which had hitherto suffered the French to spread their intrigues through Italy, and closed the ports of Sicily and Naples to his own most urgent needs. Towards the end of September, Nelson appeared in the Bay of Naples, and was received with a delirium that recalled the most effusive scenes in the French Revolution.  [67] In the city of Naples, as in the kingdom generally, the poorest classes were the fiercest enemies of reform, and the steady allies of the Queen and the priesthood against that section of the better-educated classes which had begun to hope for liberty. The system of espionage and persecution with which the sister of Marie Antoinette avenged upon her own subjects the sufferings of her kindred had grown more oppressive with every new victory of the Revolution. In the summer of 1798 there were men languishing for the fifth year in prison, whose offences had never been investigated, and whose relatives were not allowed to know whether they were dead or alive. A mode of expression, a fashion of dress, the word of an informer, consigned innocent persons to the dungeon, with the possibility of torture. In the midst of this tyranny of suspicion, in the midst of a corruption which made the naval and military forces of the kingdom worse than useless, King Ferdinand and his satellites were unwearied in their theatrical invocations of the Virgin and St. Januarius against the assailants of divine right and the conquerors of Rome. A Court cowardly almost beyond the example of Courts, a police that had trained every Neapolitan to look upon his neighbour as a traitor, an administration that had turned one of the hardiest races in Europe into soldiers of notorious and disgraceful cowardice-such were the allies whom Nelson, ill-fitted for politics by his sailor-like inexperience and facile vanity, heroic in his tenderness and fidelity, in an evil hour encouraged to believe themselves invincible because they possessed his own support. On the 14th of November, 1798, King Ferdinand published a proclamation, which, without declaring war on the French, announced that the King intended to occupy the Papal States and restore the Papal government. The manifesto disclaimed all intention of conquest, and offered a free pardon to all compromised persons. Ten days later the Neapolitan army crossed the frontier, led by the Austrian general, Mack, who passed among his admirers for the greatest soldier in Europe.  [68]

[Ferdinand enters Rome, Nov. 29.]

The mass of the French troops, about twelve thousand in number, lay in the neighbourhood of Ancona; Rome and the intermediate stations were held by small detachments. Had Mack pushed forward towards the Upper Tiber, his inroad, even if it failed to crush the separated wings of the French army, must have forced them to retreat; but, instead of moving with all his strength through Central Italy, Mack led the bulk of his army upon Rome, where there was no French force capable of making a stand, and sent weak isolated columns towards the east of the peninsula, where the French were strong enough to make a good defence. On the approach of the Neapolitans to Rome, Championnet, the French commander, evacuated the city, leaving a garrison in the Castle of St. Angelo, and fell back on Civita Castellana, thirty miles north of the capital. The King of Naples entered Rome on the 29th November. The restoration of religion was celebrated by the erection of an immense cross in the place of the tree of liberty, by the immersion of several Jews in the Tiber, by the execution of a number of compromised persons whose pardon the King had promised, and by a threat to shoot one of the sick French soldiers in the hospital for every shot fired by the guns of St. Angelo.  [69] Intelligence was despatched to the exiled Pontiff of the discomfiture of his enemies. "By help of the divine grace," wrote King Ferdinand, "and of the most miraculous St. Januarius, we have to-day with our army entered the sacred city of Rome, so lately profaned by the impious, who now fly terror-stricken at the sight of the Cross and of my arms. Leave then, your Holiness, your too modest abode, and on the wings of cherubim, like the virgin of Loreto, come and descend upon the Vatican, to purify it by your sacred presence." A letter to the King of Piedmont, who had already been exhorted by Ferdinand to encourage his peasants to assassinate French soldiers, informed him that "the Neapolitans, guided by General Mack, had sounded the hour of death to the French, and proclaimed to Europe, from the summit of the Capitol, that the time of the Kings had come."

[Mack defeated by Championnet, Dec. 6-13.]

The despatches to Piedmont fell into the hands of the enemy, and the usual modes of locomotion would scarcely have brought Pope Pius to Rome in time to witness the exit of his deliverer. Ferdinand's rhapsodies were cut short by the news that his columns advancing into the centre and east of the Papal States had all been beaten or captured. Mack, at the head of the main army, now advanced to avenge the defeat upon the French at Civita Castellana and Terni. But his dispositions were as unskilful as ever: wherever his troops encountered the enemy they were put to the rout; and, as he had neglected to fortify or secure a single position upon his line of march, his defeat by a handful of French soldiers on the north of Rome involved the loss of the country almost up to the gates of Naples. On the first rumour of Mack's reverses the Republican party at Rome declared for France. King Ferdinand fled; Championnet re-entered Rome, and, after a few days' delay, advanced into Neapolitan territory. Here, however, he found himself attacked by an enemy more formidable than the army which had been organised to expel the French from Italy. The Neapolitan peasantry, who, in soldiers' uniform and under the orders of Mack, could scarcely be brought within sight of the French, fought with courage when an appeal to their religious passions collected them in brigand-like bands under leaders of their own. Divisions of Championnet's army sustained severe losses; they succeeded, however, in effecting their junction upon the Volturno; and the stronghold of Gaeta, being defended by regular soldiers and not by brigands, surrendered to the French at the first summons.

[French enter Naples, Jan. 23, 1799.]

Mack was now concentrating his troops in an entrenched camp before Capua. The whole country was rising against the invaders; and, in spite of lost battles and abandoned fortresses, the Neapolitan Government if it had possessed a spark of courage, might still have overthrown the French army, which numbered only 18,000 men. But the panic and suspicion which the Government had fostered among its subjects were now avenged upon itself. The cry of treachery was raised on every side. The Court dreaded a Republican rising; the priests and the populace accused the Court of conspiracy with the French; Mack protested that the soldiers were resolved to be beaten; the soldiers swore that they were betrayed by Mack. On the night of the 21st of December, the Royal Family secretly went on board Nelson's ship the Vanguard, and after a short interval they set sail for Palermo, leaving the capital in charge of Prince Pignatelli, a courtier whom no one was willing to obey.  [70] Order was, however, maintained by a civic guard enrolled by the Municipality, until it became known that Mack and Pignatelli had concluded an armistice with the French, and surrendered Capua and the neighbouring towns. Then the populace broke into wild uproar. The prisons were thrown open; and with the arms taken from the arsenal the lazzaroni formed themselves into a tumultuous army, along with thousands of desperate men let loose from the gaols and the galleys. The priests, hearing that negotiations for peace were opened, raised the cry of treason anew; and, with the watchword of the Queen, "All the gentlemen are Jacobins; only the people are faithful," they hounded on the mob to riot and murder. On the morning of January 15th hordes of lazzaroni issued from the gates to throw themselves upon the French, who were now about nine miles from the city; others dragged the guns down from the forts to defend the streets. The Republican party, however, and that considerable body among the upper class which was made Republican by the chaos into which the Court, with its allies, the priests, and the populace, had thrown Naples, kept up communication with Championnet, and looked forward to the entrance of the French as the only means of averting destruction and massacre. By a stratagem carried out on the night of the 20th they gained possession of the fort of St. Elmo, while the French were already engaged in a bloody assault upon the suburbs. On the 23rd Championnet ordered the attack to be renewed. The conspirators within St. Elmo hoisted the French flag and turned their guns upon the populace; the fortress of the Carmine was stormed by the French; and, before the last struggle for life and death commenced in the centre of the city, the leaders of the lazzaroni listened to words of friendship which Championnet addressed to them in their own language, and, with the incoherence of a half-savage race, escorted his soldiers with cries of joy to the Church of St. Januarius, which Championnet promised to respect and protect.

[Parthenopean Republic.]

Championnet used his victory with a discretion and forbearance rare amongst French conquerors. He humoured the superstition of the populace; he encouraged the political hopes of the enlightened. A vehement revulsion of feeling against the fugitive Court and in favour of Republican government followed the creation of a National Council by the French general, and his ironical homage to the patron saint. The Kingdom of Naples was converted into the Parthenopean Republic. New laws, new institutions, discussed in a representative assembly, excited hopes and interests unknown in Naples before. But the inevitable incidents of a French occupation, extortion and impoverishment, with all their bitter effects on the mind of the people, were not long delayed. In every country district the priests were exciting insurrection. The agents of the new Government, men with no experience in public affairs, carried confusion wherever they went. Civil war broke out in fifty different places; and the barbarity of native leaders of insurrection, like Fra Diavolo, was only too well requited by the French columns which traversed the districts in revolt.

[War with Austria and Russia, March, 1799.]

The time was ill chosen by the French Government for an extension of the area of combat to southern Italy. Already the first division of the Russian army, led by Suvaroff, had reached Moravia, and the Court of Vienna was only awaiting its own moment for declaring war. So far were the newly-established Governments in Rome and Naples from being able to assist the French upon the Adige, that the French had to send troops to Rome and Naples to support the new Governments. The force which the French could place upon the frontier was inferior to that which two years of preparation had given to Austria: the Russians, who were expected to arrive in Lombardy in April, approached with the confidence of men who had given to the French none of their recent triumphs. Nor among the leaders was personal superiority any longer markedly on the side of the French, as in the war of the First Coalition. Suvaroff and the Archduke Charles were a fair match for any of the Republican generals, except Bonaparte, who was absent in Egypt. The executive of France had deeply declined. Carnot was in exile; the work of organisation which he had pursued with such energy and disinterestedness flagged under his mediocre and corrupt successors. Skilful generals and brave soldiers were never wanting to the Republic; but no single controlling will, no storm of national passion, inspired the Government with the force which it had possessed under the Convention, and which returned to it under Napoleon.

A new character was given to the war now breaking out by the inclusion of Switzerland in the area of combat. In the war of the First Coalition, Switzerland had been neutral territory; but the events of 1798 had left the French in possession of all Switzerland west of the Rhine, and an Austrian force subsequently occupied the Grisons. The line separating the combatants now ran without a break from Mainz to the Adriatic. The French armies were in continuous communication with one another, and the movements of each could be modified according to the requirements of the rest. On the other hand, a disaster sustained at any one point of the line endangered every other point; for no neutral territory intervened, as in 1796, to check a lateral movement of the enemy, and to protect the communications of a French army in Lombardy from a victorious Austrian force in southern Germany. The importance of the Swiss passes in this relation was understood and even overrated by the French Government; and an energy was thrown into their mountain warfare which might have produced greater results upon the plains.

[The Archduke Charles defeats Jourdan at Stockach, March, 25.]

Three armies formed the order of battle on either side. Jourdan held the French command upon the Rhine; Massena in Switzerland; Scherer, the least capable of the Republican generals, on the Adige. On the side of the Allies, the Archduke Charles commanded in southern Germany; in Lombardy the Austrians were led by Kray, pending the arrival of Suvaroff and his corps; in Switzerland the command was given to Hotze, a Swiss officer who had gained some distinction in foreign service. It was the design of the French to push their centre under Massena through the mountains into the Tyrol, and by a combined attack of the central and the southern army to destroy the Austrians upon the upper Adige, while Jourdan, also in communication with the centre, drove the Archduke down the Danube upon Vienna. Early in March the campaign opened. Massena assailed the Austrian positions east of the head-waters of the Rhine, and forced back the enemy into the heart of the Grisons. Jourdan crossed the Rhine at Strasburg, and passed the Black Forest with 40,000 men. His orders were to attack the Archduke Charles, whatever the Archduke's superiority of force. The French and the Austrian armies met at Stockach, near the head of the Lake of Constance (March 25). Overwhelming numbers gave the Archduke a complete victory. Jourdan was not only stopped in his advance, but forced to retreat beyond the Rhine. Whatever might be the fortune of the armies of Switzerland and Italy, all hope of an advance upon Vienna by the Danube was at an end.

[Murder of the French envoys at Rastadt, April 28.]

Freed from the invader's presence, the Austrians now spread themselves over Baden, up to the gates of Rastadt, where, in spite of the war between France and Austria, the envoys of the minor German States still continued their conferences with the French agents. On the 28th of April the French envoys, now three in number, were required by the Austrians to depart within twenty-four hours. An escort, for which they applied, was refused. Scarcely had their carriages passed through the city gates when they were attacked by a squadron of Austrian hussars. Two of French envoys the French envoys were murdered; the third left for dead. Whether this frightful violation of international law was the mere outrage of a drunken soldiery, as it was represented to be by the Austrian Government; whether it was to any extent occasioned by superior civil orders, or connected with French emigrants living in the neighbourhood, remains unknown. Investigations begun by the Archduke Charles were stopped by the Cabinet, in order that a more public inquiry might be held by the Diet. This inquiry, however, never took place. In the year 1804 all papers relating to the Archduke's investigation were removed by the Government from the military archives. They have never since been discovered.  [71]

[Battle of Magnano, April 5.]

The outburst of wrath with which the French people learnt the fate of their envoys would have cost Austria dear if Austria had now been the losing party in the war; but, for the present, everything seemed to turn against the Republic. Jourdan had scarcely been overthrown in Germany before a ruinous defeat at Magnano, on the Adige, drove back the army of Italy to within a few miles of Milan; while Massena, deprived of the fruit of his own victories by the disasters of his colleagues, had to abandon the eastern half of Switzerland, and to retire upon the line of the river Limnat, Lucerne, and the Gothard. Charles now moved from Germany into Switzerland. Massena fixed his centre at Zürich, and awaited the Archduke's assault. For five weeks Charles remained inactive: at length, on the 4th of June, he gave battle. After two days' struggle against greatly superior forces, Massena was compelled to evacuate Zürich. He retreated, however, no farther than to the ridge of the Uetliberg, a few miles west of the city; and here, fortifying his new position, he held obstinately on, while the Austrians established themselves in the central passes of Switzerland, and disaster after disaster seemed to be annihilating the French arms in Italy.

[Suvaroff's Campaign in Lombardy, April-June.]

Suvaroff, at the head of 17,000 Russians, had arrived in Lombardy in the middle of April. His first battle was fought, and his first victory won, at the passage of the Adda on the 25th of April. It was followed by the surrender of Milan and the dissolution of the Cisalpine Republic. Moreau, who now held the French command, fell back upon Alessandria, intending to cover both Genoa and Turin; but a sudden movement of Suvaroff brought the Russians into the Sardinian capital before it was even known to be in jeopardy. The French general, cut off from the roads over the Alps, threw himself upon the Apennines above Genoa, and waited for the army which had occupied Naples, and which, under the command of Macdonald, was now hurrying to his support, gathering with it on its march the troops that lay scattered on the south of the Po. Macdonald moved swiftly through central Italy, and crossed the Apennines above Pistoia in the beginning of June. His arrival at Modena with 20,000 men threatened to turn the balance in favour of the French. Suvaroff, aware of his danger, collected all the troops within reach with the utmost despatch, and pushed eastwards to meet Macdonald on the Trebbia. Moreau descended from the Apennines in the same direction; but he had underrated the swiftness of the Russian general; and, before he had advanced over half the distance, Macdonald was attacked by Suvaroff on the Trebbia, and overthrown in three days of the most desperate fighting that had been seen in the war (June 18).  [72]

[Naples.]

All southern Italy now rose against the Governments established by the French. Cardinal Ruffo, with a band of fanatical peasants, known as the Army of the Faith, made himself master of Apulia and Calabria amid scenes of savage cruelty, and appeared before Naples, where the lazzaroni were ready to unite with the hordes of the Faithful in murder and pillage. Confident of support within the city, and assisted by some English and Russian vessels in the harbour, Ruffo attacked the suburbs of Naples on the morning of the 13th of June. Massacre and outrage continued within and without the city for five days. On the morning of the 19th, the Cardinal proposed a suspension of arms. It was accepted by the Republicans, who were in possession of the forts. Negotiations followed. On the 23rd conditions of peace were signed by Ruffo on behalf of the King of Naples, and by the representatives of Great Britain and of Russia in guarantee for their faithful execution. It was agreed that the Republican garrison should march out with the honours of war; that their persons and property should be respected; that those who might prefer to leave the country should be conveyed to Toulon on neutral vessels; and that all who remained at home should be free from molestation.

[Reign of Terror.]

The garrison did not leave the forts that night. On the following morning, while they were embarking on board the polaccas which were to take them to Toulon, Nelson's fleet appeared in the Bay of Naples. Nelson declared that in treating with rebels Cardinal Ruffo had disobeyed the King's orders, and he pronounced the capitulation null and void. The polaccas, with the Republicans crowded on board, were attached to the sterns of the English ships, pending the arrival of King Ferdinand. On the 29th of June, Admiral Caracciolo, who had taken office under the new Government, and on its fall had attempted to escape in disguise, was brought a captive before Nelson. Nelson ordered him to be tried by a Neapolitan court-martial, and, in spite of his old age, his rank, and his long service to the State, caused him to be hanged from a Neapolitan ship's yard-arm, and his body to be thrown into the sea. Some days later, King Ferdinand arrived from Palermo, and Nelson now handed over all his prisoners to the Bourbon authorities. A reign of terror followed. Innumerable persons were thrown into prison. Courts-martial, or commissions administering any law that pleased themselves, sent the flower of the Neapolitan nation to the scaffold. Above a hundred sentences of death were carried out in Naples itself: confiscation, exile, and imprisonment struck down thousands of families. It was peculiar to the Neapolitan proscriptions that a Government with the names of religion and right incessantly upon its lips selected for extermination both among men and women those who were most distinguished in character, in science, and in letters, whilst it chose for promotion and enrichment those who were known for deeds of savage violence. The part borne by Nelson in this work of death has left a stain on his glory which time cannot efface.  [73]

[Austrian designs in Italy.]

[New plan of the War.]

It was on the advance of the Army of Naples under Macdonald that the French rested their last hope of recovering Lombardy. The battle of the Trebbia scattered this hope to the winds, and left it only too doubtful whether France could be saved from invasion. Suvaroff himself was eager to fall upon Moreau before Macdonald could rally from his defeat, and to drive him westwards along the coast-road into France. It was a moment when the fortune of the Republic hung in the scales. Had Suvaroff been permitted to follow his own counsels, France would probably have seen the remnant of her Italian armies totally destroyed, and the Russians advancing upon Lyons or Marseilles. The Republic was saved, as it had been in 1793, by the dissensions of its enemies. It was not only for the purpose of resisting French aggression that Austria had renewed the war, but for the purpose of extending its own dominion in Italy. These designs were concealed from Russia; they were partially made known by Thugut to the British Ambassador, under the most stringent obligation to secrecy. On the 17th of August, 1799, Lord Minto acquainted his Government with the intentions of the Austrian Court. "The Emperor proposes to retain Piedmont, and to take all that part of Savoy which is important in a military view. I have no doubt of his intention to keep Nice also, if he gets it, which will make the Var his boundary with France. The whole territory of the Genoese Republic seems to be an object of serious speculation ... The Papal Legations will, I am persuaded, be retained by the Emperor ... I am not yet master of the designs on Tuscany."  [74] This was the sense in which Austria understood the phrase of defending the rights of Europe against French aggression. It was not, however, for this that the Czar had sent his army from beyond the Carpathians. Since the opening of the campaign Suvaroff had been in perpetual conflict with the military Council of Vienna.  [75] Suvaroff was bent upon a ceaseless pursuit of the enemy; the Austrian Council insisted upon the reduction of fortresses. What at first appeared as a mere difference of military opinion appeared in its true political character when the allied troops entered Piedmont. The Czar desired with his whole soul to crush the men of the Revolution, and to restore the governments which France had overthrown. As soon as his troops entered Turin, Suvaroff proclaimed the restoration of the House of Savoy, and summoned all Sardinian officers to fight for their King. He was interrupted by a letter from Vienna requiring him to leave political affairs in the hands of the Viennese Ministry.  [76] The Russians had already done as much in Italy as the Austrian Cabinet desired them to do, and the first wish of Thugut was now to free himself from his troublesome ally. Suvaroff raged against the Austrian Government in every despatch, and tendered his resignation. His complaints inclined the Czar to accept a new military scheme, which was supported by the English Government in the hope of terminating the contention between Suvaroff and the Austrian Council. It was agreed at St. Petersburg that, as soon as the French armies were destroyed, the reduction of the Italian fortresses should be left exclusively to the Austrians; and that Suvaroff, uniting with a new Russian army now not far distant, should complete the conquest of Switzerland, and then invade France by the Jura, supported on his right by the Archduke Charles. An attack was to be made at the same time upon Holland by a combined British and Russian force.

If executed in its original form, this design would have thrown a formidable army upon France at the side of Franche Comté, where it is least protected by fortresses. But at the last moment an alteration in the plan was made at Vienna. The prospect of an Anglo-Russian victory in Holland again fixed the thoughts of the Austrian Minister upon Belgium, which had been so lightly abandoned five years before, and which Thugut now hoped to re-occupy and to barter for Bavaria or some other territory. "The Emperor," he wrote, "cannot turn a deaf ear to the appeal of his subjects. He cannot consent that the Netherlands shall be disposed of without his own concurrence."  [77] The effect of this perverse and mischievous resolution was that the Archduke Charles received orders to send the greater part of his army from Switzerland to the Lower Rhine, and to leave only 25,000 men to support the new Russian division which, under General Korsakoff, was approaching from the north to meet Suvaroff. The Archduke, as soon as the new instructions reached him, was filled with the presentiment of disaster, and warned his Government that in the general displacement of forces an opportunity would be given to Massena, who was still above Zürich, to strike a fatal blow. Every despatch that passed between Vienna and St. Petersburg now increased the Czar's suspicion of Austria. The Pope and the King of Naples were convinced that Thugut had the same design upon their own territories which had been shown in his treatment of Piedmont.  [78] They appealed to the Czar for protection. The Czar proposed a European Congress, at which the Powers might learn one another's real intentions. The proposal was not accepted by Austria; but, while disclaiming all desire to despoil the King of Sardinia, the Pope, or the King of Naples, Thugut admitted that Austria claimed an improvement of its Italian frontier, in other words, the annexation of a portion of Piedmont, and of the northern part of the Roman States. The Czar replied that he had taken up arms in order to check one aggressive Government, and that he should not permit another to take its place.

[Battle of Novi, Aug. 15.]

For the moment, however, the allied forces continued to co-operate in Italy against the French army on the Apennines covering Genoa. This army had received reinforcements, and was now placed under the command of Joubert, one of the youngest and most spirited of the Republican generals. Joubert determined to attack the Russians before the fall of Mantua should add the besieging army to Suvaroff's forces in the field. But the information which he received from Lombardy misled him. In the second week of August he was still unaware that Mantua had fallen a fortnight before. He descended from the mountains to attack Suvaroff at Tortona, with a force about equal to Suvaroff's own. On reaching Novi he learnt that the army of Mantua was also before him (Aug. 15). It was too late to retreat; Joubert could only give to his men the example of Republican spirit and devotion. Suvaroff himself, with Kray, the conqueror of Mantua, began the attack: the onset of a second Austrian corps, at the moment when the strength of the Russians was failing, decided the day. Joubert did not live to witness the close of a defeat which cost France eleven thousand men.  [79]

[Suvaroff goes into Switzerland.]

The allied Governments had so framed their plans that the most overwhelming victory could produce no result. Instead of entering France, Suvaroff was compelled to turn back into Switzerland, while the Austrians continued to besiege the fortresses of Piedmont. In Switzerland Suvaroff had to meet an enemy who was forewarned of his approach, and who had employed every resource of military skill and daring to prevent the union of the two Russian armies now advancing from the south and the north. Before Suvaroff could leave Italy, a series of admirably-planned attacks had given Massena the whole network of the central Alpine passes, and closed every avenue of communication between Suvaroff and the army with which he hoped to co-operate. The folly of the Austrian Cabinet seconded the French general's exertions. No sooner had Korsakoff and the new Russian division reached Schaffhausen than the Archduke Charles, forced by his orders from Vienna, turned northwards (Sept. 3), leaving the Russians with no support but Hotze's corps, which was scattered over six cantons.  [80] Korsakoff advanced to Zürich; Massena remained in his old position on the Uetliberg. It was now that Suvaroff began his march into the Alps, sorely harassed and delayed by the want of the mountain-teams which the Austrians had promised him, and filled with the apprehension that Korsakoff would suffer some irreparable disaster before his own arrival.

[Second Battle of Zürich, Sept. 26.]

Two roads lead from the Italian lakes to central Switzerland; one, starting from the head of Lago Maggiore and crossing the Gothard, ends on the shore of Lake Lucerne; the other, crossing the Splügen, runs from the Lake of Como to Reichenau, in the valley of the Rhine. The Gothard in 1799 was not practicable for cannon; it was chosen by Suvaroff, however, for his own advance, with the object of falling upon Massena's rear with the utmost possible speed. He left Bellinzona on the 21st of September, fought his way in a desperate fashion through the French outposts that guarded the defiles of the Gothard, and arrived at Altorf near the Lake of Lucerne. Here it was discovered that the westward road by which Suvaroff meant to strike upon the enemy's communications had no existence. Abandoning this design, Suvaroff made straight for the district where his colleague was encamped, by a shepherd's path leading north-eastwards across heights of 7,000 feet to the valley of the Muotta. Over this desolate region the Russians made their way; and the resolution which brought them as far as the Muotta would have brought them past every other obstacle to the spot where they were to meet their countrymen. But the hour was past. While Suvaroff was still struggling in the mountains, Massena advanced against Zürich, put Korsakoff's army to total rout, and drove it, with the loss of all its baggage and of a great part of its artillery, outside the area of hostilities.

[Retreat of Suvaroff.]

The first rumours of the catastrophe reached Suvaroff on the Muotta; he still pushed on eastwards, and, though almost without ammunition, overthrew a corps commanded by Massena in person, and cleared the road over the Pragel at the point of the bayonet, arriving in Glarus on the 1st of October. Here the full extent of Korsakoff's disaster was made known to him. To advance or to fall back was ruin. It only remained for Suvaroff's army to make its escape across a wild and snow-covered mountain-tract into the valley of the Rhine, where the river flows below the northern heights of the Grisons. This exploit crowned a campaign which filled Europe with astonishment. The Alpine traveller of to-day turns with some distrust from narratives which characterise with every epithet of horror and dismay scenes which are the delight of our age; but the retreat of Suvaroff's army, a starving, footsore multitude, over what was then an untrodden wilderness of rock, and through fresh-fallen autumn snow two feet deep, had little in common with the boldest feats of Alpine hardihood.  [81] It was achieved with loss and suffering; it brought the army from a position of the utmost danger into one of security; but it was followed by no renewed attack. Proposals for a combination between Suvaroff and the Archduke Charles resulted only in mutual taunts and menaces. The co-operation of Russia in the war was at an end. The French remained masters of the whole of the Swiss territory that they had lost since the beginning of the campaign.

[British and Russian expedition against Holland Aug. 1799.]

In the summer months of 1799 the Czar had relieved his irritation against Austria by framing in concert with the British Cabinet the plan for a joint expedition against Holland. It was agreed that 25,000 English and 17,000 Russian troops, brought from the Baltic in British ships, should attack the French in the Batavian Republic, and raise an insurrection on behalf of the exiled Stadtholder. Throughout July the Kentish coast-towns were alive with the bustle of war; and on the 13th of August the first English division, numbering 12,000 men, set sail from Deal under the command of Sir Ralph Abercromby. After tossing off the Dutch coast for a fortnight, the troops landed at the promontory of the Helder. A Dutch corps was defeated on the sand-hills, and the English captured the fort of the Helder, commanding the Texel anchorage. Immediately afterwards a movement in favour of the Stadtholder broke out among the officers of the Dutch fleet. The captains hoisted the Orange flag, and brought their ships over to the English.

This was the first and the last result of the expedition. The Russian contingent and a second English division reached Holland in the middle of September, and with them came the Duke of York, who now took the command out of the hands of Abercromby. On the other side reinforcements daily arrived from France, until the enemy's troops, led by General Brune, were equal in strength to the invaders. A battle fought at Alkmaar on the 19th of September gave the Allies some partial successes and no permanent advantage; and on the 3rd of October the Duke of York gained one of those so-called victories which result in the retreat of the conquerors. Never were there so many good reasons for a bad conclusion. The Russians moved too fast or too slow; the ditches set at nought the rules of strategy; it was discovered that the climate of Holland was unfavourable to health, and that the Dutch had not the slightest inclination to get back their Stadtholder. The result of a series of mischances, every one of which would have been foreseen by an average midshipman in Nelson's fleet, or an average sergeant in Massena's army, was that York had to purchase a retreat for the allied forces at a price equivalent to an unconditional surrender. He was allowed to re-embark on consideration that Great Britain restored to the French 8,000 French and Dutch prisoners, and handed over in perfect repair all the military works which our own soldiers had erected at the Helder. Bitter complaints were raised among the Russian officers against York's conduct of the expedition. He was accused of sacrificing the Russian regiments in battle, and of courting a general defeat in order not to expose his own men. The accusation was groundless. Where York was, treachery or bad faith was superfluous. York in command, the feeblest enemy became invincible. Incompetence among the hereditary chiefs of the English army had become part of the order of nature. The Ministry, when taxed with failure, obstinately shut their eyes to the true cause of the disaster. Parliament was reminded that defeat was the most probable conclusion of any military operations that we might undertake, and that England ought not to expect success when Prussia and Austria had so long met only with misfortune. Under the command of Nelson, English sailors were indeed manifesting that kind of superiority to the seamen of other nations which the hunter possesses over his prey; yet this gave no reason why foresight and daring should count for anything ashore. If the nation wished to see its soldiers undefeated, it must keep them at home to defend their country. Even among the Opposition no voice was raised to protest against the system which sacrificed English life and military honour to the dignity of the Royal Family. The collapse of the Anglo-Russian expedition was viewed with more equanimity in England than in Russia. The Czar dismissed his unfortunate generals. York returned home, to run horses at Newmarket, to job commissions with his mistress, and to earn his column at St. James's Park.

[Unpopularity of the Directory.]

[Plans of Siéyès 1799.]

It was at this moment, when the tide of military success was already turning in favour of the Republic, that the revolution took place which made Bonaparte absolute ruler of France. Since the attack of the Government upon the Royalists in Fructidor, 1797, the Directory and the factions had come no nearer to a system of mutual concession, or to a peaceful acquiescence in the will of a parliamentary majority. The Directory, assailed both by the extreme Jacobins and by the Constitutionalists, was still strong enough to crush each party in its turn. The elections of 1798, which strengthened the Jacobins, were annulled with as little scruple as the Royalist elections in the preceding year; it was only when defeat in Germany and Italy had brought the Government into universal discredit that the Constitutionalist party, fortified by the return of a large majority in the elections of 1799, dared to turn the attack upon the Directors themselves. The excitement of foreign conquest had hitherto shielded the abuses of Government from criticism; but when Italy was lost, when generals and soldiers found themselves without pay, without clothes, without reinforcements, one general outcry arose against the Directory, and the nation resolved to have done with a Government whose outrages and extortions had led to nothing but military ruin. The disasters of France in the spring of 1799, which resulted from the failure of the Government to raise the armies to their proper strength, were not in reality connected with the defects of the Constitution. They were caused in part by the shameless jobbery of individual members of the Administration, in part by the absence of any agency, like that of the Conventional Commissioners of 1793, to enforce the control of the central Government over the local authorities, left isolated and independent by the changes of 1789. Faults enough belonged, however, to the existing political order; and the Constitutionalists, who now for the second time found themselves with a majority in the Councils, were not disposed to prolong a system which from the first had turned their majorities into derision. A party grew up around the Abbé Siéyès intent upon some change which should give France a government really representing its best elements. What the change was to be few could say; but it was known that Siéyès, who had taken a leading part in 1789, and had condemned the Constitution of 1795 from the moment when it was sketched, had elaborated a scheme which he considered exempt from every error that had vitiated its predecessors. As the first step to reform, Siéyès himself was elected to a Directorship then falling vacant. Barras attached himself to Siéyès; the three remaining Directors, who were Jacobins and popular in Paris, were forced to surrender their seats. Siéyès now only needed a soldier to carry out his plans. His first thought had turned on Joubert, but Joubert was killed at Novi. Moreau scrupled to raise his hand against the law; Bernadotte, a general distinguished both in war and in administration, declined to play a secondary part. Nor in fact was the support of Siéyès indispensable to any popular and ambitious soldier who was prepared to attack the Government. Siéyès and his friends offered the alliance of a party weighty in character and antecedents; but there were other well-known names and powerful interests at the command of an enterprising leader, and all France awaited the downfall of a Government whose action had resulted only in disorder at home and defeat abroad.

[Bonaparte returns from Egypt, Oct., 1799.]

Such was the political situation when, in the summer of 1799, Bonaparte, baffled in an attack upon the Syrian fortress of St. Jean d'Acre, returned to Egypt, and received the first tidings from Europe which had reached him since the outbreak of the war. He saw that his opportunity had arrived. He determined to leave his army, whose ultimate failure was inevitable, and to offer to France in his own person that sovereignty of genius and strength for which the whole nation was longing. On the 7th of October a despatch from Bonaparte was read in the Council of Five Hundred, announcing a victory over the Turks at Aboukir. It brought the first news that had been received for many months from the army of Egypt; it excited an outburst of joyous enthusiasm for the general and the army whom a hated Government was believed to have sent into exile; it recalled that succession of victories which had been unchecked by a single defeat, and that Peace which had given France a dominion wider than any that her Kings had won. While every thought was turned upon Bonaparte, the French nation suddenly heard that Bonaparte himself had landed on the coast of Provence. "I was sitting that day," says Béranger in his autobiography, "in our reading-room with thirty or forty other persons. Suddenly the news was brought in that Bonaparte had returned from Egypt. At the words, every man in the room started to his feet and burst into one long shout of joy." The emotion portrayed by Béranger was that of the whole of France. Almost everything that now darkens the early fame of Bonaparte was then unknown. His falsities, his cold, unpitying heart were familiar only to accomplices and distant sufferers; even his most flagrant wrongs, such as the destruction of Venice, were excused by a political necessity, or disguised as acts of righteous chastisement. The hopes, the imagination of France saw in Bonaparte the young, unsullied, irresistible hero of the Republic. His fame had risen throughout a crisis which had destroyed all confidence in others. The stale placemen of the factions sank into insignificance by his side; even sincere Republicans, who feared the rule of a soldier, confessed that it is not always given to a nation to choose the mode of its own deliverance. From the moment that Bonaparte landed at Fréjus, he was master of France.

[Conspiracy of Siéyès and Bonaparte.]

Siéyès saw that Bonaparte, and no one else, was the man through whom he could overthrow the existing Constitution.  [82] So little sympathy existed, however, between Siéyès and the soldier to whom he now offered his support, that Bonaparte only accepted Siéyès' project after satisfying himself that neither Barras nor Bernadotte would help him to supreme power. Once convinced of this, Bonaparte closed with Siéyès' offers. It was agreed that Siéyès and his friend Ducos should resign their Directorships, and that the three remaining Directors should be driven from office. The Assemblies, or any part of them favourable to the plot, were to appoint a Triumvirate composed of Bonaparte, Siéyès, and Ducos, for the purpose of drawing up a new Constitution. In the new Constitution it was understood, though without any definite arrangement, that Bonaparte and Siéyès were to be the leading figures. The Council of Ancients was in great part in league with the conspirators: the only obstacle likely to hinder the success of the plot was a rising of the Parisian populace. As a precaution against attack, it was determined to transfer the meeting of the Councils to St. Cloud. Bonaparte had secured the support of almost all the generals and troops in Paris. His brother Lucien, now President of the Council of Five Hundred, hoped to paralyse the action of his own Assembly, in which the conspirators were in the minority.

[Coup d'état, 18 Brumaire (Nov. 9), 1799.]

Early on the morning of the 9th of November (18 Brumaire), a crowd of generals and officers met before Bonaparte's house. At the same moment a portion of the Council of Ancients assembled, and passed a decree which adjourned the session to St. Cloud, and conferred on Bonaparte the command over all the troops in Paris. The decree was carried to Bonaparte's house and read to the military throng, who acknowledged it by brandishing their swords. Bonaparte then ordered the troops to their posts, received the resignation of Barras, and arrested the two remaining Directors in the Luxembourg. During the night there was great agitation in Paris. The arrest of the two Directors and the display of military force revealed the true nature of the conspiracy, and excited men to resistance who had hitherto seen no great cause for alarm. The Councils met at St. Cloud at two on the next day. The Ancients were ready for what was coming; the Five Hundred refused to listen to Bonaparte's accomplices, and took the oath of fidelity to the Constitution. Bonaparte himself entered the Council of Ancients, and in violent, confused language declared that he had come to save the Republic from unseen dangers. He then left the Assembly, and entered the Chamber of the Five Hundred, escorted by armed grenadiers. A roar of indignation greeted the appearance of the bayonets. The members rushed in a mass upon Bonaparte, and drove him out of the hall. His brother now left the President's chair and joined the soldiers outside, whom he harangued in the character of President of the Assembly. The soldiers, hitherto wavering, were assured by Lucien's civil authority and his treacherous eloquence. The drums beat; the word of command was given; and the last free representatives of France struggled through doorways and windows before the levelled and advancing bayonets.

[Siéyès' plan of Constitution.]

The Constitution which Siéyès hoped now to impose upon France had been elaborated by its author at the close of the Reign of Terror. Designed at that epoch, it bore the trace of all those apprehensions which gave shape to the Constitution of 1795. The statutory outrages of 1793, the Royalist reaction shown in the events of Vendémiaire, were the perils from which both Siéyès and the legislators of 1795 endeavoured to guard the future of France. It had become clear that a popular election might at any moment return a royalist majority to the Assembly: the Constitution of 1795 averted this danger by prolonging the power of the Conventionalists; Siéyès overcame it by extinguishing popular election altogether. He gave to the nation no right but that of selecting half a million persons who should be eligible to offices in the Communes, and who should themselves elect a smaller body of fifty thousand, eligible to offices in the Departments. The fifty thousand were in their turn to choose five thousand, who should be eligible to places in the Government and the Legislature. The actual appointments were to be made, however, not by the electors, but by the Executive. With the irrational multitude thus deprived of the power to bring back its old oppressors, priests, royalists, and nobles might safely do their worst. By way of still further precaution, Siéyès proposed that every Frenchman who had been elected to the Legislature since 1789 should be inscribed for ten years among the privileged five thousand.

Such were the safeguards provided against a Bourbonist reaction. To guard against a recurrence of those evils which France had suffered from the precipitate votes of a single Assembly, Siéyès broke up the legislature into as many chambers as there are stages in the passing of a law. The first chamber, or Council of State, was to give shape to measures suggested by the Executive; a second chamber, known as the Tribunate, was to discuss the measures so framed, and ascertain the objections to which they were liable; the third chamber, known as the Legislative Body, was to decide in silence for or against the measures, after hearing an argument between representatives of the Council and of the Tribunate. As a last impregnable bulwark against Jacobins and Bourbonists alike, Siéyès created a Senate whose members should hold office for life, and be empowered to annul every law in which the Chambers might infringe upon the Constitution.

It only remained to invent an Executive. In the other parts of his Constitution, Siéyès had borrowed from Rome, from Greece, and from Venice; in his Executive he improved upon the political theories of Great Britain. He proposed that the Government should consist of two Consuls and a Great Elector; the Elector, like an English king, appointing and dismissing the Consuls, but taking no active part in the administration himself. The Consuls were to be respectively restricted to the affairs of peace and of war. Grotesque under every aspect, the Constitution of Siéyès was really calculated to effect in all points but one the end which he had in view. His object was to terminate the convulsions of France by depriving every element in the State of the power to create sudden change. The members of his body politic, a Council that could only draft, a Tribunate that could only discuss, a Legislature that could only vote, Yes or No, were impotent for mischief; and the nation itself ceased to have a political existence as soon as it had selected its half-million notables.

[Siéyès and Bonaparte.]

So far, nothing could have better suited the views of Bonaparte; and up to this point Bonaparte quietly accepted Siéyès' plan. But the general had his own scheme for what was to follow. Siéyès might apportion the act of deliberation among debating societies and dumb juries to the full extent of his own ingenuity; but the moment that he applied his disintegrating method to the Executive, Bonaparte swept away the flimsy reasoner, and set in the midst of his edifice of shadows the reality of an absolute personal rule. The phantom Elector, and the Consuls who were to be the Elector's tenants-at-will, corresponded very little to the power which France desired to see at its head. "Was there ever anything so ridiculous?" cried Bonaparte. "What man of spirit could accept such a post?" It was in vain that Siéyès had so nicely set the balance. His theories gave to France only the pageants which disguised the extinction of the nation beneath a single will: the frame of executive government which the country received in 1799 was that which Bonaparte deduced from the conception of an absolute central power. The First Consul summed up all executive authority in his own person. By his side there were set two colleagues whose only function was to advise. A Council of State placed the highest skill and experience in France at the disposal of the chief magistrate, without infringing upon his sovereignty. All offices, both in the Ministries of State and in the provinces, were filled by the nominees of the First Consul. No law could be proposed but at his desire.

[Contrast of the Institutions of 1791 and 1799.]

[Centralisation of 1799.]

The institutions given to France by the National Assembly of 1789 and those given to it in the Consulate exhibited a direct contrast seldom found outside the region of abstract terms. Local customs, survivals of earlier law, such as soften the difference between England and the various democracies of the United States, had no place in the sharp-cut types in which the political order of France was recast in 1791 and 1799. The Constituent Assembly had cleared the field before it began to reconstruct. Its reconstruction was based upon the Rights of Man, identified with the principle of local self-government by popular election. It deduced a system of communal administration so completely independent that France was described by foreign critics as partitioned into 40,000 republics; and the criticism was justified when, in 1793, it was found necessary to create a new central Government, and to send commissioners from the capital into the provinces. In the Constitution of 1791, judges, bishops, officers of the National Guard, were all alike subjected to popular election; the Minister of War could scarcely move a regiment from one village to another without the leave of the mayor of the commune. In the Constitution of 1799 all authority was derived from the head of the State. A system of centralisation came into force with which France under her kings had nothing to compare. All that had once served as a check upon monarchical power, the legal Parliaments, the Provincial Estates of Brittany and Languedoc, the rights of lay and ecclesiastical corporations, had vanished away. In the place of the motley of privileges that had tempered the Bourbon monarchy, in the place of the popular Assemblies of the Revolution, there sprang up a series of magistracies as regular and as absolute as the orders of military rank.  [83] Where, under the Constitution of 1791, a body of local representatives had met to conduct the business of the Department, there was now a Préfet, appointed by the First Consul, absolute, like the First Consul himself, and assisted only by the advice of a nominated council, which met for one fortnight in the year. In subordination to the Préfet, an officer and similar council transacted the local business of the Arrondissement. Even the 40,000 Maires with their communal councils were all appointed directly or indirectly by the Chief of the State. There existed in France no authority that could repair a village bridge, or light the streets of a town, but such as owed its appointment to the central Government. Nor was the power of the First Consul limited to the administration. With the exception of the lowest and the highest members of the judicature, he nominated all judges, and transferred them at his pleasure to inferior or superior posts.

Such was the system which, based to a great extent upon the preferences of the French people, fixed even more deeply in the national character the willingness to depend upon an omnipresent, all-directing power. Through its rational order, its regularity, its command of the highest science and experience, this system of government could not fail to confer great and rapid benefits upon the country. It has usually been viewed by the French themselves as one of the finest creations of political wisdom. In comparison with the self-government which then and long afterwards existed in England, the centralisation of France had all the superiority of progress and intelligence over torpor and self-contradiction. Yet a heavy, an incalculable price is paid by every nation which for the sake of administrative efficiency abandons its local liberties, and all that is bound up with their enjoyment. No practice in the exercise of public right armed a later generation of Frenchmen against the audacity of a common usurper: no immortality of youth secured the institutions framed by Napoleon against the weakness and corruption which at some period undermine all despotisms. The historian who has exhausted every term of praise upon the political system of the Consulate lived to declare, as Chief of the State himself, that the first need of France was the decentralisation of power.  [84]

[State policy of Bonaparte.]

After ten years of disquiet, it was impossible that any Government could be more welcome to the French nation than one which proclaimed itself the representative, not of party or of opinion, but of France itself. No section of the nation had won a triumph in the establishment of the Consulate; no section had suffered a defeat. In his own elevation Bonaparte announced the close of civil conflict. A Government had arisen which summoned all to its service which would employ all, reward all, reconcile all. The earliest measures of the First Consul exhibited the policy of reconciliation by which he hoped to rally the whole of France to his side. The law of hostages, under which hundreds of families were confined in retaliation for local Royalist disturbances, was repealed, and Bonaparte himself went to announce their liberty to the prisoners in the Temple. Great numbers of names were struck off the list of the emigrants, and the road to pardon was subsequently opened to all who had not actually served against their country. In the selection of his officers of State, Bonaparte showed the same desire to win men of all parties. Cambacérès, a regicide, was made Second Consul; Lebrun, an old official of Louis XVI., became his colleague. In the Ministries, in the Senate, and in the Council of State the nation saw men of proved ability chosen from all callings in life and from all political ranks. No Government of France had counted among its members so many names eminent for capacity and experience. One quality alone was indispensable, a readiness to serve and to obey. In that intellectual greatness which made the combination of all the forces of France a familiar thought in Bonaparte's mind, there was none of the moral generosity which could pardon opposition to himself, or tolerate energy acting under other auspices than his own. He desired to see authority in the best hands; he sought talent and promoted it, but on the understanding that it took its direction from himself. Outside this limit ability was his enemy, not his friend; and what could not be caressed or promoted was treated with tyrannical injustice. While Bonaparte boasted of the career that he had thrown open to talent, he suppressed the whole of the independent journalism of Paris, and banished Mme. de Stael, whose guests continued to converse, when they might not write, about liberty. Equally partial, equally calculated, was Bonaparte's indulgence towards the ancient enemies of the Revolution, the Royalists and the priests. He felt nothing of the old hatred of Paris towards the Vendean noble and the superstitious Breton; he offered his friendship to the stubborn Breton race, whose loyalty and piety he appreciated as good qualities in subjects; but failing their submission, he instructed his generals in the west of France to burn down their villages, and to set a price upon the heads of their chiefs. Justice, tolerance, good faith, were things which had no being for Bonaparte outside the circle of his instruments and allies.

[France ceases to excite democracy abroad, but promotes equality under monarchical systems.]

[Effect of Bonaparte's autocracy outside France.]

In the foreign relations of France it was not possible for the most unscrupulous will to carry aggression farther than it had been already carried; yet the elevation of Bonaparte deeply affected the fortunes of all those States whose lot depended upon France. It was not only that a mind accustomed to regard all human things as objects for its own disposal now directed an irresistible military force, but from the day when France submitted to Bonaparte, the political changes accompanying the advance of the French armies took a different character. Belgium and Holland, the Rhine Provinces, the Cisalpine, the Roman, and the Parthenopean Republics, had all received, under whatever circumstances of wrong, at least the forms of popular sovereignty. The reality of power may have belonged to French generals and commissioners; but, however insincerely uttered, the call to freedom excited hopes and aspirations which were not insincere themselves. The Italian festivals of emancipation, the trees of liberty, the rhetoric of patriotic assemblies, had betrayed little enough of the instinct for self-government; but they marked a separation from the past; and the period between the years 1796 and 1799 was in fact the birth-time of those hopes which have since been realised in the freedom and the unity of Italy. So long as France had her own tumultuous assemblies, her elections in the village and in the county-town, it was impossible for her to form republics beyond the Alps without introducing at least some germ of republican organisation and spirit. But when all power was concentrated in a single man, when the spoken and the written word became an offence against the State, when the commotion of the old municipalities was succeeded by the silence and the discipline of a body of clerks working round their chief, then the advance of French influence ceased to mean the support of popular forces against the Governments. The form which Bonaparte had given to France was the form which he intended for the clients of France. Hence in those communities which directly received the impress of the Consulate, as in Bavaria and the minor German States, authority, instead of being overthrown, was greatly strengthened. Bonaparte carried beyond the Rhine that portion of the spirit of the Revolution which he accepted at home, the suppression of privilege, the extinction of feudal rights, the reduction of all ranks to equality before the law, and the admission of all to the public service. But this levelling of the social order in the client-states of France, and the establishment of system and unity in the place of obsolete privilege, cleared the way not for the supremacy of the people, but for the supremacy of the Crown. The power which was taken away from corporations, from knights, and from ecclesiastics, was given, not to a popular Representative, but to Cabinet Ministers and officials ranged after the model of the official hierarchy of France. What the French had in the first epoch of their Revolution endeavoured to impart to Europe-the spirit of liberty and self-government-they had now renounced themselves. The belief in popular right, which made the difference between the changes of 1789 and those attempted by the Emperor Joseph, sank in the storms of the Revolution.

[Bonaparte legislates in the spirit of the reforming monarchs of the 18th century.]

Yet the statesmanship of Bonaparte, if it repelled the liberal and disinterested sentiment of 1789, was no mere cunning of a Corsican soldier, or exploit of mediæval genius born outside its age. Subject to the fullest gratification of his own most despotic or most malignant impulse, Bonaparte carried into his creations the ideas upon which the greatest European innovators before the French Revolution had based their work. What Frederick and Joseph had accomplished, or failed to accomplish, was realised in Western Germany when its Sovereigns became the clients of the First Consul. Bonaparte was no child of the French Revolution; he was the last and the greatest of the autocratic legislators who worked in an unfree age. Under his rule France lost what had seemed to be most its own; it most powerfully advanced the forms of progress common to itself and the rest of Europe. Bonaparte raised no population to liberty: in extinguishing privilege and abolishing the legal distinctions of birth, in levelling all personal and corporate authority beneath the single rule of the State, he prepared the way for a rational freedom, when, at a later day, the Government of the State should itself become the representative of the nation's will.

CHAPTER V.

Overtures of Bonaparte to Austria and England-The War continues-Massena besieged in Genoa-Moreau invades Southern Germany-Bonaparte crosses the St. Bernard, and descends in the rear of the Austrians-Battle of Marengo-Austrians retire behind the Mincio-Treaty between England and Austria-Austria continues the War-Battle of Hohenlinden-Peace of Lunéville-War between England and the Northern Maritime League-Battle of Copenhagen-Murder of Paul-End of the Maritime War-English Army enters Egypt-French defeated at Alexandria-They capitulate at Cairo and Alexandria-Preliminaries of Peace between England and France signed at London, followed by Peace of Amiens-Pitt's Irish Policy and his retirement-Debates on the Peace-Aggressions of Bonaparte during the Continental Peace-Holland, Italy, Switzerland-Settlement of Germany under French and Russian influence-Suppression of Ecclesiastical States and Free Cities-Its effects-Stein-France under the Consulate-The Civil Code-The Concordat.

[Overtures of Bonaparte to Austria and to England, 1799.]

The establishment of the Consulate gave France peace from the strife of parties. Peace from foreign warfare was not less desired by the nation; and although the First Consul himself was restlessly planning the next campaign, it belonged to his policy to represent himself as the mediator between France and Europe. Discarding the usual diplomatic forms, Bonaparte addressed letters in his own name to the Emperor Francis and to King George III., deploring the miseries inflicted by war upon nations naturally allied, and declaring his personal anxiety to enter upon negotiations for peace. The reply of Austria which was courteously worded, produced an offer on the part of Bonaparte to treat for peace upon the basis of the Treaty of Campo Formio. Such a proposal was the best evidence of Bonaparte's real intentions. Austria had re-conquered Lombardy, and driven the armies of the Republic from the Adige to within a few miles of Nice. To propose a peace which should merely restore the situation existing at the beginning of the war was pure irony. The Austrian Government accordingly declared itself unable to treat without the concurrence of its allies. The answer of England to the overtures of the First Consul was rough and defiant. It recounted the causes of war and distrust which precluded England from negotiating with a revolutionary Government; and, though not insisting on the restoration of the Bourbons as a condition of peace, it stated that no guarantee for the sincerity and good behaviour of France would be so acceptable to Great Britain as the recall of the ancient family.  [85]

Few State papers have been distinguished by worse faults of judgment than this English manifesto. It was intended to recommend the Bourbons to France as a means of procuring peace: it enabled Bonaparte to represent England as violently interfering with the rights of the French people, and the Bourbons as seeking their restoration at the hand of the enemy of their country. The answer made to Pitt's Government from Paris was such as one high-spirited nation which had recently expelled its rulers might address to another that had expelled its rulers a century before. France, it was said, had as good a right to dismiss an incapable dynasty as Great Britain. If Talleyrand's reply failed to convince King George that before restoring the Bourbons he ought to surrender his own throne to the Stuarts, it succeeded in transferring attention from the wrongs inflicted by France to the pretensions advanced by England. That it affected the actual course of events there is no reason to believe. The French Government was well acquainted with the real grounds of war possessed by England, in spite of the errors by which the British Cabinet weakened the statement of its cause. What the mass of the French people now thought, or did not think, had become a matter of very little importance.

[Situation of the Armies.]

[Moreau invades South Germany, April, 1800.]

The war continued. Winter and the early spring of 1800 passed in France amidst vigorous but concealed preparations for the campaign which was to drive the Austrians from Italy. In Piedmont the Austrians spent months in inaction, which might have given them Genoa and completed the conquest of Italy before Bonaparte's army could take the field. It was not until the beginning of April that Melas, their general, assailed the French positions on the Genoese Apennines; a fortnight more was spent in mountain warfare before Massena, who now held the French command, found himself shut up in Genoa and blockaded by land and sea. The army which Bonaparte was about to lead into Italy lay in between Dijon and Geneva, awaiting the arrival of the First Consul. On the Rhine, from Strasburg to Schaffhausen, a force of 100,000 men was ready to cross into Germany under the command of Moreau, who was charged with the task of pushing the Austrians back from the Upper Danube, and so rendering any attack through Switzerland upon the communications of Bonaparte's Italian force impossible. Moreau's army was the first to move. An Austrian force, not inferior to Moreau's own, lay within the bend of the Rhine that covers Baden and Würtemberg. Moreau crossed the Rhine at various points, and by a succession of ingenious manoeuvres led his adversary, Kray, to occupy all the roads through the Black Forest except those by which the northern divisions of the French were actually passing. A series of engagements, conspicuous for the skill of the French general and the courage of the defeated Austrians, gave Moreau possession of the country south of the Danube as far as Ulm, where Kray took refuge in his entrenched camp. Beyond this point Moreau's instructions forbade him to advance. His task was fulfilled by the severance of the Austrian army from the roads into Italy.

[Bonaparte crosses the Alps, May, 1800.]

Bonaparte's own army was now in motion. Its destination was still secret; its very existence was doubted by the Austrian generals. On the 8th of May the First Consul himself arrived at Geneva, and assumed the command. The campaign upon which this army was now entering was designed by Bonaparte to surpass everything that Europe had hitherto seen most striking in war. The feats of Massena and Suvaroff in the Alps had filled his imagination with mountain warfare. A victory over nature more imposing than theirs might, in the present position of the Austrian forces in Lombardy, be made the prelude to a victory in the field without a parallel in its effects upon the enemy. Instead of relieving Genoa by an advance along the coast-road, Bonaparte intended to march across the Alps and to descend in the rear of the Austrians. A single defeat would then cut the Austrians off from their communications with Mantua, and result either in the capitulation of their army or in the evacuation of the whole of the country that they had won, Bonaparte led his army into the mountains. The pass of the Great St. Bernard, though not a carriage-road, offered little difficulty to a commander supplied with every resource of engineering material and skill; and by this road the army crossed the Alps. The cannons were taken from their carriages and dragged up the mountain in hollowed trees; thousands of mules transported the ammunition and supplies; workshops for repairs were established on either slope of the mountain; and in the Monastery of St. Bernard there were stores collected sufficient to feed the soldiers as they reached the summit during six successive days (May 15-20). The passage of the St. Bernard was a triumph of organisation, foresight, and good management; as a military exploit it involved none of the danger, none of the suffering, none of the hazard, which gave such interest to the campaign of Massena and Suvaroff.

[Bonaparte cuts off the Austrian army from Eastern Lombardy.]

Bonaparte had rightly calculated upon the unreadiness of his enemy. The advanced guard of the French army poured down the valley of the Dora-Baltea upon the scanty Austrian detachments at Ivrea and Chiusella, before Melas, who had in vain been warned of the departure of the French from Geneva, arrived with a few thousand men at Turin to dispute the entrance into Italy. Melas himself, on the opening of the campaign, had followed a French division to Nice, leaving General Ott in charge of the army investing Genoa. On reaching Turin he discovered the full extent of his peril, and sent orders to Ott to raise the siege of Genoa and to join him with every regiment that he could collect. Ott, however, was unwilling to abandon the prey at this moment falling into his grasp. He remained stationary till the 5th of June, when Massena, reduced to the most cruel extremities by famine, was forced to surrender Genoa to the besiegers. But his obstinate endurance had the full effect of a battle won. Ott's delay rendered Melas powerless to hinder the movements of Bonaparte, when, instead of marching upon Genoa, as both French and Austrians expected him to do, he turned eastward, and thrust his army between the Austrians and their own fortresses. Bonaparte himself entered Milan (June 2); Lannes and Murat were sent to seize the bridges over the Po and the Adda. The Austrian detachment guarding Piacenza was overpowered; the communications of Melas with the country north of the Powere completely severed. Nothing remained for the Austrian commander but to break through the French or to make his escape to Genoa.

[Battle of Marengo, June 14, 1800.]

[Conditions of Armistice.]

The French centre was now at Stradella, half-way between Piacenza and Alessandria. Melas was at length joined by Ott at Alessandria, but so scattered were the Austrian forces, that out of 80,000 men Melas had not more than 33,000 at his command. Bonaparte's forces were equal in number; his only fear was that Melas might use his last line of retreat, and escape to Genoa without an engagement. The Austrian general, however, who had shared with Suvaroff the triumph over Joubert at Novi, resolved to stake everything upon a pitched battle. He awaited Bonaparte's approach at Alessandria. On the 12th of June Bonaparte advanced westward from Stradella. His anxiety lest Melas might be escaping from his hands increased with every hour of the march that brought him no tidings of the enemy; and on the 13th, when his advanced guard had come almost up to the walls of Alessandria without seeing an enemy, he could bear the suspense no longer, and ordered Desaix to march southward towards Novi and hold the road to Genoa. Desaix led off his division. Early the next morning the whole army of Melas issued from Alessandria, and threw itself upon the weakened line of the French at Marengo. The attack carried everything before it: at the end of seven hours' fighting, Melas, exhausted by his personal exertions, returned into Alessandria, and sent out tidings of a complete victory. It was at this moment that Desaix, who had turned at the sound of the cannon, appeared on the field, and declared that, although one battle had been lost, another might be won. A sudden cavalry-charge struck panic into the Austrians, who believed the battle ended and the foe overthrown. Whole brigades threw down their arms and fled; and ere the day closed a mass of fugitives, cavalry and infantry, thronging over the marshes of the Bormida, was all that remained of the victorious Austrian centre. The suddenness of the disaster, the desperate position of the army, cut off from its communications, overthrew the mind of Melas, and he agreed to an armistice more fatal than an unconditional surrender. The Austrians retired behind the Mincio, and abandoned to the French every fortress in Northern Italy that lay west of that river. A single battle had produced the result of a campaign of victories and sieges. Marengo was the most brilliant in conception of all Bonaparte's triumphs. If in its execution the genius of the great commander had for a moment failed him, no mention of the long hours of peril and confusion was allowed to obscure the splendour of Bonaparte's victory. Every document was altered or suppressed which contained a report of the real facts of the battle. The descriptions given to the French nation claimed only new homage to the First Consul's invincible genius and power.  [86]

[Austria continues the war.]

At Vienna the military situation was viewed more calmly than in Melas' camp. The conditions of the armistice were generally condemned, and any sudden change in the policy of Austria was prevented by a treaty with England, binding Austria, in return for British subsidies, and for a secret promise of part of Piedmont, to make no separate peace with France before the end of February, 1801. This treaty was signed a few hours before the arrival of the news of Marengo. It was the work of Thugut, who still maintained his influence over the Emperor, in spite of growing unpopularity and almost universal opposition. Public opinion, however, forced the Emperor at least to take steps for ascertaining the French terms of peace. An envoy was sent to Paris; and, as there could be no peace without the consent of England, conferences were held with the object of establishing a naval armistice between England and France. England, however, refused the concessions demanded by the First Consul; and the negotiations were broken off in September. But this interval of three months had weakened the authority of the Minister and stimulated the intrigues which at every great crisis paralysed the action of Austria. At length, while Thugut was receiving the subsidies of Great Britain and arranging for the most vigorous prosecution of the war, the Emperor, concealing the transaction from his Minister, purchased a new armistice by the surrender of the fortresses of Ulm and Ingolstadt to Moreau's army.  [87]

[Battle of Hohenlinden, Dec. 3, 1800.]

A letter written by Thugut after a council held on the 25th of September gives some indication of the stormy scene which then passed in the Emperor's presence. Thugut tendered his resignation, which was accepted; and Lehrbach, the author of the new armistice, was placed in office. But the reproaches of the British ambassador forced the weak Emperor to rescind this appointment on the day after it had been published to the world. There was no one in Vienna capable of filling the vacant post; and after a short interval the old Minister resumed the duties of his office, without, however, openly resuming the title. The remainder of the armistice was employed in strengthening the force opposed to Moreau, who now received orders to advance upon Vienna. The Archduke John, a royal strategist of eighteen, was furnished with a plan for surrounding the French army and cutting it off from its communications. Moreau lay upon the Isar; the Austrians held the line of the Inn. On the termination of the armistice the Austrians advanced and made some devious marches in pursuance of the Archduke's enterprise, until a general confusion, attributed to the weather, caused them to abandon their manoeuvres and move straight against the enemy. On the 3rd of December the Austrians plunged into the snow-blocked roads of the Forest of Hohenlinden, believing that they had nothing near them but the rear-guard of a retiring French division. Moreau waited until they had reached the heart of the forest, and then fell upon them with his whole force in front, in flank, and in the rear. The defeat of the Austrians was overwhelming. What remained of the war was rather a chase than a struggle. Moreau successively crossed the Inn, the Salza, and the Traun; and on December 25th the Emperor, seeing that no effort of Pitt could keep Moreau out of Vienna, accepted an armistice at Steyer, and agreed to treat for peace without reference to Great Britain.

[Peace of Lunéville, Feb. 9, 1801.]

Defeats on the Mincio, announced during the following days, increased the necessity for peace. Thugut was finally removed from power. Some resistance was offered to the conditions proposed by Bonaparte, but these were directed more to the establishment of French influence in Germany than to the humiliation of the House of Hapsburg. Little was taken from Austria but what she had surrendered at Campo Formio. It was not by the cession of Italian or Slavonic provinces that the Government of Vienna paid for Marengo and Hohenlinden, but at the cost of that divided German race whose misfortune it was to have for its head a sovereign whose interests in the Empire and in Germany were among the least of all his interests. The Peace of Lunéville,  [88] concluded between France and the Emperor on the 9th of February, 1801, without even a reference to the Diet of the Empire, placed the minor States of Germany at the mercy of the French Republic. It left to the House of Hapsburg the Venetian territory which it had gained in 1797; it required no reduction of the Hapsburg influence in Italy beyond the abdication of the Grand Duke of Tuscany; but it ceded to France, without the disguises of 1797, the German provinces west of the Rhine, and it formally bound the Empire to compensate the dispossessed lay Sovereigns in such a manner as should be approved by France. The French Republic was thus made arbiter, as a matter of right, in the rearrangement of the maimed and shattered Empire. Even the Grand Duke of Tuscany, like his predecessor in ejection, the Duke of Modena, was to receive some portion of the German race for his subjects, in compensation for the Italians taken from him. To such a pass had political disunion brought a nation which at that time could show the greatest names in Europe in letters, in science, and in art.

[Peace with Naples.]

[Russia turns against England.]

[Northern Maritime League, Dec., 1800.]

Austria having succumbed, the Court of Naples, which had been the first of the Allies to declare war, was left at the mercy of Bonaparte. Its cruelties and tyranny called for severe punishment; but the intercession of the Czar kept the Bourbons upon the throne, and Naples received peace upon no harder condition than the exclusion of English vessels from its ports. England was now left alone in its struggle with the French Republic. Nor was it any longer to be a struggle only against France and its dependencies. The rigour with which the English Government had used its superiority at sea, combined with the folly which it had shown in the Anglo-Russian attack upon Holland, raised against it a Maritime League under the leadership of a Power which England had offended as a neutral and exasperated as an ally. Since the pitiful Dutch campaign, the Czar had transferred to Great Britain the hatred which he had hitherto borne to France. The occasion was skilfully used by Bonaparte, to whom, as a soldier, the Czar felt less repugnance than to the Government of advocates and contractors which he had attacked in 1799. The First Consul restored without ransom several thousands of Russian prisoners, for whom the Austrians and the English had refused to give up Frenchmen in exchange, and followed up this advance by proposing that the guardianship of Malta, which was now blockaded by the English, should be given to the Czar. Paul had caused himself to be made Grand Master of the Maltese Order of St. John of Jerusalem. His vanity was touched by Bonaparte's proposal, and a friendly relation was established between the French and Russian Governments. England, on the other hand, refused to place Malta under Russian guardianship, either before or after its surrender. This completed the breach between the Courts of London and St. Petersburg. The Czar seized all the English vessels in his ports and imprisoned their crews (Sept. 9). A difference of long standing existed between England and the Northern Maritime Powers, which was capable at any moment of being made a cause of war. The rights exercised over neutral vessels by English ships in time of hostilities, though good in international law, were so oppressive that, at the time of the American rebellion, the Northern Powers had formed a league, known as the Armed Neutrality, for the purpose of resisting by force the interference of the English with neutral merchantmen upon the high seas. Since the outbreak of war with France, English vessels had again pushed the rights of belligerents to extremes. The Armed Neutrality of 1780 was accordingly revived under the auspices of the Czar. The League was signed on the 16th of December, 1800, by Russia, Sweden, and Denmark. Some days later Prussia gave in its adhesion.  [89]

[Points at issue.]

The points at issue between Great Britain and the Neutrals were such as arise between a great naval Power intent upon ruining its adversary and that larger part of the world which remains at peace and desires to carry on its trade with as little obstruction as possible. It was admitted on all sides that a belligerent may search a neutral vessel in order to ascertain that it is not conveying contraband of war, and that a neutral vessel, attempting to enter a blockaded port, renders itself liable to forfeiture; but beyond these two points everything was in dispute. A Danish ship conveys a cargo of wine from a Bordeaux merchant to his agent in New York. Is the wine liable to be seized in the mid-Atlantic by an English cruiser, to the destruction of the Danish carrying-trade, or is the Danish flag to protect French property from a Power whose naval superiority makes capture upon the high seas its principal means of offence? England announces that a French port is in a state of blockade. Is a Swedish vessel, stopped while making for the port in question, to be considered a lawful prize, when, if it had reached the port, it would as a matter of fact have found no real blockade in existence? A Russian cargo of hemp, pitch, and timber is intercepted by an English vessel on its way to an open port in France. Is the staple produce of the Russian Empire to lose its market as contraband of war? Or is an English man-of-war to allow material to pass into France, without which the repair of French vessels of war would be impossible?

[War between England and the Northern Maritime Powers, Jan., 1801.]

These were the questions raised as often as a firm of shipowners in a neutral country saw their vessel come back into port cleared of its cargo, or heard that it was lying in the Thames awaiting the judgment of the Admiralty Court. Great Britain claimed the right to seize all French property, in whatever vessel it might be sailing, and to confiscate, as contraband of war, not only muskets, gunpowder, and cannon, but wheat, on which the provisioning of armies depended, and hemp, pitch, iron, and timber, out of which the navies of her adversary were formed. The Neutrals, on the other hand, demanded that a neutral flag should give safe passage to all goods on board, not being contraband of war; that the presence of a vessel of State as convoy should exempt merchantmen from search; that no port should be considered in a state of blockade unless a competent blockading force was actually in front of it; and that contraband of war should include no other stores than those directly available for battle. Considerations of reason and equity may be urged in support of every possible theory of the rights of belligerents and neutrals; but the theory of every nation has, as a matter of fact, been that which at the time accorded with its own interests. When a long era of peace had familiarised Great Britain with the idea that in the future struggles of Europe it was more likely to be a spectator than a belligerent, Great Britain accepted the Neutrals' theory of international law at the Congress of Paris in 1856; but in 1801, when the lot of England seemed to be eternal warfare, any limitation of the rights of a belligerent appeared to every English jurist to contradict the first principles of reason. Better to add a general maritime war to the existing difficulties of the country than to abandon the exercise of its naval superiority in crippling the commerce of an adversary. The Declaration of armed Neutrality, announcing the intention of the Allied Powers to resist the seizure of French goods on board their own merchantmen, was treated in this country as a declaration of war. The Government laid an embargo upon all vessels of the allied neutrals lying in English ports (Jan. 14th, 1801), and issued a swarm of privateers against the trading ships making for the Baltic. Negotiations failed to lower the demands of either side, and England prepared to deal with the navies of Russia, Denmark, Sweden, and Prussia.

[Battle of Copenhagen, April 2, 1801.]

At the moment, the concentrated naval strength of England made it more than a match for its adversaries. A fleet of seventeen ships of the line sailed from Yarmouth on the 12th of March, under the command of Parker and Nelson, with orders to coerce the Danes and to prevent the junction of the confederate navies. The fleet reached the Sound. The Swedish batteries commanding the Sound failed to open fire. Nelson kept to the eastern side of the channel, and brought his ships safely past the storm of shot poured upon them from the Danish guns at Elsinore. He appeared before Copenhagen at mid-day on the 30th of March. Preparations for resistance were made by the Danes with extraordinary spirit and resolution. The whole population of Copenhagen volunteered for service on the ships, the forts, and the floating batteries. Two days were spent by the English in exploring the shallows of the channel; on the morning of the 2nd of April Nelson led his ships into action in front of the harbour. Three ran aground; the Danish fire from land and sea was so violent that after some hours Admiral Parker, who watched the engagement from the mid-channel, gave the signal of recall. Nelson laughed at the signal, and continued the battle. In another hour the six Danish men-of-war and the whole of the floating batteries were disabled or sunk. The English themselves had suffered most severely from a resistance more skilful and more determined than anything that they had experienced from the French, and Nelson gladly offered a truce as soon as his own victory was assured. The truce was followed by negotiation, and the negotiation by an armistice for fourteen weeks, a term which Nelson considered sufficient to enable him to visit and to overthrow the navies of Sweden and Russia.

[Murder of Paul, March 23.]

[Peace between England and the Northern Powers.]

But an event had already occurred more momentous in its bearing upon the Northern Confederacy than the battle of Copenhagen itself. On the night of the 23rd of March the Czar of Russia was assassinated in his palace. Paul's tyrannical violence, and his caprice verging upon insanity, had exhausted the patience of a court acquainted with no mode of remonstrance but homicide. Blood-stained hands brought to the Grand Duke Alexander the crown which he had consented to receive after a pacific abdication. Alexander immediately reversed the policy of his father, and sent friendly communications both to the Government at London and to the commander of the British fleet in the Baltic. The maintenance of commerce with England was in fact more important to Russia than the protection of its carrying trade. Nelson's attack was averted. A compromise was made between the two Governments, which saved Russia's interests, without depriving England of its chief rights against France. The principles of the Armed Neutrality were abandoned by the Government of St. Petersburg in so far as they related to the protection of an enemy's goods by the neutral flag. Great Britain continued to seize French merchandise on board whatever craft it might be found; but it was stipulated that the presence of a ship of war should exempt neutral vessels from search by privateers, and that no port should be considered as in a state of blockade unless a reasonable blockading force was actually in front of it. The articles condemned as contraband were so limited as not to include the flax, hemp, and timber, on whose export the commerce of Russia depended. With these concessions the Czar was easily brought to declare Russia again neutral. The minor Powers of the Baltic followed the example of St. Petersburg; and the naval confederacy which had threatened to turn the balance in the conflict between England and the French Republic left its only trace in the undeserved suffering of Denmark.

[Affairs in Egypt.]

Eight years of warfare had left France unassailable in Western Europe, and England in command of every sea. No Continental armies could any longer be raised by British subsidies: the navies of the Baltic, with which Bonaparte had hoped to meet England on the seas, lay at peace in their ports. Egypt was now the only arena remaining where French and English combatants could meet, and the dissolution of the Northern Confederacy had determined the fate of Egypt by leaving England in undisputed command of the approach to Egypt by sea. The French army, vainly expecting reinforcements, and attacked by the Turks from the east, was caught in a trap. Soon after the departure of Bonaparte from Alexandria, his successor, General Kleber, had addressed a report to the Directory, describing the miserable condition of the force which Bonaparte had chosen to abandon. The report was intercepted by the English, and the Government immediately determined to accept no capitulation which did not surrender the whole of the French army as prisoners of war. An order to this effect was sent to the Mediterranean. Before, however, the order reached Sir Sidney Smith, the English admiral co-operating with the Turks, an agreement had been already signed by him at El Arish, granting Kleber's army a free return to France (Feb. 24, 1800). After Kleber, in fulfilment of the conditions of the treaty, had withdrawn his troops from certain positions, Sir Sidney Smith found himself compelled to inform the French General that in the negotiations of El Arish he had exceeded his powers, and that the British Government insisted upon the surrender of the French forces. Kleber replied by instantly giving battle to the Turks at Heliopolis, and putting to the rout an army six times as numerous as his own. The position of the French seemed to be growing stronger in Egypt, and the prospect of a Turkish re-conquest more doubtful, when the dagger of a fanatic robbed the French of their able chief, and transferred the command to General Menou, one of the very few French officers of marked incapacity who held command at any time during the war. The British Government, as soon as it learnt what had taken place between Kleber and Sir Sidney Smith, declared itself willing to be bound by the convention of El Arish. The offer was, however, rejected by the French. It was clear that the Turks could never end the war by themselves; and the British Ministry at last came to understand that Egypt must be re-conquered by English arms.

[English army lands in Egypt, March, 1801.]

[French capitulate at Cairo, June 27, 1801.]

[And at Alexandria, Aug. 30.]

On the 8th of March, 1801, a corps of 17,000 men, led by Sir Ralph Abercromby, landed at Aboukir Bay. According to the plan of the British Government, Abercromby's attack was to be supported by a Turkish corps from Syria, and by an Anglo-Indian division brought from Ceylon to Kosseir, on the Red Sea. The Turks and the Indian troops were, however, behind their time, and Abercromby opened the campaign alone. Menou had still 27,000 troops at his disposal. Had he moved up with the whole of his army from Cairo, he might have destroyed the English immediately after their landing. Instead of doing so, he allowed weak isolated detachments of the French to sink before superior numbers. The English had already gained confidence of victory when Menou advanced in some force in order to give battle in front of Alexandria. The decisive engagement took place on the 21st of March. The French were completely defeated. Menou, however, still refused to concentrate his forces; and in the course of a few weeks 13,000 French troops which had been left behind at Cairo were cut off from communication with the rest of the army. A series of attempts made by Admiral Ganteaume to land reinforcements from France ended fruitlessly. Towards the end of June the arrival of a Turkish force enabled the English to surround the French in Cairo. The circuit of the works was too large to be successfully defended; on the other hand, the English were without the heavy artillery necessary for a siege. Under these circumstances the terms which had originally been offered at El Arish were again proposed to General Belliard for himself and the army of Cairo. They were accepted, and Cairo was surrendered to the English on condition that the garrison should be conveyed back to France (June 27). Soon after the capitulation General Baird reached Lower Egypt with an Anglo-Indian division. Menou with the remainder of the French army was now shut up in Alexandria. His forts and outworks were successively carried; his flotilla was destroyed; and when all hope of support from France had been abandoned, the army of Alexandria, which formed the remnant of the troops with which Bonaparte had won his earliest victories in Italy, found itself compelled to surrender the last stronghold of the French in Egypt (Aug. 30). It was the first important success which had been gained by English soldiers over the troops of the Republic; the first campaign in which English generalship had permitted the army to show itself in its true quality.

[Negotiations for peace.]

[Preliminaries of London, Oct. 1, 1801.]

[Peace of Amiens, March 27, 1802.]

Peace was now at hand. Soon after the Treaty of Lunéville had withdrawn Austria from the war, unofficial negotiations had begun between the Governments of Great Britain and France. The object with which Pitt had entered upon the war, the maintenance of the old European system against the aggression of France, was now seen to be one which England must abandon. England had borne its share in the defence of the Continent. If the Continental Powers could no longer resist the ascendancy of a single State, England could not struggle for the Balance of Power alone. The negotiations of 1801 had little in common with those of 1796. Belgium, which had been the burden of all Pitt's earlier despatches, no longer figured as an object of contention. The frontier of the Rhine, with the virtual possession of Holland and Northern Italy, under the title of the Batavian, Ligurian, and Cisalpine Republics, was tacitly conceded to France. In place of the restoration of the Netherlands, the negotiators of 1801 argued about the disposal of Egypt, of Malta, and of the colonies which Great Britain had conquered from France and its allies. Events decided the fate of Egypt. The restoration of Malta to the Knights of St. John was strenuously demanded by France, and not refused by England. It was in relation to the colonial claims of France that the two Governments found it most difficult to agree. Great Britain, which had lost no territory itself, had conquered nearly all the Asiatic and Atlantic colonies of the French Republic and of its Dutch and Spanish allies. In return for the restoration of Ceylon, the Cape of Good Hope, Guiana, Trinidad, and various East and West Indian settlements, France had nothing to offer to Great Britain but peace. If peace, however, was to be made, the only possible settlement was by means of a compromise; and it was finally agreed that England should retain Ceylon and Trinidad, and restore the rest of the colonies which it had taken from France, Spain, and Holland. Preliminaries of peace embodying these conditions were signed at London on the 1st of October, 1801. Hostilities ceased; but an interval of several months between the preliminary agreement and the conclusion of the final treaty was employed by Bonaparte in new usurpations upon the Continent, to which he forced the British Government to lend a kind of sanction in the continuance of the negotiations. The Government, though discontented, was unwilling to treat these acts as new occasions of war. The conferences were at length brought to a close, and the definitive treaty between France and Great Britain was signed at Amiens on the 27th of March, 1802.  [90]

[Pitt's retirement. Its cause.]

[Union of Ireland and Great Britain, 1800.]

The Minister who, since the first outbreak of war, had so resolutely struggled for the freedom of Europe, was no longer in power when Great Britain entered into negotiations with the First Consul. In the same week that Austria signed the Peace of Lunéville, Pitt had retired from office. The catastrophe which dissolved his last Continental alliance may possibly have disposed Pitt to make way for men who could treat for peace with a better grace than himself, but the immediate cause of his retirement was an affair of internal policy. Among the few important domestic measures which Pitt had not sacrificed to foreign warfare was a project for the Legislative Union of Great Britain and Ireland. Ireland had up to this time possessed a Parliament nominally independent of that of Great Britain. Its population, however, was too much divided to create a really national government; and, even if the internal conditions of the country had been better, the practical sovereignty of Great Britain must at that time have prevented the Parliament of Dublin from being more than an agency of ministerial corruption. It was the desire of Pitt to give to Ireland, in the place of a fictitious independence, that real participation in the political life of Great Britain which has more than recompensed Scotland and Wales for the loss of separate nationality. As an earnest of legislative justice, Pitt gave hopes to the leaders of the Irish Catholic party that the disabilities which excluded Roman Catholics from the House of Commons and from many offices in the public service would be no longer maintained. On this understanding the Catholics of Ireland abstained from offering to Pitt's project a resistance which would probably have led to its failure. A majority of members in the Protestant Parliament of Dublin accepted the price which the Ministry offered for their votes. A series of resolutions in favour of the Legislative Union of the two countries was transmitted to England in the spring of 1800; the English Parliament passed the Act of Union in the same summer; and the first United Parliament of Great Britain and Ireland assembled in London at the beginning of the year 1801.

[Pitt desires to emancipate the Catholics.]

[Pitt resigns Feb. 1801.]

[Addington Minister.]

Pitt now prepared to fulfil his virtual promise to the Irish Catholics. A measure obliterating the ancient lines of civil and religious enmity, and calling to public life a class hitherto treated as alien and hostile to the State, would have been in true consonance with all that was best in Pitt's own statesmanship. But the ignorant bigotry of King George III. was excited against him by men who hated every act of justice or tolerance to Roman Catholics; and it proved of greater force than the genius of the Minister. The old threat of the King's personal enmity was publicly addressed to Pitt's colleague, Dundas, when the proposal for Catholic emancipation was under discussion in the Cabinet; and, with a just regard for his own dignity, Pitt withdrew from office (Feb. 5, 1801), unable to influence a Sovereign who believed his soul to be staked on the letter of the Coronation Oath. The ablest members of Pitt's government, Grenville, Dundas, and Windham, retired with their leader. Addington, Speaker of the House of Commons, became Prime Minister, with colleagues as undistinguished as himself. It was under the government of Addington that the negotiations were begun which resulted in the signature of Preliminaries of Peace in October 1801.

[The Peace of 1801.]

Pitt himself supported the new Ministry in their policy of peace; Grenville, lately Pitt's Foreign Minister, unsparingly condemned both the cession of the conquered colonies and the policy of granting France peace on any terms whatever. Viewed by the light of our own knowledge of events, the Peace of 1801 appears no more than an unprofitable break in an inevitable war; and perhaps even then the signs of Bonaparte's ambition justified those who, like Grenville, urged the nation to give no truce to France, and to trust to Bonaparte's own injustice to raise us up allies upon the Continent. But, for the moment, peace seemed at least worth a trial. The modes of prosecuting a war of offence were exhausted; the cost of the national defence remained the same. There were no more navies to destroy, no more colonies to seize; the sole means of injuring the enemy was by blockading his ports, and depriving him of his maritime commerce. On the other hand, the possibility of a French invasion required the maintenance of an enormous army and militia in England, and prevented any great reduction in the expenses of the war, which had already added two hundred millions to the National Debt. Nothing was lost by making peace, except certain colonies and military positions which few were anxious to retain. The argument that England could at any moment recover what she now surrendered was indeed a far sounder one than most of those which went to prove that the positions in question were of no real service. Yet even on the latter point there was no want of high authority. It was Nelson himself who assured the House of Lords that neither Malta nor the Cape of Good Hope could ever be of importance to Great Britain.  [91] In the face of such testimony, the men who lamented that England should allow the adversary to recover any lost ground in the midst of a struggle for life or death, passed for obstinate fanatics. The Legislature reflected the general feeling of the nation; and the policy of the Government was confirmed in the Lords and the Commons by majorities of ten to one.

[Aggressions of Bonaparte during the Continental peace.]

[Holland, Sept., 1801.]

Although the Ministry of Addington had acted with energy both in Egypt and in the Baltic, it was generally felt that Pitt's retirement marked the surrender of that resolute policy which had guided England since 1793. When once the Preliminaries of Peace had been signed in London, Bonaparte rightly judged that Addington would waive many just causes of complaint, rather than break off the negotiations which were to convert the Preliminaries into a definitive treaty. Accordingly, in his instructions to Joseph Bonaparte, who represented France at the conferences held at Amiens, the First Consul wrote, through Talleyrand, as follows:-"You are forbidden to entertain any proposition relating to the King of Sardinia, or to the Stadtholder, or to the internal affairs of Batavia, of Helvetia, or the Republic of Italy. None of these subjects have anything to do with the discussions of England." The list of subjects excluded from the consideration of England was the list of aggressions by which Bonaparte intended to fill up the interval of Continental peace. In the Treaty of Lunéville, the independence of the newly-established republics in Holland, Switzerland, and Italy had been recognised by France. The restoration of Piedmont to the House of Savoy had been the condition on which the Czar made peace. But on every one of these points the engagements of France were made only to be broken. So far from bringing independence to the client-republics of France, the peace of Lunéville was but the introduction to a series of changes which brought these States directly into the hands of the First Consul. The establishment of absolute government in France itself entailed a corresponding change in each of its dependencies, and the creation of an executive which should accept the First Consul's orders with as little question as the Prefect of a French department. Holland received its new constitution while France was still at war with England. The existing Government and Legislature of the Batavian Republic were dissolved (Sept., 1801), and replaced by a council of twelve persons, each holding the office of President in turn for a period of three months, and by a legislature of thirty-five, which met only for a few days in the year. The power given to the new President during his office was enough, and not more than enough, to make him an effective servant: a three-months' Minister and an Assembly that met and parted at the word of command were not likely to enter into serious rivalry with the First Consul. The Dutch peaceably accepted the constitution thus forced upon them; they possessed no means of resistance, and their affairs excited but little interest upon the Continent.

[Bonaparte made President of the Italian Republic, Jan., 1802.]

[Piedmont annexed to France, Sept., 1802.]

Far more striking was the revolution next effected by the First Consul. In obedience to orders sent from Paris to the Legislature of the Cisalpine Republic, a body of four hundred and fifty Italian representatives crossed the Alps in the middle of winter in order to meet the First Consul at Lyons, and to deliberate upon a constitution for the Cisalpine Republic. The constitution had, as a matter of fact, been drawn up by Talleyrand, and sent to the Legislature at Milan some months before. But it was not for the sake of Italy that its representatives were collected at Lyons, in the presence of the First Consul, with every circumstance of national solemnity. It was the most striking homage which Bonaparte could exact from a foreign race in the face of all France; it was the testimony that other lands besides France desired Bonaparte to be their sovereign. When all the minor offices in the new Cisalpine Constitution had been filled, the Italians learnt that the real object of the convocation was to place the sceptre in Bonaparte's hands. They accepted the part which they found themselves forced to play, and offered to the First Consul the presidency of the Cisalpine State (Jan. 25, 1802). Unlike the French Consulate, the chief magistracy in the new Cisalpine Constitution might be prolonged beyond the term of ten years. Bonaparte had practically won the Crown of Lombardy; and he had given to France the example of a submission more unqualified than its own. A single phrase rewarded the people who had thus placed themselves in his hands. The Cisalpine Republic was allowed to assume the name of Italian Republic. The new title indicated the national hopes which had sprung up in Italy during the past ten years; it indicated no real desire on the part of Bonaparte to form either a free or a united Italian nation. In the Cisalpine State itself, although a good administration and the extinction of feudal privileges made Bonaparte's government acceptable, patriots who asked for freedom ran the risk of exile or imprisonment. What further influence was exercised by France upon Italian soil was not employed for the consolidation of Italy. Tuscany was bestowed by Bonaparte upon the Spanish Prince of Parma, and controlled by agents of the First Consul. Piedmont, which had long been governed by French generals, was at length definitely annexed to France.

[Intervention in Switzerland.]

[Bonaparte Mediator of the Helvetic League, Oct. 4, 1802.]

Switzerland had not, like the Cisalpine Republic, derived its liberty from the victories of French armies, nor could Bonaparte claim the presidency of the Helvetic State under the title of its founder. The struggles of the Swiss parties, however, placed the country at the mercy of France. Since the expulsion of the Austrians by Massena in 1799, the antagonism between the Democrats of the town and the Federalists of the Forest Cantons had broken out afresh. A French army still occupied Switzerland; the Minister of the First Consul received instructions to interfere with all parties and consolidate none. In the autumn of 1801, the Federalists were permitted to dissolve the central Helvetic Government, which had been created by the Directory in 1798. One change followed another, until, on the 19th of May, 1802, a second Constitution was proclaimed, based, like that of 1798, on centralising and democratic principles, and almost extinguishing the old local independence of the members of the Swiss League. No sooner had French partisans created this Constitution, which could only be maintained by force against the hostility of Berne and the Forest Cantons, than the French army quitted Switzerland. Civil war instantly broke out, and in the course of a few weeks the Government established by the French had lost all Switzerland except the Pays de Vaud. This was the crisis for which Bonaparte had been waiting. On the 4th of October a proclamation appeared at Lausanne, announcing that the First Consul had accepted the office of Mediator of the Helvetic League. A French army entered Switzerland. Fifty-six deputies from the cantons were summoned to Paris; and, in the beginning of 1803, a new Constitution, which left the central Government powerless in the hands of France and reduced the national sovereignty to cantonal self-administration, placed Switzerland on a level with the Batavian and the Cisalpine dependencies of Bonaparte. The Rhone Valley, with the mountains crossed by the new road over the Simplon, was converted into a separate republic under the title of La Valais. The new chief magistrate of the Helvetic Confederacy entered upon his office with a pension paid out of Bonaparte's secret police fund.

[Settlement of Germany.]

Such was the nature of the independence which the Peace of Lunéville gave to Holland, to Northern Italy, and to Switzerland. The re-organisation of Germany, which was provided for by the same treaty, affected larger interests, and left more permanent traces upon European history. In the provinces ceded to France lay the territory of the ancient ecclesiastical princes of the empire, the Electors of Mainz, Cologne, and Trèves; but, besides these spiritual sovereigns, a variety of secular potentates, ranging from the Elector Palatine, with 600,000 subjects, to the Prince of Wiedrunkel, with a single village, owned territory upon the left bank of the Rhine; and for the dispossessed lay princes new territories had now to be formed by the destruction of other ecclesiastical States in the interior of Germany. Affairs returned to the state in which they had stood in 1798, and the comedy of Rastadt was renewed at the point where it had been broken off: the only difference was that the French statesmen who controlled the partition of ecclesiastical Germany now remained in Paris, instead of coming to the Rhine, to run the risk of being murdered by Austrian hussars. Scarcely was the Treaty of Lunéville signed when the whole company of intriguers who had touted at Rastadt posted off to the French capital with their maps and their money-bags, the keener for the work when it became known that by common consent the Free Cities of the Empire were now to be thrown into the spoil. Talleyrand and his confidant Mathieu had no occasion to ask for bribes, or to manoeuvre for the position of arbiters in Germany. They were overwhelmed with importunities. Solemn diplomatists of the old school toiled up four flights of stairs to the office of the needy secretary, or danced attendance at the parties of the witty Minister. They hugged Talleyrand's poodle; they vied with one another in gaining a smile from the child whom he brought up at his house.  [92] The shrewder of them fortified their attentions with solid bargains, and made it their principal care not to be outbidden at the auction. Thus the game was kept up as long as there was a bishopric or a city in the market.

This was the real process of the German re-organisation. A pretended one was meanwhile enacted by the Diet of Ratisbon. The Diet deliberated during the whole of the summer of 1801 without arriving at a single resolution. Not even the sudden change of Russian policy that followed the death of the Emperor Paul and deprived Bonaparte of the support of the Northern Maritime League, could stimulate the German Powers to united action. The old antagonism of Austria and Prussia paralysed the Diet. Austria sought a German indemnity for the dethroned Grand Duke of Tuscany; Prussia aimed at extending its influence into Southern Germany by the annexation of Würzburg and Bamberg. Thus the summer of 1801 was lost in interminable debate, until Bonaparte regained the influence over Russia which he had held before the death of Paul, and finally set himself free from all check and restraint by concluding peace with England.

[German policy of Bonaparte.]

No part of Bonaparte's diplomacy was more ably conceived or more likely to result in a permanent empire than that which affected the secondary States of Germany. The rivalry of Austria and Prussia, the dread of Austrian aggression felt in Bavaria, the grotesque ambition of the petty sovereigns of Baden and Würtemburg, were all understood and turned to account in the policy which from this time shaped the French protectorate beyond the Rhine. Bonaparte intended to give to Prussia such an increase of territory upon the Baltic as should counterbalance the power of Austria; and for this purpose he was willing to sacrifice Hanover or Mecklenburg: but he forbade Prussia's extension to the south. Austria, so far from gaining new territory in Bavaria, was to be deprived of its own outlying possessions in Western Germany, and excluded from all influence in this region. Bavaria, dependent upon French protection against Austria, was to be greatly strengthened. Baden and Würtemberg, enriched by the spoil of little sovereignties, of Bishoprics and Free Cities, were to look to France for further elevation and aggrandisement. Thus, while two rival Powers balanced one another upon the Baltic and the Lower Danube, the sovereigns of central and western Germany, owing everything to the Power that had humbled Austria, would find in submission to France the best security for their own gains, and the best protection against their more powerful neighbours.

[Treaty between France and Russia for joint action in Germany, Oct. 11, 1801.]

One condition alone could have frustrated a policy agreeable to so many interests, namely, the existence of a national sentiment among the Germans themselves. But the peoples of Germany cared as little about a Fatherland as their princes. To the Hessian and the Bavarian at the centre of the Empire, Germany was scarcely more than it was to the Swiss or the Dutch, who had left the Empire centuries before. The inhabitants of the Rhenish Provinces had murmured for a while at the extortionate rule of the Directory; but their severance from Germany and their incorporation with a foreign race touched no fibre of patriotic regret; and after the establishment of a better order of things under the Consulate the annexation to France appears to have become highly popular.  [93] Among a race whose members could thus be actually conquered and annexed without doing violence to their feelings Bonaparte had no difficulty in finding willing allies. While the Diet dragged on its debates upon the settlement of the Empire, the minor States pursued their bargainings with the French Government; and on the 14th of August, 1801, Bavaria signed the first of those treaties which made the First Consul the patron of Western Germany. Two months later a secret treaty between France and Russia admitted the new Czar, Alexander, to a share in the reorganisation of the Empire. The Governments of Paris and St. Petersburg pledged themselves to united action for the purpose of maintaining an equilibrium between Austria and Prussia; and the Czar further stipulated for the advancement of his own relatives, the Sovereigns of Bavaria, Baden, and Würtemberg. The relationship of these petty princes to the Russian family enabled Bonaparte to present to the Czar, as a graceful concession, the very measure which most vitally advanced his own power in Germany. Alexander's intervention made resistance on the part of Austria hopeless. One after another the German Sovereigns settled with their patrons for a share in the spoil; and on the 3rd of June, 1802, a secret agreement between France and Russia embodied the whole of these arrangements, and disposed of almost all the Free Cities and the entire ecclesiastical territory of the Empire.

[Diet of Ratisbon accepts French Scheme.]

[End of German Ecclesiastical States and forty-five Free Cities, March, 1803.]

When everything had thus been settled by the foreigners, a Committee, to which the Diet of Ratisbon had referred the work of re-organisation, began its sessions, assisted by a French and a Russian representative. The Scheme which had been agreed upon between France and Russia was produced entire; and in spite of the anger and the threats of Austria it passed the Committee with no greater delay than was inseparable from everything connected with German affairs. The Committee presented the Scheme to the Diet: the Diet only agitated itself as to the means of passing the Scheme without violating those formalities which were the breath of its life. The proposed destruction of all the Ecclesiastical States, and of forty-five out of the fifty Free Cities, would extinguish a third part of the members of the Diet itself. If these unfortunate bodies were permitted to vote upon the measure, their votes might result in its rejection: if unsummoned, their absence would impair the validity of the resolution. By a masterpiece of conscientious pedantry it was agreed that the doomed prelates and cities should be duly called to vote in their turn, and that upon the mention each name the answer "absent" should be returned by an officer. Thus, faithful to its formalities, the Empire voted the destruction of its ancient Constitution; and the sovereignties of the Ecclesiastics and Free Cities, which had lasted for so many centuries, vanished from Europe (March, 1803).  [94]

[Effect on Germany.]

The loss was small indeed. The internal condition of the priest-ruled districts was generally wretched; heavy ignorance, beggary, and intolerance reduced life to a gross and dismal inertia. Except in their patronage of music, the ecclesiastical princes had perhaps rendered no single service to Germany. The Free Cities, as a rule, were sunk in debt; the management of their affairs had become the perquisite of a few lawyers and privileged families. For Germany, as a nation, the destruction of these petty sovereignties was not only an advantage but an absolute necessity. The order by which they were superseded was not devised in the interest of Germany itself; yet even in the arrangements imposed by the foreigner Germany gained centres from which the institutions of modern political life entered into regions where no public authority had yet been known beyond the court of the bishop or the feudal officers of the manor.  [95] Through the suppression of the Ecclesiastical States a Protestant majority was produced in the Diet. The change bore witness to the decline of Austrian and of Catholic energy during the past century; it scarcely indicated the future supremacy of the Protestant rival of Austria; for the real interests of Germany were but faintly imaged in the Diet, and the leadership of the race was still open to the Power which should most sincerely identify itself with the German nation. The first result of the changed character of the Diet was the confiscation of all landed property held by religious or charitable bodies, even where these had never advanced the slightest claim to political independence. The Diet declared the whole of the land held in Germany by pious foundations to be at the disposal of the Governments for purposes of religion, of education, and of financial relief. The more needy courts immediately seized so welcome an opportunity of increasing their revenues. Germany lost nothing by the dissolution of some hundreds of monasteries; the suppression of hospitals and the impoverishment of Universities was a doubtful benefit. Through the destruction of the Ecclesiastical States and the confiscation of Church lands, the support of an army of priests was thrown upon the public revenues. The Elector of Cologne, who had been an indifferent civil ruler, became a very prosperous clergyman on £20,000 a year. All the members of the annexed or disendowed establishments, down to the acolytes and the sacristans, were credited with annuities equal in value to what they had lost. But in the confusion caused by war the means to satisfy these claims was not always forthcoming; and the ecclesiastical revolution, so beneficial on the whole to the public interest, was not effected without much severe and undeserved individual suffering.

[Governments in Germany become more absolute and more regular.]

[Bavaria. Reforms of Montgelas.]

[Suppression of the Knights.]

The movement of 1803 put an end to an order of things more curious as a survival of the mixed religious and political form of the Holy Roman Empire than important in the actual state of Europe. The temporal power now lost by the Church in Germany had been held in such sluggish hands that its effect was hardly visible except in a denser prejudice and an idler life than prevailed under other Governments. The first consequence of its downfall was that a great part of Germany which had hitherto had no political organisation at all gained the benefit of a regular system of taxation, of police, of civil and of criminal justice. If harsh and despotic, the Governments which rose to power at the expense of the Church were usually not wanting in the love of order and uniformity. Officers of the State administered a fixed law where custom and privilege had hitherto been the only rule. Appointments ceased to be bought or inherited; trades and professions were thrown open; the peasant was relieved of his heaviest feudal burdens. Among the newly consolidated States, Bavaria was the one where the reforming impulse of the time took the strongest form. A new dynasty, springing from the west of the Rhine, brought something of the spirit of French liberalism into a country hitherto unsurpassed in Western Europe for its ignorance and bigotry.  [96] The Minister Montgelas, a politician of French enlightenment, entered upon the same crusade against feudal and ecclesiastical disorder which Joseph had inaugurated in Austria twenty years before. His measures for subjecting the clergy to the law, and for depriving the Church of its control over education, were almost identical with those which in 1790 had led to the revolt of Belgium; and the Bavarian landowners now unconsciously reproduced all the mediæval platitudes of the University of Louvain. Montgelas organised and levelled with a remorseless common sense. Among his victims there was a class which had escaped destruction in the recent changes. The Knights of the Empire, with their village jurisdictions, were still legally existent; but to Montgelas such a class appeared a mere absurdity, and he sent his soldiers to disperse their courts and to seize their tolls. Loud lamentation assailed the Emperor at Vienna. If the dethroned bishops had bewailed the approaching extinction of Christianity in Europe, the knights just as convincingly deplored the end of chivalry. Knightly honour, now being swept from the earth, was proved to be the true soul of German nationality, the invisible support of the Imperial throne. For a moment the intervention of the Emperor forced Montgelas to withdraw his grasp from the sacred rents and turnpikes; but the threatening storm passed over, and the example of Bavaria was gradually followed by the neighbouring Courts.

[Stein and the Duke of Nassau.]

[Stein's attack on the Minor Princes.]

It was to the weak and unpatriotic princes who were enriched by the French that the knights fell victims. Among the knights thus despoiled by the Duke of Nassau was the Ritter vom Stein, a nobleman who had entered the Prussian service in the reign of Frederick the Great, and who had lately been placed in high office in the newly-acquired province of Münster. Stein was thoroughly familiar with the advantages of systematic government; the loss of his native parochial jurisdiction was not a serious one to a man who had become a power in Prussia; and although domestic pride had its share in Stein's resentment, the protest now published by him against the aggressions of the Duke of Nassau sounded a different note from that of his order generally. That a score of farmers should pay their dues and take off their hats to the officer of the Duke of Nassau instead of to the bailiff of the Ritter vom Stein was not a matter to excite deep feeling in Europe; but that the consolidation of Germany should be worked out in the interest of French hirelings instead of in the interests of the German people was justly treated by Stein as a subject for patriotic anger. In his letter  [97] to the Duke of Nassau, Stein reproached his own despoiler and the whole tribe of petty princes with that treason to German interests which had won them the protection of the foreigner. He argued that the knights were a far less important obstacle to German unity than those very princes to whom the knights were sacrificed; and he invoked that distant day which should give to Germany a real national unity, over knights and princes alike, under the leadership of a single patriotic sovereign. Stein's appeal found little response among his contemporaries. Like a sober man among drunkards, he seemed to be scarcely rational. The simple conception of a nation sacrificing its internal rivalries in order to avert foreign rule was folly to the politicians who had all their lives long been outwitting one another at Vienna or Berlin, or who had just become persons of consequence in Europe through the patronage of Bonaparte. Yet, if years of intolerable suffering were necessary before any large party in Germany rose to the idea of German union, the ground had now at least been broken. In the changes that followed the Peace of Lunéville the fixity and routine of Germany received its death-blow. In all but name the Empire had ceased to exist. Change and re-constitution in one form or another had become familiar to all men's minds; and one real statesman at the least was already beginning to learn the lesson which later events were to teach to the rest of the German race.

[France, 1801-1804.]

[Civil Code.]

Four years of peace separated the Treaty of Lunéville from the next outbreak of war between France and any Continental Power. They were years of extension of French influence in every neighbouring State; in France itself, years of the consolidation of Bonaparte's power, and of the decline of everything that checked his personal rule. The legislative bodies sank into the insignificance for which they had been designed; everything that was suffered to wear the appearance of strength owed its vigour to the personal support of the First Consul. Among the institutions which date from this period, two, equally associated with the name of Napoleon, have taken a prominent place in history, the Civil Code and the Concordat. Since the middle of the eighteenth century the codification of law had been pursued with more or less success by almost every Government in Europe. In France the Constituent Assembly of 1789 had ordered the statutes, by which it superseded the old variety of local customs, to be thus cast into a systematic form. A Committee of the Convention had completed the draft of a Civil Code. The Directory had in its turn appointed a Commission; but the project still remained unfulfilled when the Directory was driven from power. Bonaparte instinctively threw himself into a task so congenial to his own systematising spirit, and stimulated the efforts of the best jurists in France by his personal interest and pride in the work of legislation. A Commission of lawyers, appointed by the First Consul, presented the successive chapters of a Civil Code to the Council of State. In the discussions in the Council of State Bonaparte himself took an active, though not always a beneficial, part. The draft of each chapter, as it left the Council of State, was submitted, as a project of Law, to the Tribunate and to the Legislative Body. For a moment the free expression of opinion in the Tribunate caused Bonaparte to suspend his work in impatient jealousy. The Tribunate, however, was soon brought to silence; and in March, 1804, France received the Code which has formed from that time to the present the basis of its civil rights.

[Napoleon as a legislator.]

When Napoleon declared that he desired his fame to rest upon the Civil Code, he showed his appreciation of the power which names exercise over mankind. It is probable that a majority of the inhabitants of Western Europe believe that Napoleon actually invented the laws which bear his name. As a matter of fact, the substance of these laws was fixed by the successive Assemblies of the Revolution; and, in the final revision which produced the Civil Code, Napoleon appears to have originated neither more nor less than several of the members of his Council whose names have long been forgotten. He is unquestionably entitled to the honour of a great legislator, not, however, as one who, like Solon or like Mahomet, himself created a new body of law, but as one who most vigorously pursued the work of consolidating and popularising law by the help of all the skilled and scientific minds whose resources were at his command. Though faulty in parts, the Civil Code, through its conciseness, its simplicity, and its justice, enabled Napoleon to carry a new and incomparably better social order into every country that became part of his Empire. Four other Codes, appearing at intervals from the year 1804 to the year 1810, embodied, in a corresponding form, the Law of Commerce, the Criminal Law, and the Rules of Civil and of Criminal Process.  [98] The whole remains a monument of the legal energy of the period which began in 1789, and of the sagacity with which Napoleon associated with his own rule all the science and the reforming zeal of the jurists of his day.

[The Concordat.]

[The Concordat destroys the Free Church.]

Far more distinctively the work of Napoleon's own mind was the reconciliation with the Church of Rome effected by the Concordat. It was a restoration of religion similar to that restoration of political order which made the public service the engine of a single will. The bishops and priests, whose appointment the Concordat transferred from their congregations to the Government, were as much instruments of the First Consul as his prefects and his gendarmes. The spiritual wants of the public, the craving of the poor for religious consolation, were made the pretext for introducing the new theological police. But the situation of the Catholic Church was in reality no worse in France at the commencement of the Consulate than its present situation in Ireland. The Republic had indeed subjected the non-juring priests to the heaviest penalties, but the exercise of Christian worship, which, even in the Reign of Terror, had only been interrupted by local and individual fanaticism, had long recovered the protection of the law, services in the open air being alone prohibited.  [99] Since 1795 the local authorities had been compelled to admit the religious societies of their district to the use of church-buildings. Though the coup d'état of Fructidor, 1797, renewed the persecution of non-juring priests, it in no way checked the activity of the Constitutional Church, now free from all connection with the Civil Government. While the non-juring priests, exiled as political offenders, or theatrically adoring the sacred elements in the woods, pretended that the age of the martyrs had returned to France, a Constitutional Church, ministering in 4,000 parishes, unprivileged but unharassed by the State, supplied the nation with an earnest and respectable body of clergy.  [100] But in the eyes of the First Consul everything left to voluntary association was so much lost to the central power. In the order of nature, peasants must obey priests, priests must obey bishops, and bishops must obey the First Consul. An alliance with the Pope offered to Bonaparte the means of supplanting the popular organisation of the Constitutional Church by an imposing hierarchy, rigid in its orthodoxy and unquestioning in its devotion to himself. In return for the consecration of his own rule, Bonaparte did not shrink from inviting the Pope to an exercise of authority such as the Holy See had never even claimed in France. The whole of the existing French Bishops, both the exiled non-jurors and those of the Constitutional Church, were summoned to resign their Sees into the hands of the Pope; against all who refused to do so sentence of deposition was pronounced by the Pontiff, without a word heard in defence, or the shadow of a fault alleged. The Sees were re-organised, and filled up by nominees of the First Consul. The position of the great body of the clergy was substantially altered in its relation to the Bishops. Episcopal power was made despotic, like all other power in France: thousands of the clergy, hitherto secure in their livings, were placed at the disposal of their bishop, and rendered liable to be transferred at the pleasure of their superior from place to place. The Constitutional Church vanished, but religion appeared to be honoured by becoming part of the State.

[Results in Ultramontanism.]

In its immediate action, the Napoleonic Church served the purpose for which it was intended. For some few years the clergy unflaggingly preached, prayed, and catechised to the glory of their restorer. In the greater cycle of religious change, the Concordat of Bonaparte appears in another light. However little appreciated at the time, it was the greatest, the most critical, victory which the Roman See has ever gained over the more enlightened and the more national elements in the Catholic Church. It converted the Catholicism of France from a faith already far more independent than that of Fénélon and Bossuet into the Catholicism which in our own day has outstripped the bigotry of Spain and Austria in welcoming the dogma of Papal infallibility. The lower clergy, condemned by the State to an intolerable subjection, soon found their only hope in an appeal to Rome, and instinctively worked as the emissaries of the Roman See. The Bishops, who owed their office to an unprecedented exercise of Papal power and to the destruction of religious independence in France, were not the men who could maintain a struggle with the Papacy for the ancient Gallican liberties. In the resistance to the Papacy which had been maintained by the Continental Churches in a greater or less degree during the eighteenth century, France had on the whole taken the most effective part; but, from the time when the Concordat dissolved both the ancient and the revolutionary Church system of France, the Gallican tradition of the past became as powerless among the French clergy as the philosophical liberalism of the Revolution.

[So do the German changes.]

In Germany the destruction of the temporal power of the Church tended equally to Ultramontanism. An archbishop of Cologne who governed half a million subjects was less likely to prostrate himself before the Papal Chair than an archbishop of Cologne who was only one among a regiment of churchmen. The spiritual Electors and Princes who lost their dominions in 1801 had understood by the interests of their order something more tangible than a body of doctrines. When not hostile to the Papacy, they had usually treated it with indifference. The conception of a Catholic society exposed to persecution at the hands of the State on account of its devotion to Rome was one which had never entered the mind of German ecclesiastics in the eighteenth century. Without the changes effected in Germany by the Treaty of Lunéville, without the Concordat of Bonaparte, Catholic orthodoxy would never have become identical with Ultramontanism. In this respect the opening years of the present century mark a turning-point in the relation of the Church to modern life. Already, in place of the old monarchical Governments, friendly on the whole to the Catholic Church, events were preparing the way for that changed order with which the century seems destined to close-an emancipated France, a free Italy, a secular, state-disciplined Germany, and the Church in conspiracy against them all.

CHAPTER VI.

England claims Malta-War renewed-Bonaparte occupies Hanover, and blockades the Elbe-Remonstrances of Prussia-Cadoudal's Plot-Murder of the Duke of Enghien-Napoleon Emperor-Coalition of 1805-Prussia holds aloof-State of Austria-Failure of Napoleon's attempt to gain naval superiority in the Channel-Campaign in Western Germany-Capitulation of Ulm-Trafalgar-Treaty of Potsdam between Prussia and the Allies-The French enter Vienna-Haugwitz sent to Napoleon with Prussian Ultimatum- Battle of Austerlitz-Haugwitz signs a Treaty of Alliance with Napoleon-Peace-Treaty of Presburg-End of the Holy Roman Empire- Naples given to Joseph Bonaparte-Battle of Maida-The Napoleonic Empire and Dynasty-Federation of the Rhine-State of Germany-Possibility of maintaining the Empire of 1806.

[England prepares for war, Nov., 1802.]

[England claims Malta.]

War was renewed between France and Great Britain in the spring of 1803. Addington's Government, in their desire for peace, had borne with Bonaparte's aggressions during all the months of negotiation at Amiens; they had met his complaints against the abuse of the English press by prosecuting his Royalist libellers; throughout the Session of 1802 they had upheld the possibility of peace against the attacks of their parliamentary opponents. The invasion of Switzerland in the autumn of 1802, following the annexation of Piedmont, forced the Ministry to alter its tone. The King's Speech at the meeting of Parliament in November declared that the changes in operation on the Continent demanded measures of security on the part of Great Britain. The naval and military forces of the country were restored to a war-footing; the evacuation of Malta by Great Britain, which had hitherto been delayed chiefly through a misunderstanding with Russia, was no longer treated as a matter of certainty. While the English Government still wavered, a challenge was thrown down by the First Consul which forced them into decided action. The Moniteur published on the 13th of January, 1803, a report upon Egypt by Colonel Sebastiani, pointing in the plainest terms to the renewal of French attacks upon the East. The British Government demanded explanations, and declared that until satisfaction was given upon this point they should retain possession of Malta. Malta was in fact appropriated by Great Britain as an equivalent for the Continental territory added to France since the end of the war.  [101]

[War, May, 1803.]

It would have been better policy if, some months earlier, Bonaparte had been required to withdraw from Piedmont or from Switzerland, under pain of hostilities with England. Great Britain had as little technical right to retain Malta as Bonaparte had to annex Piedmont. The desire for peace had, however, led Addington's Government to remain inactive until Bonaparte's aggressions had become accomplished facts. It was now too late to attempt to undo them: England could only treat the settlement of Amiens as superseded, and claim compensation on its own side. Malta was the position most necessary to Great Britain, in order to prevent Bonaparte from carrying out projects in Egypt and Greece of which the Government had evidence independent of Sebastiani's report. The value of Malta, so lately denied by Nelson, was now fully understood both in France and England. No sooner had the English Ministry avowed its intention of retaining the island than the First Consul declared himself compelled to take up arms in behalf of the faith of treaties. Ignoring his own violations of treaty-rights in Italy and Switzerland, Bonaparte declared the retention of Malta by Great Britain to be an outrage against all Europe. He assailed the British Ambassador with the utmost fury at a reception held at the Tuileries on the 13th of March; and, after a correspondence of two months, which probably marked his sense of the power and obstinacy of his enemy, the conflict was renewed which was now to continue without a break until Bonaparte was driven from his throne.

[Bonaparte and Hanover.]

So long as England was without Continental allies its warfare was limited to the seizure of colonies and the blockade of ports: on the part of France nothing could be effected against the island Power except by actual invasion. There was, however, among the communities of Germany one which, in the arguments of a conqueror, might be treated as a dependency of England, and made to suffer for its connection with the British Crown. Hanover had hitherto by common agreement been dissociated from the wars in which its Elector engaged as King of England; even the personal presence of King George II. at the battle of Dettingen had been held no ground for violating its neutrality. Bonaparte, however, was untroubled by precedents in a case where he had so much to gain. Apart from its value as a possible object of exchange in the next treaty with England, Hanover would serve as a means of influencing Prussia: it was also worth so many millions in cash through the requisitions which might be imposed upon its inhabitants. The only scruple felt by Bonaparte in attacking Hanover arose from the possibility of a forcible resistance on the part of Prussia to the appearance of a French army in North Germany. Accordingly, before the invasion began, General Duroc was sent to Berlin to inform the King of the First Consul's intentions, and to soothe any irritation that might be felt at the Prussian Court by assurances of friendship and respect.

[Prussia and Hanover.]

It was a moment of the most critical importance to Prussia. Prussia was the recognised guardian of Northern Germany; every consideration of interest and of honour required that its Government should forbid the proposed occupation of Hanover-if necessary, at the risk of actual war. Hanover in the hands of France meant the extinction of German independence up to the frontiers of the Prussian State. If, as it was held at Berlin, the cause of Great Britain was an unjust one, and if the connection of Hanover with the British Crown was for the future to make that province a scapegoat for the offences of England, the wisest course for Prussia would have been to deliver Hanover at once from its French and from its English enemies by occupying it with its own forces. The Foreign Minister, Count Haugwitz, appears to have recommended this step, but his counsels were overruled. King Frederick William III., who had succeeded his father in 1797, was a conscientious but a timid and spiritless being. Public affairs were in the hands of his private advisers, of whom the most influential were the so-called cabinet-secretaries, Lombard and Beyme, men credulously anxious for the goodwill of France, and perversely blind to the native force and worth which still existed in the Prussian Monarchy.  [102] Instead of declaring the entry of the French into Hanover to be absolutely incompatible with the safety of the other North German States, King Frederick William endeavoured to avert it by diplomacy. He tendered his mediation to the British Government upon condition of the evacuation of Malta; and, when this proposal was bluntly rejected, he offered to the First Consul his personal security that Hanover should pay a sum of money in order to be spared the intended invasion.

[French enter Hanover, May, 1803.]

[Oppression in Hanover, 1803-1805.]

Such a proposal marked the depth to which Prussian statemanship had sunk; it failed to affect the First Consul in the slightest degree. While negotiations were still proceeding, a French division, commanded by General Mortier, entered Hanover (May, 1803). The Hanoverian army was lost through the follies of the civil Government; the Duke of Cambridge, commander of one of its divisions, less ingenious than his brother the Duke of York in finding excuses for capitulation, resigned his commission, and fled to England, along with many brave soldiers, who subsequently found in the army of Great Britain the opportunity for honourable service which was denied to them at home. Hanover passed into the possession of France, and for two years the miseries of French occupation were felt to the full. Extortion consumed the homely wealth of the country; the games and meetings of the people were prohibited; French spies violated the confidences of private life; law was administered by foreign soldiers; the press existed only for the purpose of French proselytism. It was in Hanover that the bitterness of that oppression was first felt which subsequently roused all North Germany against a foreign master, and forced upon the race the long-forgotten claims of patriotism and honour.

[French blockade the Elbe.]

[Vain remonstrance of Prussia.]

Bonaparte had justly calculated upon the inaction of the Prussian Government when he gave the order to General Mortier to enter Hanover; his next step proved the growth of his confidence in Prussia's impassivity. A French force was despatched to Cuxhaven, at the mouth of the Elbe, in order to stop the commerce of Great Britain with the interior of Germany. The British Government immediately informed the Court of Berlin that it should blockade the Elbe and the Weser against the ships of all nations unless the French soldiers withdrew from the Elbe. As the linen trade of Silesia and other branches of Prussian industry depended upon the free navigation of the Elbe, the threatened reprisals of the British Government raised very serious questions for Prussia. It was France, not England, that had first violated the neutrality of the river highway; and the King of Prussia now felt himself compelled to demand assurances Bonaparte that the interests of Germany should suffer no further injury at his hands. A letter was written by the King to the First Consul, and entrusted to the cabinet-secretary, Lombard, who carried it to Napoleon at Brussels (July, 1803). Lombard, the son of French parents who had settled at Berlin in the reign of Frederick the Great, had risen from a humble station through his skill in expression in the two languages that were native to him; and the accomplishments which would have made him a good clerk or a successful journalist made him in the eyes of Frederick William a counsellor for kings. The history of his mission to Brussels gives curious evidence both of the fascination exercised by Napoleon over common minds, and of the political helplessness which in Prussia could now be mistaken for the quality of a statesman. Lombard failed to obtain from Napoleon any guarantee or security whatever; yet he wrote back in terms of the utmost delight upon the success of his mission. Napoleon had infatuated him by the mere exercise of his personal charm. "What I cannot describe," said Lombard, in his report to the King relating his interview with the First Consul,  [103] "is the tone of goodness and noble frankness with which he expressed his reverence for your Majesty's rights, and asked for that confidence from your Majesty which he so well deserves." "I only wish," he cried at the close of Napoleon's address, "that I could convey to the King, my master, every one of your words and the tone in which they are uttered; he would then, I am sure, feel a double joy at the justice with which you have always been treated at his hands." Lombard's colleagues at Berlin were perhaps not stronger men than the envoy himself, but they were at least beyond the range of Napoleon's voice and glance, and they received this rhapsody with coldness. They complained that no single concession had been made by the First Consul upon the points raised by the King. Cuxhaven continued in French hands; the British inexorably blockaded the Germans upon their own neutral waters; and the cautious statecraft of Prussia proved as valueless to Germany as the obstinate, speculating warfare of Austria.

[Alexander displeased.]

There was, however, a Power which watched the advance of French dominion into Northern Germany with less complaisance than the Germans themselves. The Czar of Russia had gradually come to understand the part allotted to him by Bonaparte since the Peace of Lunéville, and was no longer inclined to serve as the instrument of French ambition. Bonaparte's occupation of Hanover changed the attitude of Alexander into one of coldness and distrust. Alexander saw and lamented the help which he himself had given to Bonaparte in Germany: events that now took place in France itself, as well as the progress of French intrigues in Turkey,  [104] threw him into the arms of Bonaparte's enemies, and prepared the way for a new European coalition.

[Bonaparte about to become Emperor.]

[Murder of the Duke of Enghien, March 20, 1804.]

The First Bonaparte Consul had determined to assume the dignity of Emperor. The renewal of war with England excited a new outburst of enthusiasm for his person; nothing was wanting to place the crown on his head but the discovery of a plot against his life. Such a plot had been long and carefully followed by the police. A Breton gentleman, Georges Cadoudal, had formed the design of attacking the First Consul in the streets of Paris in the midst of his guards. Cadoudal and his fellow-conspirators, including General Pichegru, were traced by the police from the coast of Normandy to Paris: an unsuccessful attempt was made to lure the Count of Artois, and other royal patrons of the conspiracy, from Great Britain. When all the conspirators who could be enticed to France were collected within the capital, the police, who had watched every stage of the movement, began to make arrests. Moreau, the last Republican soldier of France, was charged with complicity in the plot. Pichegru and Cadoudal were thrown into prison, there to await their doom; Moreau, who probably wished for the overthrow of the Consular Government, but had no part in the design against Bonaparte's life,  [105] was kept under arrest and loaded with official calumny. One sacrifice more remained to be made, in place of the Bourbon d'Artois, who baffled the police of the First Consul beyond the seas. In the territory of Baden, twelve miles from the French frontier, there lived a prince of the exiled house, the Duke of Enghien, a soldier under the first Coalition against France, now a harmless dependent on the bounty of England. French spies surrounded him; his excursions into the mountains gave rise to a suspicion that he was concerned in Pichegru's plot. This was enough to mark him for destruction. Bonaparte gave orders that he should be seized, brought to Paris, and executed. On the 15th of March, 1804, a troop of French soldiers crossed the Rhine and arrested the Duke in his own house at Ettenheim. They arrived with him at Paris on the 20th. He was taken to the fort of Vincennes without entering the city. On that same night a commission of six colonels sat in judgment upon the prisoner, whose grave was already dug, and pronounced sentence of death without hearing a word of evidence. At daybreak the Duke was led out and shot.

[Napoleon Emperor, May 18, 1804.]

If some barbaric instinct made the slaughter of his predecessor's kindred in Bonaparte's own eyes the omen of a successful usurpation, it was not so with Europe generally. One universal sense of horror passed over the Continent. The Court of Russia put on mourning; even the Diet of Ratisbon showed signs of human passion at the indignity done to Germany by the seizure of the Duke of Enghien on German soil. Austria kept silent, but watched the signs of coming war. France alone showed no pity. Before the Duke of Enghien had been dead a week, the Senate besought Napoleon to give to France the security of a hereditary throne. Prefects, bishops, mayors, and councils with one voice repeated the official prayer. A resolution in favour of imperial rule was brought forward in the Tribunate, and passed, after a noble and solitary protest on the part of Carnot. A decree of the Senate embodied the terms of the new Constitution; and on the 18th of May, without waiting for the sanction of a national vote, Napoleon assumed the title of Emperor of the French.

[Title of Emperor of Austria, Aug., 1804.]

In France itself the change was one more of the name than of the substance of power. Napoleon could not be vested with a more absolute authority than he already possessed; but the forms of republican equality vanished; and although the real social equality given to France by the Revolution was beyond reach of change, the nation had to put up with a bastard Court and a fictitious aristocracy of Corsican princes, Terrorist excellencies, and Jacobin dukes. The new dynasty was recognised at Vienna and Berlin: on the part of Austria it received the compliment of an imitation. Three months after the assumption of the Imperial title by Napoleon, the Emperor Francis (Emperor in Germany, but King in Hungary and Bohemia) assumed the title of Emperor of all his Austrian dominions. The true reason for this act was the virtual dissolution of the Germanic system by the Peace of Lunéville, and the probability that the old Imperial dignity, if preserved in name, would soon be transferred to some client of Napoleon or to Napoleon himself. Such an apprehension was, however, not one that could be confessed to Europe. Instead of the ruin of Germany, the grandeur of Austria was made the ostensible ground of change. In language which seemed to be borrowed from the scriptural history of Nebuchadnezzar, the Emperor Francis declared that, although no possible addition could be made to his own personal dignity, as Roman Emperor, yet the ancient glory of the Austrian House, the grandeur of the principalities and kingdoms which were united under its dominion, required that the Sovereigns of Austria should hold a title equal to that of the greatest European throne. A general war against Napoleon was already being proposed by the Court of St. Petersburg; but for the present the Corsican and the Hapsburg Cæsar exchanged their hypocritical congratulations.  [106]

[Pitt again Minister, May, 1804.]

[Coalition of 1805.]

Almost at the same time that Bonaparte ascended the throne, Pitt returned to power in Great Britain. He was summoned by the general distrust felt in Addington's Ministry, and by the belief that no statesman but himself could rally the Powers of Europe against the common enemy. Pitt was not long in framing with Russia the plan of a third Coalition. The Czar broke off diplomatic intercourse with Napoleon in September, 1804, and induced the Court of Vienna to pledge itself to resist any further extension of French power. Sweden entered into engagements with Great Britain. On the opening of Parliament at the beginning of 1805, King George III. announced that an understanding existed between Great Britain and Russia, and asked in general terms for a provision for Continental subsidies. In April, a treaty was signed at St. Petersburg by the representatives of Russia and Great Britain, far more comprehensive and more serious in its provisions than any which had yet united the Powers against France.  [107] Russia and England bound themselves to direct their efforts to the formation of a European League capable of placing five hundred thousand men in the field. Great Britain undertook to furnish subsidies to every member of the League; no peace was to be concluded with France but by common consent; conquests made by any of the belligerents were to remain unappropriated until the general peace; and at the termination of the war a Congress was to fix certain disputed points of international right, and to establish a federative European system for their maintenance and enforcement. As the immediate objects of the League, the treaty specified the expulsion of the French from Holland, Switzerland, Italy, and Northern Germany; the re-establishment of the King of Sardinia in Piedmont, with an increase of territory; and the creation of a solid barrier against any future usurpations of France. The last expression signified the union of Holland and part of Belgium under the House of Orange. In this respect, as in the provision for a common disposal of conquests and for the settlement of European affairs by a Congress, the Anglo-Russian Treaty of 1805 defined the policy actually carried out in 1814. Other territorial changes now suggested by Pitt, including the annexation of the Rhenish Provinces to the Prussian Monarchy, were not embodied in the treaty, but became from this time understood possibilities.

[Policy of Prussia.]

[Prussia neutral.]

England and Russia had, however, some difficulty in securing allies. Although in violation of his promises to Austria, Napoleon had accepted the title of King of Italy from the Senate of the Italian Republic, and had crowned himself with the Iron Crown of Lombardy (March, 1805), the Ministers at Vienna would have preferred peace, if that had been possible; and their master reluctantly consented to a war against Napoleon when war in some form or other seemed inevitable. The policy of Prussia was doubtful. For two years past Napoleon had made every effort to induce Prussia to enter into alliance with himself. After the invasion of Hanover he had doubled his attentions to the Court of Berlin, and had spared nothing in the way of promises and assurances of friendship to win the King over to his side. The neutrality of Prussia was of no great service to France: its support would have been of priceless value, rendering any attack upon France by Russia or Austria almost impossible, and thus enabling Napoleon to throw his whole strength into the combat with Great Britain. In the spring of 1804, the King of Prussia, uncertain of the friendship of the Czar, and still unconvinced of the vanity of Napoleon's professions, had inclined to a defensive alliance with France. The news of the murder of the Duke of Enghien, arriving almost simultaneously with a message of goodwill from St. Petersburg, led him to abandon this project of alliance, but caused no breach with Napoleon. Frederick William adhered to the temporising policy which Prussia had followed since 1795, and the Foreign Minister, Haugwitz, who had recommended bolder measures, withdrew for a time from the Court.  [108] Baron Hardenberg, who had already acted as his deputy, stepped into his place. Hardenberg, the negotiator of the peace of Basle, had for the last ten years advocated a system of neutrality. A politician quick to grasp new social and political ideas, he was without that insight into the real forces at work in Europe which, in spite of errors in detail, made the political aims of Pitt, and of many far inferior men, substantially just and correct. So late as the end of the year 1804, Hardenberg not only failed to recognise the dangers to which Prussia was exposed from Napoleon's ambition, but conceived it to be still possible for Prussia to avert war between France and the Allied Powers by maintaining a good understanding with all parties alike. Hardenberg's neutrality excited the wrath of the Russian Cabinet. While Metternich, the Austrian ambassador at Berlin, cautiously felt his way, the Czar proposed in the last resort to force Prussia to take up arms. A few months more passed; and, when hostilities were on the point of breaking out, Hanover was definitely offered to Prussia by Napoleon as the price of an alliance. Hardenberg, still believing that it lay within the power of Prussia, by means of a French alliance, both to curb Napoleon and to prevent a European war, urged the King to close with the offer of the French Emperor.  [109] But the King shrank from a decision which involved the possibility of immediate war. The offer of Hanover was rejected, and Prussia connected itself neither with Napoleon nor his enemies.

[State of Austria. The army.]

Pitt, the author of the Coalition of 1805, had formed the most sanguine estimate of the armaments of his allies. Austria was said to have entered upon a new era since the peace of Lunéville, and to have turned to the best account all the disasters of its former campaigns. There had indeed been no want of fine professions from Vienna, but Pitt knew little of the real state of affairs. The Archduke Charles had been placed at the head of the military administration, and entrusted with extraordinary powers; but the whole force of routine and corruption was ranged against him. He was deceived by his subordinates; and after three years of reorganisation he resigned his post, confessing that he left the army no nearer efficiency than it was before. Charles was replaced at the War Office by General Mack. Within six months this bustling charlatan imagined himself to have effected the reorganisation of which the Archduke despaired, [110] while he had in fact only introduced new confusion into an army already hampered beyond any in Europe by its variety of races and languages.

[Political condition of Austria.]

If the military reforms of Austria were delusive, its political reforms were still more so. The Emperor had indeed consented to unite the Ministers, who had hitherto worked independently, in a Council of State; but here reform stopped. Cobenzl, who was now First Minister, understood nothing but diplomacy. Men continued in office whose presence was an insuperable bar to any intelligent action: even in that mechanical routine which, in the eyes of the Emperor Francis, constituted the life of the State, everything was antiquated and self-contradictory. In all that affected the mental life of the people the years that followed the peace of Lunéville were distinctly retrograde. Education was placed more than ever in the hands of the priests; the censorship of the press was given to the police; a commission was charged with the examination of all the books printed during the reign of the Emperor Joseph, and above two thousand works, which had come into being during that brief period of Austrian liberalism, were suppressed and destroyed. Trade regulations were issued which combined the extravagance of the French Reign of Terror with the ignorance of the Middle Ages. All the grain in the country was ordered to be sold before a certain date, and the Jews were prohibited from carrying on the corn-trade for a year. Such were the reforms described by Pitt in the English Parliament as having effected the regeneration of Austria. Nearer home things were judged in a truer light. Mack's paper-regiments, the helplessness and unreality of the whole system of Austrian officialism, were correctly appreciated by the men who had been most in earnest during the last war. Even Thugut now thought a contest hopeless. The Archduke Charles argued to the end for peace, and entered upon the war with the presentiment of defeat and ruin.

[Plans of campaign, 1805.]

The plans of the Allies for the campaign of 1805 covered an immense field.  [111] It was intended that one Austrian army should operate in Lombardy under the Archduke Charles, while a second, under General Mack, entered Bavaria, and there awaited the arrival of the Russians, who were to unite with it in invading France: British and Russian contingents were to combine with the King of Sweden in Pomerania, and with the King of Naples in Southern Italy. At the head-quarters of the Allies an impression prevailed that Napoleon was unprepared for war. It was even believed that his character had lost something of its energy under the influence of an Imperial Court. Never was there a more fatal illusion. The forces of France had never been so overwhelming; the plans of Napoleon had never been worked out with greater minuteness and certainty. From Hanover to Strasburg masses of troops had been collected upon the frontier in readiness for the order to march; and, before the campaign opened, the magnificent army of Boulogne, which had been collected for the invasion of England, was thrown into the scale against Austria.

[Failure of Napoleon's naval designs against England.]

[Nelson and Villeneuve, April-June, 1805.]

Events had occurred at sea which frustrated Napoleon's plan for an attack upon Great Britain. This attack, which in 1797 had been but lightly threatened, had, upon the renewal of war with England in 1803, become the object of Napoleon's most serious efforts. An army was concentrated at Boulogne sufficient to overwhelm the military forces of England, if once it could reach the opposite shore. Napoleon's thoughts were centred on a plan for obtaining the naval superiority in the Channel, if only for the few hours which it would take to transport the army from Boulogne to the English coast. It was his design to lure Nelson to the other side of the Atlantic by a feigned expedition against the West Indies, and, during the absence of the English admiral, to unite all the fleets at present lying blockaded in the French ports, as a cover for the invading armament. Admiral Villeneuve was ordered to sail to Martinique, and, after there meeting with some other ships, to re-cross the Atlantic with all possible speed, and liberate the fleets blockaded in Ferrol, Brest, and Rochefort. The junction of the fleets would give Napoleon a force of fifty sail in the British Channel, a force more than sufficient to overpower all the squadrons which Great Britain could possibly collect for the defence of its shores. Such a design exhibited all the power of combination which marked Napoleon's greatest triumphs; but it required of an indifferent marine the precision and swiftness of movement which belonged to the land-forces of France; it assumed in the seamen of Great Britain the same absence of resource which Napoleon had found among the soldiers of the Continent. In the present instance, however, Napoleon had to deal with a man as far superior to all the admirals of France as Napoleon himself was to the generals of Austria and Prussia. Villeneuve set sail for the West Indies in the spring of 1805, and succeeded in drawing Nelson after him; but, before he could re-cross the Atlantic, Nelson, incessantly pursuing the French squadron in the West-Indian seas, and at length discovering its departure homewards at Antigua (June 13), had warned the English Government of Villeneuve's movement by a message sent in the swiftest of the English brigs.  [112] The Government, within twenty-four hours of receiving Nelson's message, sent orders to Sir Robert Calder instantly to raise the blockades of Ferrol and Rochefort, and to wait for Villeneuve off Cape Finisterre. Here Villeneuve met the English fleet (July 22). He was worsted in a partial engagement, and retired into the harbour of Ferrol. The pressing orders of Napoleon forced the French admiral, after some delay, to attempt that movement on Brest and Rochefort on which the whole plan of the invasion of England depended. But Villeneuve was no longer in a condition to meet the English force assembled against him. He put back without fighting, and retired to Cadiz. All hope of carrying out the attack upon England was lost.

[March of French armies on Bavaria, Sept.]

It only remained for Napoleon to avenge himself upon Austria through the army which was baulked of its English prey. On the 1st of September, when the Austrians were now on the point of crossing the Inn, the camp of Boulogne was broken up. The army turned eastwards, and distributed itself over all the roads leading from the Channel to the Rhine and the Upper Danube. Far on the north-east the army of Hanover, commanded by Bernadotte, moved as its left wing, and converged upon a point in Southern Germany half-way between the frontiers of France and Austria. In the fables that long disguised the true character of every action of Napoleon, the admirable order of march now given to the French armies appears as the inspiration of a moment, due to the rebound of Napoleon's genius after learning the frustration of all his naval plans. In reality, the employment of the "Army of England" against a Continental coalition had always been an alternative present to Napoleon's mind; and it was threateningly mentioned in his letters at a time when Villeneuve's failure was still unknown.

[Austrians invade Bavaria, Sept. 8.]

The only advantage which the Allies derived from the remoteness of the Channel army was that Austria was able to occupy Bavaria without resistance. General Mack, who was charged with this operation, crossed the Inn on the 8th of September. The Elector of Bavaria was known to be secretly hostile to the Coalition. The design of preventing his union with the French was a correct one; but in the actual situation of the allied armies it was one that could not be executed without great risk. The preparations of Russia required more time than was allowed for them; no Russian troops could reach the Inn before the end of October; and, in consequence, the entire force operating in Western Germany did not exceed seventy thousand men. Any doubts, however, as to the prudence of an advance through Bavaria were silenced by the assurance that Napoleon had to bring the bulk of his army from the British Channel.  [113] In ignorance of the real movements of the French, Mack pushed on to the western limit of Bavaria, and reached the river Iller, the border of Würtemberg, where he intended to stand on the defensive until the arrival of the Russians.

[Mack at Ulm, October.]

[Capitulation of Ulm, Oct. 17.]

Here, in the first days of October, he became aware of the presence of French troops, not only in front but to the east of his own position. With some misgiving as to the situation of the enemy, Mack nevertheless refused to fall back from Ulm. Another week revealed the true state of affairs. Before the Russians were anywhere near Bavaria, the vanguard of Napoleon's Army of the Channel and the Army of Hanover had crossed North-Western Germany, and seized the roads by which Mack had advanced from Vienna. Every hour that Mack remained in Ulm brought new divisions of the French into the Bavarian towns and villages behind him. Escape was only possible by a retreat into the Tyrol, or by breaking through the French line while it was yet incompletely formed. Resolute action might still have saved the Austrian army; but the only energy that was shown was shown in opposition to the general. The Archduke Ferdinand, who was the titular commander-in-chief, cut his way through the French with part of the cavalry; Mack remained in Ulm, and the iron circle closed around him. At the last moment, after the hopelessness of the situation had become clear even to himself, Mack was seized by an illusion that some great disaster had befallen the French in their rear, and that in the course of a few days Napoleon would be in full retreat. "Let no man utter the word 'Surrender'"-he proclaimed in an order of October 15th-"the enemy is in the most fearful straits; it is impossible that he can continue more than a few days in the neighbourhood. If provisions run short, we have three thousand horses to nourish us." "I myself," continued the general, "will be the first to eat horseflesh." Two days later the inevitable capitulation took place; and Mack with 25,000 men, fell into the hands of the enemy without striking a blow. A still greater number of the Austrians outside Ulm surrendered in detachments.  [114]

[Trafalgar, Oct. 21.]

[Effects.]

All France read with wonder Napoleon's bulletins describing the capture of an entire army and the approaching presentation of forty Austrian standards to the Senate at Paris. No imperial rhetoric acquainted the nation with an event which, within four days of the capitulation of Ulm, inflicted a heavier blow on France than Napoleon himself had ever dealt to any adversary. On the 21st of October Nelson's crowning victory of Trafalgar, won over Villeneuve venturing out from Cadiz, annihilated the combined fleets of France and Spain. Nelson fell in the moment of his triumph; but the work which his last hours had achieved was one to which years prolonged in glory could have added nothing. He had made an end of the power of France upon the sea. Trafalgar was not only the greatest naval victory, it was the greatest and most momentous victory won either by land or by sea during the whole of the Revolutionary War. No victory, and no series of victories, of Napoleon produced the same effect upon Europe. Austria was in arms within five years of Marengo, and within four years of Austerlitz; Prussia was ready to retrieve the losses of Jena in 1813; a generation passed after Trafalgar before France again seriously threatened England at sea. The prospect of crushing the British navy, so long as England had the means to equip a navy, vanished: Napoleon henceforth set his hopes on exhausting England's resources by compelling every State on the Continent to exclude her commerce. Trafalgar forced him to impose his yoke upon all Europe, or to abandon the hope of conquering Great Britain. If national love and pride have idealised in our great sailor a character which, with its Homeric force and freshness, combined something of the violence and the self-love of the heroes of a rude age, the common estimate of Nelson's work in history is not beyond the truth. So long as France possessed a navy, Nelson sustained the spirit of England by his victories; his last triumph left England in such a position that no means remained to injure her but those which must result in the ultimate deliverance of the Continent.

[Treaty of Potsdam, Nov. 3.]

[Violation of Prussian territory.]

The consequences of Trafalgar lay in the future; the military situation in Germany after Mack's catastrophe was such that nothing could keep the army of Napoleon out of Vienna. In the sudden awakening of Europe to its danger, one solitary gleam of hope appeared in the attitude of the Prussian Court. Napoleon had not scrupled, in his anxiety for the arrival of the Army of Hanover, to order Bernadotte, its commander, to march through the Prussian territory of Anspach, which lay on his direct route towards Ulm. It was subsequently alleged by the Allies that Bernadotte's violation of Prussian neutrality had actually saved him from arriving too late to prevent Mack's escape; but, apart from all imaginary grounds of reproach, the insult offered to Prussia by Napoleon was sufficient to incline even Frederick William to decided action. Some weeks earlier the approach of Russian forces to his frontier had led Frederick William to arm; the French had now more than carried out what the Russians had only suggested. When the outrage was made known to the King of Prussia, that cold and reserved monarch displayed an emotion which those who surrounded him had seldom witnessed.  [115] The Czar was forthwith offered a free passage for his armies through Silesia; and, before the news of Mack's capitulation reached the Russian frontier, Alexander himself was on the way to Berlin. The result of the deliberations of the two monarchs was the Treaty of Potsdam, signed on November 3rd. By this treaty Prussia undertook to demand from Napoleon an indemnity for the King of Piedmont, and the evacuation of Germany, Switzerland, and Holland: failing Napoleon's acceptance of Prussia's mediation upon these terms, Prussia engaged to take the field with 180,000 men.

[French enter Vienna, Nov. 13.]

Napoleon was now close upon Vienna. A few days after the capitulation of Ulm thirty thousand Russians, commanded by General Kutusoff, had reached Bavaria; but Mack's disaster rendered it impossible to defend the line of the Inn, and the last detachments of the Allies disappeared as soon as Napoleon's vanguard approached the river. The French pushed forth in overpowering strength upon the capital. Kutusoff and the weakened Austrian army could neither defend Vienna nor meet the invader in the field. It was resolved to abandon the city, and to unite the retreating forces on the northern side of the Danube with a second Russian army now entering Moravia. On the 7th of November the Court quitted Vienna. Six days later the French entered the capital, and by an audacious stratagem of Murat's gained possession of the bridge connecting the city with the north bank of the Danube, at the moment when the Austrian gunners were about to blow it into the air.  [116] The capture of this bridge deprived the allied army of the last object protecting it from Napoleon's pursuit. Vienna remained in the possession of the French. All the resources of a great capital were now added to the means of the conqueror; and Napoleon prepared to follow his retreating adversary beyond the Danube, and to annihilate him before he could reach his supports.

[The Allies and Napoleon in Moravia, Nov.]

The retreat of the Russian army into Moravia was conducted with great skill by General Kutusoff, who retorted upon Murat the stratagem practised at the bridge of Vienna, and by means of a pretended armistice effected his junction with the newly-arrived Russian corps between Olmütz and Brünn. Napoleon's anger at the escape of his prey was shown in the bitterness of his attacks upon Murat. The junction of the allied armies in Moravia had in fact most seriously altered the prospects of the war. For the first time since the opening of the campaign, the Allies had concentrated a force superior in numbers to anything that Napoleon could bring against it. It was impossible for Napoleon, while compelled to protect himself on the Italian side, to lead more than 70,000 men into Moravia. The Allies had now 80,000 in camp, with the prospect of receiving heavy reinforcements. The war, which lately seemed to be at its close, might now, in the hands of a skilful general, be but beginning. Although the lines of Napoleon's communication with France were well guarded, his position in the heart of Europe exposed him to many perils; the Archduke Charles had defeated Massena at Caldiero on the Adige, and was hastening northwards; above all, the army of Prussia was preparing to enter the field. Every mile that Napoleon advanced into Moravia increased the strain upon his resources; every day that postponed the decision of the campaign brought new strength to his enemies. Merely to keep the French in their camp until a Prussian force was ready to assail their communications seemed enough to ensure the Allies victory; and such was the counsel of Kutusoff, who made war in the temper of the wariest diplomatist. But the scarcity of provisions was telling upon the discipline of the army, and the Czar was eager for battle.  [117] The Emperor Francis gave way to the ardour of his allies. Weyrother, the Austrian chief of the staff, drew up the most scientific plans for a great victory that had ever been seen even at the Austrian head-quarters; and towards the end of November it was agreed by the two Emperors that the allied army should march right round Napoleon's position near Brünn, and fight a battle with the object of cutting off his retreat upon Vienna.

[Haugwitz comes with Prussian demands to Napoleon, Nov. 28.]

[Haugwitz goes away to Vienna.]

It was in the days immediately preceding the intended battle, and after Napoleon had divined the plans of his enemy, that Count Haugwitz, bearing the demands of the Cabinet of Berlin, reached the French camp at Brünn.  [118] Napoleon had already heard something of the Treaty of Potsdam, and was aware that Haugwitz had started from Berlin. He had no intention of making any of those concessions which Prussia required; at the same time it was of vital importance to him to avoid the issue of a declaration of war by Prussia, which would nerve both Austria and Russia to the last extremities. He therefore resolved to prevent Haugwitz by every possible method from delivering his ultimatum, until a decisive victory over the allied armies should have entirely changed the political situation. The Prussian envoy himself played into Napoleon's hands. Haugwitz had obtained a disgraceful permission from his sovereign to submit to all Napoleon's wishes, if, before his arrival, Austria should be separately treating for peace; and he had an excuse for delay in the fact that the military preparations of Prussia were not capable of being completed before the middle of December. He passed twelve days on the journey from Berlin, and presented himself before Napoleon on the 28th of November. The Emperor, after a long conversation, requested that he would proceed to Vienna and transact business with Talleyrand. He was weak enough to permit himself to be removed to a distance with his ultimatum to Napoleon undelivered. When next the Prussian Government heard of their envoy, he was sauntering in Talleyrand's drawing-rooms at Vienna, with the cordon of the French Legion of Honour on his breast, exchanging civilities with officials who politely declined to enter upon any question of business.

[Austerlitz, Dec. 2.]

[Armistice, Dec. 4.]

Haugwitz once removed to Vienna, and the Allies thus deprived of the certainty that Prussia would take the field, Napoleon trusted that a single great defeat would suffice to break up the Coalition. The movements of the Allies were exactly those which he expected and desired. He chose his own positions between Brünn and Austerlitz in the full confidence of victory; and on the morning of the 2nd of December, when the mists disappeared before a bright wintry sun, he saw with the utmost delight that the Russian columns were moving round him in a vast arc, in execution of the turning-movement of which he had forewarned his own army on the day before. Napoleon waited until the foremost columns were stretched far in advance of their supports; then, throwing Soult's division upon the gap left in the centre of the allied line, he cut the army into halves, and crushed its severed divisions at every point along the whole line of attack. The Allies, although they outnumbered Napoleon, believed themselves to be overpowered by an army double their own size. The incoherence of the allied movements was as marked as the unity and effectiveness of those of the French. It was alleged in the army that Kutusoff, the commander-in-chief, had fallen asleep while the Austrian Weyrother was expounding his plans for the battle; a truer explanation of the palpable errors in the allied generalship was that the Russian commander had been forced by the Czar to carry out a plan of which he disapproved. The destruction in the ranks of the Allies was enormous, for the Russians fought with the same obstinacy as at the Trebbia and at Novi. Austria had lost a second army in addition to its capital; and the one condition which could have steeled its Government against all thoughts of peace-the certainty of an immediate Prussian attack upon Napoleon-had vanished with the silent disappearance of the Prussian envoy. Two days after the battle, the Emperor Francis met his conqueror in the open field, and accepted an armistice, which involved the withdrawal of the Russian army from his dominions.

[Haugwitz signs Treaty with Napoleon, Dec. 15.]

Yet even now the Czar sent appeals to Berlin for help, and the negotiation begun by Austria would possibly have been broken off if help had been given. But the Cabinet of Frederick William had itself determined to evade its engagements; and as soon as the news of Austerlitz reached Vienna, Haugwitz had gone over heart and soul to the conqueror. While negotiations for peace were carried on between France and Austria, a parallel negotiation was carried on with the envoy of Prussia; and even before the Emperor Francis gave way to the conqueror's demands, Haugwitz signed a treaty with Napoleon at Schönbrunn, by which Prussia, instead of attacking Napoleon, entered into an alliance with him, and received from him in return the dominion of Hanover (December 15, 1805).  [119] Had Prussia been the defeated power at Austerlitz, the Treaty of Schönbrunn could not have more completely reversed the policy to which King Frederick William had pledged himself six weeks before. While Haugwitz was making his pact with Napoleon, Hardenberg had been arranging with an English envoy for the combination of English and Russian forces in Northern Germany.  [120]

There were some among the King's advisers who declared that the treaty must be repudiated, and the envoy disgraced. But the catastrophe of Austerlitz, and the knowledge that the Government of Vienna was entering upon a separate negotiation, had damped the courage of the men in power. The conduct of Haugwitz was first excused, then supported, then admired. The Duke of Brunswick disgraced himself by representing to the French Ambassador in Berlin that the whole course of Prussian policy since the beginning of the campaign had been an elaborate piece of dissimulation in the interest of France. The leaders of the patriotic party in the army found themselves without influence or following; the mass of the nation looked on with the same stupid unconcern with which it had viewed every event of the last twenty years. The King finally decided that the treaty by which Haugwitz had thrown the obligations of his country to the winds should be ratified, with certain modifications, including one that should nominally reserve to King George III. a voice in the disposal of Hanover.  [121]

[Treaty of Presburg, Dec. 27.]

[End of the Holy Roman Empire, Aug. 6, 1806.]

Ten days after the departure of the Prussian envoy from Vienna, peace was concluded between France and Austria by the Treaty of Presburg  [122] (December 27). At the outbreak of the war Napoleon had declared to his army that he would not again spare Austria, as he had spared her at Campo Formio and at Lunéville; and he kept his word. The Peace of Presburg left the Austrian State in a condition very different from that in which it had emerged from the two previous wars. The Treaty of Campo Formio had only deprived Austria of Belgium in order to replace it by Venice; the Settlement of Lunéville had only substituted French for Austrian influence in Western Germany: the Treaty that followed the battle of Austerlitz wrested from the House of Hapsburg two of its most important provinces, and cut it off at once from Italy, from Switzerland, and from the Rhine. Venetia was ceded to Napoleon's kingdom of Italy; the Tyrol was ceded to Bavaria; the outlying districts belonging to Austria in Western Germany were ceded to Baden and to Würtemberg. Austria lost 28,000 square miles of territory and 3,000,000 inhabitants. The Emperor recognised the sovereignty and independence of Bavaria, Baden, and Würtemberg, and renounced all rights over those countries as head of the Germanic Body. The Electors of Bavaria and Würtemberg, along with a large increase of territory, received the title of King. The constitution of the Empire ceased to exist even in name. It only remained for its chief, the successor of the Roman Cæsars, to abandon his title at Napoleon's bidding; and on the 6th of August, 1806, an Act, published by Francis II. at Vienna, made an end of the outworn and dishonoured fiction of a Holy Roman Empire.

[Naples given to Joseph Bonaparte.]

Though Russia had not made peace with Napoleon, the European Coalition was at an end. Now, as in 1801, the defeat of the Austrian armies left the Neapolitan Monarchy to settle its account with the conqueror. Naples had struck no blow; but it was only through the delays of the Allies that the Neapolitan army had not united with an English and a Russian force in an attack upon Lombardy. What had been pardoned in 1801 was now avenged upon the Bourbon despot of Naples and his Austrian Queen, who from the first had shown such bitter enmity to France. Assuming the character of a judge over the sovereigns of Europe, Napoleon pronounced from Vienna that the House of Naples had ceased to reign (Dec. 27, 1805). The sentence was immediately carried into execution. Ferdinand fled, as he had fled in 1798, to place himself under the protection of the navy of Great Britain. The vacant throne was given by Napoleon to his own brother, Joseph Bonaparte. Ferdinand, with the help of the English fleet, maintained himself in Sicily. A thread of sea two miles broad was sufficient barrier against the Power which had subdued half the Continent; and no attempt was made either by Napoleon or his brother to gain a footing beyond the Straits of Messina. In Southern Italy the same fanatical movements took place among the peasantry as in the previous period of French occupation. When the armies of Austria and Russia were crushed, and the continent lay at the mercy of France, Great Britain imagined that it could effect something against Napoleon in a corner of Italy, with the help of some ferocious villagers. A British force, landing near Maida, on the Calabrian coast, in the summer of 1806, had the satisfaction of defeating the French at the point of the bayonet, of exciting a horde of priests and brigands to fruitless barbarities, and of abandoning them to their well-merited chastisement.

[Battle of Maida, July 6, 1806.]

[The Empire. Napoleonic dynasty and titles.]

The elevation of Napoleon's brother Joseph to the throne of Naples was the first of a series of appointments now made by Napoleon in the character of Emperor of the West. He began to style himself the new Charlemagne; his thoughts and his language were filled with pictures of universal sovereignty; his authority, as a military despot who had crushed his neighbours, became strangely confused in his own mind with that half-sacred right of the Cæsars from which the Middle Ages derived all subordinate forms of power. He began to treat the government of the different countries of Western Europe as a function to be exercised by delegation from himself. Even the territorial grants which under the Feudal System accompanied military or civil office were now revived and the commander of a French army-corps or the chief of the French Foreign Office became the titular lord of some obscure Italian principality.  [123] Napoleon's own family were to reign in many lands, as the Bourbons and the Hapsburgs had reigned before them, but in strict dependence on their head. Joseph Bonaparte had not long been installed at Naples when his brother Louis was compelled to accept the Crown of Holland. Jerome, for whom no kingdom was at present vacant, was forced to renounce his American wife, in order that he might marry the daughter of the King of Würtemberg. Eugène Beauharnais, Napoleon's step-son, held the office of Viceroy of Italy; Murat, who had married Napoleon's sister, had the German Duchy of Berg. Bernadotte, Talleyrand, and Berthier found themselves suzerains of districts whose names were almost unknown to them. Out of the revenues of Northern Italy a yearly sum was reserved as an endowment for the generals whom the Emperor chose to raise to princely honours.

[Federation of the Rhine.]

More statesmanlike, more practical than Napoleon's dynastic policy, was his organisation of Western Germany under its native princes as a dependency of France. The object at which all French politicians had aimed since the outbreak of the Revolutionary War, the exclusion of both Austria and Prussia from influence in Western Germany, was now completely attained. The triumph of French statesmanship, the consummation of two centuries of German discord, was seen in the Act of Federation subscribed by the Western German Sovereigns in the summer of 1806. By this Act the Kings of Bavaria and Würtemberg, the Elector of Baden, and thirteen minor princes, united themselves, in the League known as the Rhenish Confederacy, under the protection of the French Emperor, and undertook to furnish contingents, amounting to 63,000 men, in all wars in which the French Empire should engage. Their connection with the ancient Germanic Body was completely severed; the very town in which the Diet of the Empire had held its meetings was annexed by one of the members of the Confederacy. The Confederacy itself, with a population of 8,000,000, became for all purposes of war and foreign policy a part of France. Its armies were organised by French officers; its frontiers were fortified by French engineers; its treaties were made for it at Paris. In the domestic changes which took place within these States the work of consolidation begun in 1801 was carried forward with increased vigour. Scores of tiny principalities which had escaped dissolution in the earlier movement were now absorbed by their stronger neighbours. Governments became more energetic, more orderly, more ambitious. The princes who made themselves the vassals of Napoleon assumed a more despotic power over their own subjects. Old constitutional forms which had imposed some check on the will of the sovereign, like the Estates of Würtemberg, were contemptuously suppressed; the careless, ineffective routine of the last age gave place to a system of rigorous precision throughout the public services. Military service was enforced in countries hitherto free from it. The burdens of the people became greater, but they were more fairly distributed. The taxes were more equally levied; justice was made more regular and more simple. A career both in the army and the offices of Government was opened to a people to whom the very conception of public life had hitherto been unknown.

[No national unity in Germany.]

The establishment of German unity in our own day after a victorious struggle with France renders it difficult to imagine the voluntary submission of a great part of the race to a French sovereign, or to excuse a policy which, like that of 1806, appears the opposite of everything honourable and patriotic. But what seems strange now was not strange then. No expression more truly describes the conditions of that period than one of the great German poet who was himself so little of a patriot. "Germany," said Goethe, "is not a nation." Germany had indeed the unity of race; but all that truly constitutes a nation, the sense of common interest, a common history, pride, and desire, Germany did not possess at all. Bavaria, the strongest of the western States, attached itself to France from a well-grounded fear of Austrian aggression. To be conquered by Austria was just as much conquest for Bavaria as to be conquered by any other Power; it was no step to German unity, but a step in the aggrandisement of the House of Hapsburg. The interests of the Austrian House were not the interests of Germany any more than they were the interests of Croatia, or of Venice, or of Hungary. Nor, on the other hand, had Prussia yet shown a form of political life sufficiently attractive to lead the southern States to desire to unite with it. Frederick's genius had indeed made him the hero of Germany, but his military system was harsh and tyrannical. In the actual condition of Austria and Prussia, it is doubtful whether the population of the minor States would have been happier united to these Powers than under their own Governments. Conquest in any case was impossible, and there was nothing to stimulate to voluntary union. It followed that the smaller States were destined to remain without a nationality, until the violence of some foreign Power rendered weakness an intolerable evil, and forced upon the better minds of Germany the thought of a common Fatherland.

[What German unity desirable.]

The necessity of German unity is no self-evident political truth. Holland and Switzerland in past centuries detached themselves from the Empire, and became independent States, with the highest advantage to themselves. Identity of blood is no more conclusive reason for political union between Holstein and the Tyrol than between Great Britain and the United States of America. The conditions which determine both the true area and the true quality of German unity are, in fact, something more complex than an ethnological law or an outburst of patriotic indignation against the French. Where local circumstances rendered it possible for a German district, after detaching itself from the race, to maintain a real national life and defend itself from foreign conquest, there it was perhaps better that the connection with Germany should be severed; where, as in the great majority of minor States, independence resulted only in military helplessness and internal stagnation, there it was better that independence should give place to German unity. But the conditions of any tolerable unity were not present so long as Austria was the leading Power. Less was imperilled in the future of the German people by the submission of the western States to France than would have been lost by their permanent incorporation under Austria.

[The Empire of 1806 might have been permanent.]

[Limits of a possible Napoleonic Empire.]

With the establishment of the Rhenish Confederacy and the conquest of Naples, Napoleon's empire reached, but did not overpass, the limits within which the sovereignty of France might probably have been long maintained. It has been usual to draw the line between the sound statesmanship and the hazardous enterprises of Napoleon at the Peace of Lunéville: a juster appreciation of the condition of Western Europe would perhaps include within the range of a practical, though mischievous, ideal the whole of the political changes which immediately followed the war of 1805, and which extended Napoleon's dominion to the Inn and to the Straits of Messina. Italy and Germany were not then what they have since become. The districts that lay between the Rhine and the Inn were not more hostile to the foreigner than those Rhenish Provinces which so readily accepted their union with France. The more enterprising minds in Italy found that the Napoleonic rule, with all its faults, was superior to anything that Italy had known in recent times. If we may judge from the feeling with which Napoleon was regarded in Germany down to the middle of the year 1806, and in Italy down to a much later date, the Empire then founded might have been permanently upheld, if Napoleon had abstained from attacking other States. No comparison can be made between the attractive power exercised by the social equality of France, its military glory, and its good administration, and the slow and feeble process of assimilation which went on within the dominions of Austria; yet Austria succeeded in uniting a greater variety of races than France sought to unite in 1806. The limits of a possible France were indeed fixed, and fixed more firmly than by any geographical line, in the history and national character of two other peoples. France could not permanently overpower Prussia, and it could not permanently overpower Spain. But within a boundary-line drawn roughly from the mouth of the Elbe to the head of the Adriatic, that union of national sentiment and material force which checks the formation of empires did not exist. The true turning-point in Napoleon's career was the moment when he passed beyond the policy which had planned the Federation of the Rhine, and roused by his oppression the one State which was still capable of giving a national life to Germany.

CHAPTER VII.

Death of Pitt-Ministry of Fox and Grenville-Napoleon forces Prussia into War with England, and then offers Hanover to England-Prussia resolves on War with Napoleon-State of Prussia-Decline of the Army-Southern Germany with Napoleon-Austria Neutral-England and Russia about to help Prussia, but not immediately-Campaign of 1806-Battles of Jena and Auerstädt-Ruin of the Prussian Army-Capitulation of Fortresses-Demands of Napoleon-The War continues-Berlin Decree-Exclusion of English Goods from the Continent-Russia enters the War-Campaign in Poland and East Prussia-Eylau-Treaty of Bartenstein-Friedland-Interview at Tilsit-Alliance of Napoleon and Alexander-Secret Articles-English Expedition to Denmark-The French enter Portugal-Prussia after the Peace of Tilsit-Stein's Edict of Emancipation-The Prussian Peasant-Reform of the Prussian Army, and Creation of Municipalities-Stein's other Projects of Reform, which are not carried out.

[Death of Pitt, Jan. 23rd, 1806.]

[Coalition Ministry of Fox and Grenville.]

Six weeks after the tidings of Austerlitz reached Great Britain, the statesman who had been the soul of every European coalition against France was carried to the grave.  [124] Pitt passed away at a moment of the deepest gloom. His victories at sea appeared to have effected nothing; his combinations on land had ended in disaster and ruin. If during Pitt's lifetime a just sense of the greatness and patriotism of all his aims condoned the innumerable faults of his military administration, that personal ascendancy which might have disarmed criticism even after the disaster of Austerlitz belonged to no other member of his Ministry. His colleagues felt their position to be hopeless. Though the King attempted to set one of Pitt's subordinates in the vacant place, the prospects of Europe were too dark, the situation of the country too serious, to allow a Ministry to be formed upon the ordinary principles of party-organisation or in accordance with the personal preferences of the monarch. The nation called for the union of the ablest men of all parties in the work of government; and, in spite of the life-long hatred of King George to Mr. Fox, a Ministry entered upon office framed by Fox and Grenville conjointly; Fox taking the post of Foreign Secretary, with a leading influence in the Cabinet, and yielding to Grenville the title of Premier. Addington received a place in the Ministry, and carried with him the support of a section of the Tory party, which was willing to countenance a policy of peace.

[Napoleon hopes to intimidate Fox through Prussia.]

Fox had from the first given his whole sympathy to the French Revolution, as the cause of freedom. He had ascribed the calamities of Europe to the intervention of foreign Powers in favour of the Bourbon monarchy: he had palliated the aggressions of the French Republic as the consequences of unjust and unprovoked attack: even the extinction of liberty in France itself had not wholly destroyed his faith in the honour and the generosity of the soldier of the Revolution. In the brief interval of peace which in 1802 opened the Continent to English travellers, Fox had been the guest of the First Consul. His personal feeling towards the French Government had in it nothing of that proud and suspicious hatred which made negotiation so difficult while Pitt continued in power. It was believed at Paris, and with good reason, that the first object of Fox on entering upon office would be the restoration of peace. Napoleon adopted his own plan in view of the change likely to arise in the spirit of the British Cabinet. It was his habit, wherever he saw signs of concession, to apply more violent means of intimidation. In the present instance he determined to work upon the pacific leanings of Fox by adding Prussia to the forces arrayed against Great Britain. Prussia, isolated and discredited since the battle of Austerlitz, might first be driven into hostilities with England, and then be made to furnish the very satisfaction demanded by England as the primary condition of peace.

[The King of Prussia wishes to disguise the cession of Hanover.]

[Napoleon forces Prussia into war with England, March, 1806.]

At the moment when Napoleon heard of Pitt's death, he was expecting the arrival of Count Haugwitz at Paris for the purpose of obtaining some modification in the treaty which he had signed on behalf of Prussia after the battle of Austerlitz. The principal feature in that treaty had been the grant of Hanover to Prussia by the French Emperor in return for its alliance. This was the point which above all others excited King Frederick William's fears and scruples. He desired to retain Hanover, but he also desired to derive his title rather from its English owner than from its French invader. It was the object of Haugwitz' visit to Paris to obtain an alteration in the terms of the treaty which should make the Prussian occupation of Hanover appear to be merely provisional, and reserve to the King of England at least a nominal voice in its ultimate transfer. In full confidence that Napoleon would agree to such a change, the King of Prussia had concealed the fact of its cession to himself by Napoleon, and published an untruthful proclamation, stating that, in the interests of the Hanoverian people themselves, a treaty had been signed and ratified by the French and Prussian Governments, in virtue of which Hanover was placed under the protection of the King of Prussia until peace should be concluded between Great Britain and France. The British Government received assurances of Prussia's respect for the rights of King George III.: the bitter truth that the treaty between France and Prussia contained no single word reserving the rights of the Elector, and that the very idea of qualifying the absolute cession of Hanover was an afterthought, lay hidden in the conscience of the Prussian Cabinet. Never had a Government more completely placed itself at the mercy of a pitiless enemy. Count Haugwitz, on reaching Paris, was received by Napoleon with a storm of invective against the supposed partisans of England at the Prussian Court. Napoleon declared that the ill faith of Prussia had made an end even of that miserable pact which had been extorted after Austerlitz, and insisted that King Frederick William should openly defy Great Britain by closing the ports of Northern Germany to British vessels, and by declaring himself endowed by Napoleon with Hanover in virtue of Napoleon's own right of conquest. Haugwitz signed a second and more humiliating treaty embodying these conditions; and the Prussian Government, now brought into the depths of contempt, but unready for immediate war, executed the orders of its master.  [125] A proclamation, stating that Prussia had received the absolute dominion of Hanover from its conqueror Napoleon, gave the lie to the earlier announcements of King Frederick William. A decree was published excluding the ships of England from the ports of Prussia and from those of Hanover itself (March 28, 1806). It was promptly answered by the seizure of four hundred Prussian vessels in British harbours, and by the total extinction of Prussian maritime commerce by British privateers.  [126]

[Napoleon negotiates with Fox. Offers Hanover to England.]

Scarcely was Prussia committed to this ruinous conflict with Great Britain, when Napoleon opened negotiations for peace with Mr. Fox's Government. The first condition required by Great Britain was the restitution of Hanover to King George III. It was unhesitatingly granted by Napoleon.  [127] Thus was Prussia to be mocked of its prey, after it had been robbed of all its honour. For the present, however, no rumour of this part of the negotiation reached Berlin. The negotiation itself, which dragged on through several months, turned chiefly upon the future ownership of Sicily. Napoleon had in the first instance agreed that Sicily should be left in the hands of Ferdinand of Naples, who had never been expelled from it by the French. Finding, however, that the Russian envoy d'Oubril, who had been sent to Paris with indefinite instructions by the Emperor Alexander, was willing to separate the cause of Russia from that of England, and to sign a separate peace, Napoleon retracted his promise relating to Sicily, and demanded that this island should be ceded to his brother Joseph. D'Oubril signed Preliminaries on behalf of Russia on the 20th of July, and left the English negotiator to obtain what terms he could. Fox had been willing to recognise the order of things established by Napoleon on the Italian mainland; he would even have ceded Sicily, if Russia had urged this in a joint negotiation; but he was too good a statesman to be cheated out of Sicily by a mere trick. He recalled the English envoy from Paris, and waited for the judgment of the Czar upon the conduct of his own representative. The Czar disavowed d'Oubril's negotiations, and repudiated the treaty which he brought back to St. Petersburg. Napoleon had thus completely overreached himself, and, instead of severing Great Britain and Russia by separate agreements, had only irritated and displeased them both. The negotiations went no further; their importance lay only in the effect which they produced upon Prussia, when Napoleon's offer of Hanover to Great Britain became known at Berlin.

[Prussia learns of Napoleon's offer of Hanover to England, Aug. 7.]

[Prussia determines on war.]

From the time when Haugwitz' second treaty placed his master at Napoleon's feet, Prussia had been subjected to an unbroken series of insults and wrongs. Murat, as Duke of Berg, had seized upon territory allotted to Prussia in the distribution of the ecclesiastical lands; the establishment of a North German Confederacy under Prussian leadership was suggested by Napoleon himself, only to be summarily forbidden as soon as Prussia attempted to carry the proposal into execution. There was scarcely a courtier in Berlin who did not feel that the yoke of the French had become past endurance; even Haugwitz himself now considered war as a question of time. The patriotic party in the capital and the younger officers of the army bitterly denounced the dishonoured Government, and urged the King to strike for the credit of his country.  [128] In the midst of this deepening agitation, a despatch arrived from Lucchesini, the Prussian Ambassador at Paris (August 7), relating the offer of Hanover made by Napoleon to the British Government. For nearly three months Lucchesini had caught no glimpse of the negotiations between Great Britain and France; suddenly, on entering into conversation with the English envoy at a dinner-party, he learnt the blow which Napoleon had intended to deal to Prussia. Lucchesini instantly communicated with the Court of Berlin; but his despatch was opened by Talleyrand's agents before it left Paris, and the French Government was thus placed on its guard against the sudden explosion of Prussian wrath. Lucchesini's despatch had indeed all the importance that Talleyrand attributed to it. It brought that spasmodic access of resolution to the irresolute King which Bernadotte's violation of his territory had brought in the year before. The whole Prussian army was ordered to prepare for war; Brunswick was summoned to form plans of a campaign; and appeals for help were sent to Vienna, to St. Petersburg, and even to the hostile Court of London.

[Condition of Prussia.]

[Ministers not in the King's Cabinet.]

The condition of Prussia at this critical moment was one which filled with the deepest alarm those few patriotic statesmen who were not blinded by national vanity or by slavery to routine. The foreign policy of Prussia in 1805, miserable as it was, had been but a single manifestation of the helplessness, the moral deadness that ran through every part of its official and public life. Early in the year 1806 a paper was drawn up by Stein,  [129] exposing, in language seldom used by a statesman, the character of the men by whom Frederick William was surrounded, and declaring that nothing but a speedy change of system could save the Prussian State from utter downfall and ruin. Two measures of immediate necessity were specified by Stein, the establishment of a responsible council of Ministers, and the removal of Haugwitz and all his friends from power. In the existing system of government the Ministers were not the monarch's confidential advisers. The Ministers performed their work in isolation from one another; the Cabinet, or confidential council of the King, was composed of persons holding no public function, and free from all public responsibility. No guarantee existed that the policy of the country would be the same for two days together. The Ministers were often unaware of the turn that affairs had taken in the Cabinet; and the history of Haugwitz' mission to Austerlitz showed that an individual might commit the State to engagements the very opposite of those which he was sent to contract. The first necessity for Prussia was a responsible governing council: with such a council, formed from the heads of the actual Administration, the reform of the army and of the other branches of the public service, which was absolutely hopeless under the present system, might be attended with some chance of success.

[State of the Prussian Army.]

[Higher officers.]

The army of Prussia, at an epoch when the conscription and the genius of Napoleon had revolutionised the art of war, was nothing but the army of Frederick the Great grown twenty years older.  [130] It was obvious to all the world that its commissariat and marching-regulations belonged to a time when weeks were allowed for movements now reckoned by days; but there were circumstances less conspicuous from the outside which had paralysed the very spirit of soldiership, and prepared the way for a military collapse in which defeats in the field were the least dishonourable event. Old age had rendered the majority of the higher officers totally unfit for military service. In that barrack-like routine of officialism which passed in Prussia for the wisdom of government, the upper ranks of the army formed a species of administrative corps in time of peace, and received for their civil employment double the pay that they could earn in actual war. Aged men, with the rank of majors, colonels, and generals, mouldered in the offices of country towns, and murmured at the very mention of a war, which would deprive them of half their salaries. Except in the case of certain princes, who were placed in high rank while young, and of a few vigorous patriarchs like Blücher, all the energy and military spirit of the army was to be found in men who had not passed the grade of captain. The higher officers were, on an average, nearly double the age of French officers of corresponding rank. [131] Of the twenty-four lieutenant-generals, eighteen were over sixty; the younger ones, with a single exception, were princes. Five out of the seven commanders of infantry were over seventy; even the sixteen cavalry generals included only two who had not reached sixty-five. These were the men who, when the armies of Prussia were beaten in the field, surrendered its fortresses with as little concern as if they had been receiving the French on a visit of ceremony. Their vanity was as lamentable as their faint-heartedness. "The army of his Majesty," said General Rüchel on parade, "possesses several generals equal to Bonaparte." Faults of another character belonged to the generation which had grown up since Frederick. The arrogance and licentiousness of the younger officers was such that their ruin on the field of Jena caused positive joy to a great part of the middle classes of Prussia. But, however hateful their manners, and however rash their self-confidence, the vices of these younger men had no direct connection with the disasters of 1806. The gallants who sharpened their swords on the window-sill of the French Ambassador received a bitter lesson from the plebeian troopers of Murat; but they showed courage in disaster, and subsequently gave to their country many officers of ability and honour.

[Common soldiers.]

What was bad in the higher grades of the army was not retrieved by any excellence on the part of the private soldier. The Prussian army was recruited in part from foreigners, but chiefly from Prussian serfs, who were compelled to serve. Men remained with their regiments till old age; the rough character of the soldiers and the frequency of crimes and desertions occasioned the use of brutal punishments, which made the military service an object of horror to the better part of the middle and lower classes. The soldiers themselves, who could be flogged and drilled into high military perfection by a great general like Frederick, felt a surly indifference to their present taskmasters, and were ready to desert in masses to their homes as soon as a defeat broke up the regimental muster and roll-call. A proposal made in the previous year to introduce that system of general service which has since made Prussia so great a military power was rejected by a committee of generals, on the ground that it "would convert the most formidable army of Europe into a militia." But whether Prussia entered the war with a militia or a regular army, under the men who held command in 1806 it could have met with but one fate. Neither soldiery nor fortresses could have saved a kingdom whose generals knew only how to capitulate.

[Southern Germany. Execution of Palm, Aug. 26.]

All southern Germany was still in Napoleon's hands. As the probability of a war with Prussia became greater and greater, Napoleon had tightened his grasp upon the Confederate States. Publications originating among the patriotic circles of Austria were beginning to appeal to the German people to unite against a foreign oppressor. An anonymous pamphlet, entitled "Germany in its Deep Humiliation," was sold by various booksellers in Bavaria, among others by Palm, a citizen of Nuremberg. There is no evidence that Palm was even acquainted with the contents of the pamphlet; but as in the case of the Duke of Enghien, two years before, Napoleon had required a victim to terrify the House of Bourbon, so now he required a victim to terrify those who among the German people might be inclined to listen to the call of patriotism. Palm was not too obscure for the new Charlemagne. The innocent and unoffending man, innocent even of the honourable crime of attempting to save his country, was dragged before a tribunal of French soldiers, and executed within twenty-four hours, in pursuance of the imperative orders of Napoleon (August 26). The murder was an unnecessary one, for the Bavarians and the Würtembergers were in fact content with the yoke they bore; its only effect was to arouse among a patient and home-loving class the doubt whether the German citizen and his family might not after all have some interest in the preservation of national independence.

[Austria neutral. England and Russia can give Prussia no prompt help.]

When, several years later, the oppressions of Napoleon had given to a great part of the German race at least the transient nobleness of a real patriotism, the story of Palm's death was one of those that kindled the bitterest sense of wrong: at the time, it exercised no influence upon the course of political events. Southern Germany remained passive, and supplied Napoleon with a reserve of soldiers: Prussia had to look elsewhere for allies. Its prospects of receiving support were good, if the war should prove a protracted one, but not otherwise. Austria, crippled by the disasters of 1805, could only hope to renew the struggle if victory should declare against Napoleon. In other quarters help might be promised, but it could not be given at the time and at the place where it was needed. The Czar proffered the whole forces of his Empire; King George III. forgave the despoilers of his patrimony when he found that they really intended to fight the French; but the troops of Alexander lay far in the East, and the action of England in any Continental war was certain to be dilatory and ineffective. Prussia was exposed to the first shock of the war alone. In the existing situation of the French armies, a blow unusually swift and crushing might well be expected by all who understood Napoleon's warfare.

[Situation of the French and Prussian armies, Sept., 1806.]

[French on the Main.]

[Prussians on the Saale.]

A hundred and seventy thousand French soldiers, with contingents from the Rhenish Confederate States, lay between the Main and the Inn. The last weeks of peace, in which the Prussian Government imagined themselves to be deceiving the enemy while they pushed forward their own preparations, were employed by Napoleon in quietly concentrating this vast force upon the Main (September, 1806). Napoleon himself appeared to be absorbed in friendly negotiations with General Knobelsdorff, the new Prussian Ambassador at Paris. In order to lull Napoleon's suspicions, Haugwitz had recalled Lucchesini from Paris, and intentionally deceived his successor as to the real designs of the Prussian Cabinet. Knobelsdorff confidentially informed the Emperor that Prussia was not serious in its preparations for war. Napoleon, caring very little whether Prussia intended to fight or not, continued at Paris in the appearance of the greatest calm, while his lieutenants in Southern Germany executed those unobserved movements which were to collect the entire army upon the Upper Main. In the meantime the advisers of King Frederick William supposed themselves to have made everything ready for a vigorous offensive. Divisions of the Prussian army, numbering nearly 130,000 men, were concentrated in the neighbourhood of Jena, on the Saale. The bolder spirits in the military council pressed for an immediate advance through the Thuringian Forest, and for an attack upon what were supposed to be the scattered detachments of the French in Bavaria. Military pride and all the traditions of the Great Frederick impelled Prussia to take the offensive rather than to wait for the enemy upon the strong line of the Elbe. Political motives pointed in the same direction, for the support of Saxony was doubtful if once the French were permitted to approach Dresden.

[Confusion of the Prussians.]

On the 23rd of September King Frederick William arrived at the head-quarters of the army, which were now at Naumburg, on the Saale. But his presence brought no controlling mind to the direction of affairs. Councils of war held on the two succeeding days only revealed the discord and the irresolution of the military leaders of Prussia. Brunswick, the commander-in-chief, sketched the boldest plans, and shrank from the responsibility of executing them. Hohenlohe, who commanded the left wing, lost no opportunity of opposing his superior; the suggestions of officers of real ability, like Scharnhorst, chief of the staff, fell unnoticed among the wrangling of pedants and partisans. Brunswick, himself a man of great intelligence though of little resolution, saw the true quality of the men who surrounded him. "Rüchel," he cried, "is a tin trumpet, Möllendorf a dotard, Kalkreuth a cunning trickster. The generals of division are a set of stupid journeymen. Are these the people with whom one can make war on Napoleon? No. The best service that I could render to the King would be to persuade him to keep the peace."  [132] It was ultimately decided, after two days of argument, that the army should advance through the Thuringian Forest, while feints on the right and left deceived the French as to its real direction. The diplomatists, however, who were mad enough to think that an ultimatum which they had just despatched to Paris would bring Napoleon on to his knees, insisted that the opening of hostilities should be deferred till the 8th of October, when the term of grace which they had given to Napoleon would expire.

[Prussians at Erfurt, Oct. 4.]

A few days after this decision had been formed, intelligence arrived at head-quarters that Napoleon himself was upon the Rhine. Before the ultimatum reached the hands of General Knobelsdorff in Paris, Napoleon had quitted the capital, and the astonished Ambassador could only send the ultimatum in pursuit of him after he had gone to place himself at the head of 200,000 men. The news that Napoleon was actually in Mainz confounded the diplomatists in the Prussian camp, and produced an order for an immediate advance. This was the wisest as well as the boldest determination that had yet been formed; and an instant assault upon the French divisions on the Main might perhaps even now have given the Prussian army the superiority in the first encounter. But some fatal excuse was always at hand to justify Brunswick in receding from his resolutions. A positive assurance was brought into camp by Lucchesini that Napoleon had laid his plans for remaining on the defensive on the south of the Thuringian Forest. If this were true, there might yet be time to improve the plan of the campaign; and on the 4th of October, when every hour was of priceless value, the forward march was arrested, and a new series of deliberations began at the head-quarters at Erfurt. In the council held on the 4th of October, a total change in the plan of operations was urged by Hohenlohe's staff. They contended, and rightly, that it was the design of Napoleon to pass the Prussian army on the east by the valley of the Saale, and to cut it off from the roads to the Elbe. The delay in Brunswick's movements had in fact brought the French within striking distance of the Prussian communications. Hohenlohe urged the King to draw back the army from Erfurt to the Saale, or even to the east of it, in order to cover the roads to Leipzig and the Elbe. His theory of Napoleon's movements, which was the correct one, was adopted by the council, and the advance into the Thuringian Forest was abandoned; but instead of immediately marching eastwards with the whole army, the generals wasted two more days in hesitations and half-measures. At length it was agreed that Hohenlohe should take post at Jena, and that the mass of the army should fall back to Weimar, with the object of striking a blow at some undetermined point on the line of Napoleon's advance.

[Encounter at Saalfeld, Oct. 10.]

[Napoleon defeats Hohenlohe at Jena, Oct. 14.]

[Davoust defeats Brunswick at Auerstädt, Oct. 14.]

[Ruin of the Prussian Army.]

Napoleon, who had just received the Prussian ultimatum with unbounded ridicule and contempt, was now moving along the roads that lead from Bamberg and Baireuth to the Upper Saale. On the 10th of October, as the division of Lannes was approaching Saalfeld, it was attacked by Prince Louis Ferdinand at the head of Hohenlohe's advanced guard. The attack was made against Hohenlohe's orders. It resulted in the total rout of the Prussian force. Though the numbers engaged were small, the loss of magazines and artillery, and the death of Prince Louis Ferdinand, the hero of the war-party, gave to this first repulse the moral effect of a great military disaster. Hohenlohe's troops at Jena were seized with panic; numbers of men threw away their arms and dispersed; the drivers of artillery-waggons and provision-carts cut the traces and rode off with their horses. Brunswick, however, and the main body of the army, were now at Weimar, close at hand; and if Brunswick had decided to fight a great battle at Jena, the Prussians might have brought nearly 90,000 men into action. But the plans of the irresolute commander were again changed. It was resolved to fall back upon Magdeburg and the Elbe. Brunswick himself moved northwards to Naumburg; Hohenlohe was ordered to hold the French in check at Jena until this movement was completed. Napoleon reached Jena. He had no intelligence of Brunswick's retreat, and imagined the mass of the Prussian army to be gathered round Hohenlohe, on the plateau before him. He sent Davoust, with a corps 27,000 strong, to outflank the enemy by a march in the direction of Naumburg, and himself prepared to make the attack in front with 90,000 men, a force more than double Hohenlohe's real army. The attack was made on the 14th of October. Hohenlohe's army was dashed to pieces by Napoleon, and fled in wild disorder. Davoust's weak corps, which had not expected to meet with any important forces until it fell upon Hohenlohe's flank, found itself in the presence of Brunswick's main army, when it arrived at Auerstädt, a few miles to the north. Fortune had given to the Prussian commander an extraordinary chance of retrieving what strategy had lost. A battle conducted with common military skill would not only have destroyed Davoust, but have secured, at least for the larger portion of the Prussian forces, a safe retreat to Leipzig or the Elbe. The French general, availing himself of steep and broken ground, defeated numbers nearly double his own through the confusion of his adversary, who sent up detachment after detachment instead of throwing himself upon Davoust with his entire strength. The fighting was as furious on the Prussian side as its conduct was unskilful. King Frederick William, who led the earlier cavalry charges, had two horses killed under him. Brunswick was mortally wounded. Many of the other generals were killed or disabled. There remained, however, a sufficient number of unbroken regiments to preserve some order in the retreat until the army came into contact with the remnant of Hohenlohe's forces, flying for their lives before the cavalry of Murat. Then all hope was lost. The fugitive mass struck panic and confusion into the retreating columns; and with the exception of a few regiments which gathered round well-known leaders, the soldiers threw away their arms and spread over the country in headlong rout. There was no line of retreat, and no rallying-point. The disaster of a single day made an end of the Prussian army as a force capable of meeting the enemy in the field. A great part of the troops was captured by the pursuing enemy during the next few days. The regiments which preserved their coherence were too weak to make any attempt to check Napoleon's advance, and could only hope to save themselves by escaping to the fortresses on the Oder.

[Haugwitz and Lord Morpeth.]

[Retreat and surrender of Hohenlohe.]

Two days before the battle of Jena, an English envoy, Lord Morpeth, had arrived at the head-quarters of the King of Prussia, claiming the restoration of Hanover, and bearing an offer of the friendship and support of Great Britain. At the moment when the Prussian monarchy was on the point of being hurled to the ground, its Government might have been thought likely to welcome any security that it should not be abandoned in its utmost need. Haugwitz, however, was at head-quarters, dictating lying bulletins, and perplexing the generals with ridiculous arguments of policy until the French actually opened fire. When the English envoy made known his arrival, he found that no one would transact business with him. Haugwitz had determined to evade all negotiations until the battle had been fought. He was unwilling to part with Hanover, and he hoped that a victory over Napoleon would enable him to meet Lord Morpeth with a bolder countenance on the following day. When that day arrived, Ministers and diplomatists were flying headlong over the country. The King made his escape to Weimar, and wrote to Napoleon, begging for an armistice; but the armistice was refused, and the pursuit of the broken army was followed up without a moment's pause. The capital offered no safe halting-place; and Frederick William only rested when he had arrived at Graudenz, upon the Vistula. Hohenlohe's poor remnant of an army passed the Elbe at Magdeburg, and took the road for Stettin, at the mouth of the Oder, leaving Berlin to its fate. The retreat was badly conducted; alternate halts and strained marches discouraged the best of the soldiers. As the men passed their native villages they abandoned the famishing and broken-spirited columns; and at the end of a fortnight's disasters Prince Hohenlohe surrendered to his pursuers at Prenzlau with his main body, now numbering only 10,000 men (Oct. 28).

[Blücher at Lübeck.]

Blücher, who had shown the utmost energy and fortitude after the catastrophe of Jena, was moving in the rear of Hohenlohe with a considerable force which his courage had gathered around him. On learning of Hohenlohe's capitulation, he instantly reversed his line of march, and made for the Hanoverian fortress of Hameln, in order to continue the war in the rear of the French. Overwhelming forces, however, cut off his retreat to the Elbe; he was hemmed in on the east and on the west; and nothing remained for him but to throw himself into the neutral town of Lübeck, and fight until food and ammunition failed him. The French were at his heels. The magistrates of Lübeck prayed that their city might not be made into a battle-field, but in vain; Blücher refused to move into the open country. The town was stormed by the French, and put to the sack. Blücher was driven out, desperately fighting, and pent in between the Danish frontier and the sea. Here, surrounded by overpowering numbers, without food, without ammunition, he capitulated on the 7th of November, after his courage and resolution had done everything that could ennoble both general and soldiers in the midst of overwhelming calamity.

[Napoleon at Berlin, Oct. 27.]

[Capitulation of Prussian fortresses.]

The honour of entering the Prussian capital was given by Napoleon to Davoust, whose victory at Auerstädt had in fact far surpassed his own. Davoust entered Berlin without resistance on the 25th of October; Napoleon himself went to Potsdam, and carried off the sword and the scarf that lay upon the grave of Frederick the Great. Two days after Davoust, the Emperor made his own triumphal entry into the capital. He assumed the part of the protector of the people against the aristocracy, ordering the formation of a municipal body and of a civic guard for the city of Berlin. The military aristocracy he treated with the bitterest hatred and contempt. "I will make that noblesse," he cried, "so poor that they shall beg their bread." The disaster of Jena had indeed fearfully punished the insolence with which the officers of the army had treated the rest of the nation. The Guards were marched past the windows of the citizens of Berlin, a miserable troop of captives; soldiers of rank who remained in the city had to attend upon the French Emperor to receive his orders. But calamity was only beginning. The overthrow of Jena had been caused by faults of generalship, and cast no stain upon the courage of the officers; the surrender of the Prussian fortresses, which began on the day when the French entered Berlin, attached the utmost personal disgrace to their commanders. Even after the destruction of the army in the field, Prussia's situation would not have been hopeless if the commanders of fortresses had acted on the ordinary rules of military duty. Magdeburg and the strongholds upon the Oder were sufficiently armed and provisioned to detain the entire French army, and to give time to the King to collect upon the Vistula a force as numerous as that which he had lost. But whatever is weakest in human nature-old age, fear, and credulity-seemed to have been placed at the head of Prussia's defences. The very object for which fortresses exist was forgotten; and the fact that one army had been beaten in the field was made a reason for permitting the enemy to forestall the organisation of another. Spandau surrendered on the 25th of October, Stettin on the 29th. These were places of no great strength; but the next fortress to capitulate, Küstrin on the Oder, was in full order for a long siege. It was surrendered by the older officers, amidst the curses of the subalterns and the common soldiers: the artillerymen had to be dragged from their guns by force. Magdeburg, with a garrison of 24,000 men and enormous supplies, fell before a French force not numerous enough to beleaguer it (Nov. 8).

[Napoleon's demands.]

Neither Napoleon himself nor any one else in Europe could have foreseen such conduct on the part of the Prussian commanders. The unexpected series of capitulations made him demand totally different terms of peace from those which he had offered after the battle of Jena. A week after the victory, Napoleon had demanded, as the price of peace, the cession of Prussia's territory west of the Elbe, with the exception of the town of Magdeburg, and the withdrawal of Prussia from the affairs of Germany. These terms were communicated to King Frederick William; he accepted them, and sent Lucchesini to Berlin to negotiate for peace upon this basis. Lucchesini had scarcely reached the capital when the tidings arrived of Hohenlohe's capitulation, followed by the surrender of Stettin and Küstrin. The Prussian envoy now sought in vain to procure Napoleon's ratification of the terms which he had himself proposed. No word of peace could be obtained: an armistice was all that the Emperor would grant, and the terms on which the armistice was offered rose with each new disaster to the Prussian arms. On the fall of Magdeburg becoming known, Napoleon demanded that the troops of Prussia should retire behind the Vistula, and surrender every fortress that they still retained, with the single exception of Königsberg. Much as Prussia had lost, it would have cost Napoleon a second campaign to make himself master of what he now asked; but to such a depth had the Prussian Government sunk, that Lucchesini actually signed a convention at Charlottenburg (November 16), surrendering to Napoleon, in return for an armistice, the entire list of uncaptured fortresses, including Dantzig and Thorn on the Lower Vistula, Breslau, with the rest of the untouched defences of Silesia, Warsaw and Praga in Prussian Poland, and Colberg upon the Pomeranian coast.[133]

[Frederick William continues the war.]

The treaty, however, required the King's ratification. Frederick William, timorous as he was, hesitated to confirm an agreement which ousted him from his dominions as completely as if the last soldier of Prussia had gone into captivity. The patriotic party, headed by Stein, pleaded for the honour of the country against the miserable Cabinet which now sought to complete its work of ruin. Assurances of support arrived from St. Petersburg. The King determined to reject the treaty, and to continue the war to the last extremity. Haugwitz hereupon tendered his resignation, and terminated a political career disastrous beyond any recorded in modern times. For a moment, it seemed as if the real interests of the country were at length to be recognised in the appointment of Stein to one of the three principal offices of State. But the King still remained blind to the necessity of unity in the government, and angrily dismissed Stein when he refused to hold the Ministry if representatives of the old Cabinet and of the peace-party were to have places beside him. The King's act was ill calculated to serve the interests of Prussia, either at home or abroad. Stein was the one Minister on whom the patriotic party of Prussia and the Governments of Europe could rely with perfect confidence.  [134] His dismissal at this crisis proved the incurable poverty of Frederick William's mental nature; it also proved that, so long as any hope remained of saving the Prussian State by the help of the Czar of Russia, the patriotic party had little chance of creating a responsible government at home.

[Napoleon at Berlin.]

[The Berlin decree against English commerce, Nov. 21, 1806.]

Throughout the month of November French armies overran Northern Germany: Napoleon himself remained at Berlin, and laid the foundations of a political system corresponding to that which he had imposed upon Southern Germany after the victory of Austerlitz. The Houses of Brunswick and Hesse-Cassel were deposed, in order to create a new client-kingdom of Westphalia; Saxony, with Weimar and four other duchies, entered the Confederation of the Rhine. A measure more widely affecting the Continent of Europe dated from the last days of the Emperor's residence at the Prussian capital. On the 21st of November, 1806, a decree was published at Berlin prohibiting the inhabitants of the entire European territory allied with France from carrying on any commerce with Great Britain, or admitting any merchandise that had been produced in Great Britain or in its colonies.  [135] The line of coast thus closed to the shipping and the produce of the British Empire included everything from the Vistula to the southern point of Dalmatia, with the exception of Denmark and Portugal and the Austrian port of Trieste. All property belonging to English subjects, all merchandise of British origin, whoever might be the owner, was ordered to be confiscated: no vessel that had even touched at a British port was permitted to enter a Continental harbour. It was the fixed purpose of Napoleon to exhaust Great Britain, since he could not destroy its navies, or, according to his own expression, to conquer England upon the Continent. All that was most harsh and unjust in the operation of the Berlin Decree fell, however, more upon Napoleon's own subjects than upon Great Britain. The exclusion of British ships from the harbours of the allies of France was no more than the exercise of a common right in war; even the seizure of the property of Englishmen, though a violation of international law, bore at least an analogy to the seizure of French property at sea; but the confiscation of the merchandise of German and Dutch traders, after it had lain for weeks in their own warehouses, solely because it had been produced in the British Empire, was an act of flagrant and odious oppression. The first result of the Berlin Decree was to fill the trading towns of North Germany with French revenue-officers and inquisitors. Peaceable tradesmen began to understand the import of the battle of Jena when French gendarmes threw their stock into the common furnace, or dragged them to prison for possessing a hogshead of Jamaica sugar or a bale of Leeds cloth. The merchants who possessed a large quantity of English or colonial wares were the heaviest sufferers by Napoleon's commercial policy: the public found the markets supplied by American and Danish traders, until, at a later period, the British Government adopted reprisals, and prevented the ships of neutrals from entering any port from which English vessels were excluded. Then every cottage felt the stress of the war. But if the full consequences of the Berlin Decree were delayed until the retaliation of Great Britain reached the dimensions of Napoleon's own tyranny, the Decree itself marked on the part of Napoleon the assumption of a power in conflict with the needs and habits of European life. Like most of the schemes of Napoleon subsequent to the victories of 1806, it transgressed the limits of practical statesmanship, and displayed an ambition no longer raised above mere tyranny by its harmony with forms of progress and with the better tendencies of the age.

[Napoleon and the Poles.]

Immediately after signing the Berlin Decree, Napoleon quitted the Prussian capital (Nov. 25). The first act of the war had now closed. The Prussian State was overthrown; its territory as far as the Vistula lay at the mercy of the invader; its King was a fugitive at Königsberg, at the eastern extremity of his dominions. The second act of the war began with the rejection of the armistice which had been signed by Lucchesini, and with the entry of Russia into the field against Napoleon. The scene of hostilities was henceforward in Prussian Poland and in the Baltic Province lying between the lower Vistula and the Russian frontier. Napoleon entered Poland, as he had entered Italy ten years before, with the pretence of restoring liberty to an enslaved people. Kosciusko's name was fraudulently attached to a proclamation summoning the Polish nation to arms; and although Kosciusko himself declined to place any trust in the betrayer of Venice, thousands of his countrymen flocked to Napoleon's standard, or anticipated his arrival by capturing and expelling the Prussian detachments scattered through their country. Promises of the restoration of Polish independence were given by Napoleon in abundance; but the cause of Poland was the last to attract the sympathy of a man who considered the sacrifice of the weak to the strong to be the first principle of all good policy. To have attempted the restoration of Polish independence would have been to make permanent enemies of Russia and Prussia for the sake of an ally weaker than either of them. The project was not at this time seriously entertained by Napoleon. He had no motive to face a work of such enormous difficulty as the creation of a solid political order among the most unpractical race in Europe. He was glad to enrol the Polish nobles among his soldiers; he knew the value of their enthusiasm, and took pains to excite it; but, when the battle was over, it was with Russia, not Poland, that France had to settle; and no better fate remained, even for the Prussian provinces of Poland, than in part to be formed into a client-state, in part to be surrendered as a means of accommodation with the Czar.

[Campaign in Poland against Russia, Dec., 1806.]

The armies of Russia were at some distance from the Vistula when, in November, 1806, Napoleon entered Polish territory. Their movements were slow, their numbers insufficient. At the moment when all the forces of the Empire were required for the struggle against Napoleon, troops were being sent into Moldavia against the Sultan. Nor were the Russian commanders anxious to save what still remained of the Prussian kingdom. The disasters of Prussia, like those of Austria at the beginning of the campaign of 1805, excited less sympathy than contempt; and the inclination of the Czar's generals was rather to carry on the war upon the frontier of their own country than to commit themselves to a distant campaign with a despised ally. Lestocq, who commanded the remnant of the Prussian army upon the Vistula, was therefore directed to abandon his position at Thorn and to move eastwards. The French crossed the Vistula higher up the river; and by the middle of December the armies of France and Russia lay opposite to one another in the neighbourhood of Pultusk, upon the Ukra and the Narew. The first encounter, though not of a decisive character, resulted in the retreat of the Russians. Heavy rains and fathomless mud checked the pursuit. War seemed almost impossible in such a country and such a climate; and Napoleon ordered his troops to take up their winter quarters along the Vistula, believing that nothing more could be attempted on either side before the spring.

[Eylau, Feb. 8, 1807.]

[Napoleon and Bennigsen in East Prussia.]

But the command of the Russian forces was now transferred from the aged and half-mad Kamenski,[136] who had opened the campaign, to a general better qualified to cope with Napoleon. Bennigsen, the new commander-in-chief, was an active and daring soldier. Though a German by birth, his soldiership was of that dogged and resolute order which suits the character of Russian troops; and, in the mid-winter of 1806, Napoleon found beyond the Vistula such an enemy as he had never encountered in Western Europe. Bennigsen conceived the design of surprising the extreme left of the French line, where Ney's division lay stretched towards the Baltic, far to the north-east of Napoleon's main body. Forest and marsh concealed the movement of the Russian troops, and both Ney and Bernadotte narrowly escaped destruction. Napoleon now broke up his winter quarters, and marched in great force against Bennigsen in the district between Königsberg and the mouth of the Vistula. Bennigsen manoeuvred and retired until his troops clamoured for battle. He then took up a position at Eylau, and waited for the attack of the French. The battle of Eylau, fought in the midst of snowstorms on the 8th of February, 1807, was unlike anything that Napoleon had ever yet seen. His columns threw themselves in vain upon the Russian infantry. Augereau's corps was totally destroyed in the beginning of the battle. The Russians pressed upon the ground where Napoleon himself stood; and, although the superiority of the Emperor's tactics at length turned the scale, and the French began a forward movement, their advance was stopped by the arrival of Lestocq and a body of 13,000 Prussians. At the close of the engagement 30,000 men lay wounded or dead in the snow; the positions of the armies remained what they had been in the morning. Bennigsen's lieutenants urged him to renew the combat on the next day; but the confusion of the Russian army was such that the French, in spite of their losses and discouragement, would probably have gained the victory in a second battle;  [137] and the Russian commander determined to fall back towards Königsberg, content with having disabled the enemy and given Napoleon such a check as he had never received before. Napoleon, who had announced his intention of entering Königsberg in triumph, fell back upon the river Passarge, and awaited the arrival of reinforcements.

[Sieges of Dantzig and Colberg, March, 1807.]

[Inaction of England.]

[Fall of Grenville's Ministry, March 24, 1807.]

[Treaty of Bartenstein between Russia, Prussia, England, and Sweden. April, 1807.]

The warfare of the next few months was confined to the reduction of the Prussian fortresses which had not yet fallen into the hands of the French. Dantzig surrendered after a long and difficult siege; the little town of Colberg upon the Pomeranian coast prolonged a defence as honourable to its inhabitants as to the military leaders. Two soldiers of singularly different character, each destined to play a conspicuous part in coming years, first distinguished themselves in the defence of Colberg. Gneisenau, a scientific soldier of the highest order, the future guide of Blücher's victorious campaigns, commanded the garrison; Schill, a cavalry officer of adventurous daring, gathered round him a troop of hardy riders, and harassed the French with an audacity as perplexing to his military superiors as to the enemy. The citizens, led by their burgomaster, threw themselves into the work of defence with a vigour in striking contrast to the general apathy of the Prussian people; and up to the end of the war Colberg remained uncaptured. Obscure as Colberg was, its defence might have given a new turn to the war if the Government of Great Britain had listened to the entreaties of the Emperor Alexander, and despatched a force to the Baltic to threaten the communications of Napoleon. The task was not a difficult one for a Power which could find troops, as England now did, to send to Constantinople, to Alexandria, and to Buenos Ayres; but military judgment was more than ever wanting to the British Cabinet. Fox had died at the beginning of the war; his successors in Grenville's Ministry, though they possessed a sound theory of foreign policy,  [138] were not fortunate in its application, nor were they prompt enough in giving financial help to their allies. Suddenly, however, King George quarrelled with his Ministers upon the ancient question of Catholic Disabilities, and drove them from office (March 24). The country sided with the King. A Ministry came into power, composed of the old supporters of Pitt, men, with the exception of Canning and Castlereagh, of narrow views and poor capacity, headed by the Duke of Portland, who, in 1793, had given his name to the section of the Whig party which joined Pitt. The foreign policy of the new Cabinet, which concealed its total lack of all other statesmanship, returned to the lines laid down by Pitt in 1805. Negotiations were opened with Russia for the despatch of an English army to the Baltic; arms and money were promised to the Prussian King. For a moment it seemed as if the Powers of Europe had never been united in so cordial a league. The Czar embraced the King of Prussia in the midst of his soldiers, and declared with tears that the two should stand or fall together. The Treaty of Bartenstein, signed in April 1807 pledged the Courts of St. Petersburg, Stockholm, and Berlin to a joint prosecution of the war, and the common conclusion of peace. Great Britain joined the pact, and prepared to fulfil its part in the conflict upon the Baltic. But the task was a difficult one, for Grenville's Ministry had dispersed the fleet of transports; and, although Canning determined upon the Baltic expedition in April, two months passed before the fleet was ready to sail.

[Summer campaign in East Prussia, 1807.]

[Battle of Friedland.]

In the meantime army upon army was moving to the support of Napoleon, from France, from Spain, from Holland, and from Southern Germany. The fortresses of the Elbe and the Oder, which ought to have been his barrier, had become his base of operations; and so enormous were the forces at his command, that, after manning every stronghold in Central Europe, he was able at the beginning of June to bring 140,000 men into the field beyond the Vistula. The Russians had also received reinforcements, but Bennigsen's army was still weaker than that of the enemy. It was Bennigsen, nevertheless, who began the attack; and now, as in the winter campaign, he attempted to surprise and crush the northern corps of Ney. The same general movement of the French army followed as in January. The Russian commander, outnumbered by the French, retired to his fortified camp at Heilsberg. After sustaining a bloody repulse in an attack upon this position, Napoleon drew Bennigsen from his lair by marching straight upon Königsberg. Bennigsen supposed himself to be in time to deal with an isolated corps; he found himself face to face with the whole forces of the enemy at Friedland, accepted battle, and was unable to save his army from a severe and decisive defeat (June 14). The victory of Friedland brought the French into Königsberg. Bennigsen retired behind the Niemen; and on the 19th of June an armistice closed the operations of the hostile forces upon the frontiers of Russia.  [139]

The situation of Bennigsen's army was by no means desperate. His men had not been surrounded; they had lost scarcely any prisoners; they felt no fear of the French. But the general exaggerated the seriousness of his defeat. Like most of his officers, he was weary of the war, and felt no sympathy with the motives which led the Emperor to fight for the common cause of Europe. The politicians who surrounded Alexander urged him to withdraw Russia from a conflict in which she had nothing to gain. The Emperor wavered. The tardiness of Great Britain, the continued neutrality of Austria, cast a doubt upon the wisdom of his own disinterestedness; and he determined to meet Napoleon, and ascertain the terms on which Russia might be reconciled to the master of half the Continent.

[Interview of Napoleon and Alexander at Tilsit, June 25.]

On the 25th of June the two sovereigns met one another on the raft of Tilsit, in the midstream of the river Niemen. The conversation, which is alleged to have been opened by Alexander with an expression of hatred towards England, was heard by no one but the speakers. But whatever the eagerness or the reluctance of the Russian monarch to sever himself from Great Britain, the purpose of Napoleon was effected. Alexander surrendered himself to the addresses of a conqueror who seemed to ask for nothing and to offer everything. The negotiations were prolonged; the relations of the two monarchs became more and more intimate; and the issue of the struggle for life or death was that Russia accepted the whole scheme of Napoleonic conquest, and took its place by the side of the despoiler in return for its share of the prey. It was in vain that the King of Prussia had rejected Napoleon's offers after the battle of Eylau, in fidelity to his engagements towards his ally. Promises, treaties, and pity were alike cast to the winds. The unfortunate Frederick William received no more embraces; the friend with whom he was to stand or fall bargained away the larger half of his dominions to Napoleon, and even rectified the Russian frontier at his expense. Prussia's continued existence in any shape whatever was described as a concession made by Napoleon to Alexander. By the public articles of the Treaties of Tilsit, signed by France, Russia, and Prussia in the first week of July, the King of Prussia ceded to Napoleon the whole of his dominions west of the Elbe, and the entire territory which Prussia had gained in the three partitions of Poland, with the exception of a district upon the Lower Vistula connecting Pomerania with Eastern Prussia. Out of the ceded territory on the west of the Elbe a Kingdom of Westphalia was created for Napoleon's brother Jerome; the Polish provinces of Prussia, with the exception of a strip made over to Alexander, were formed into the Grand-Duchy of Warsaw, and presented to Napoleon's vassal, the King of Saxony. Russia recognised the Napoleonic client-states in Italy, Holland, and Germany. The Czar undertook to offer his mediation in the conflict between France and Great Britain; a secret article provided that, in the event of Great Britain and France being at war on the ensuing 1st of December, Prussia should declare war against Great Britain.

[Secret Treaty of Alliance.]

[Conspiracy of the two Emperors.]

Such were the stipulations contained in the formal Treaties of Peace between the three Powers. These, however, contained but a small part of the terms agreed upon between the masters of the east and of the west. A secret Treaty of Alliance, distinct from the Treaty of Peace, was also signed by Napoleon and Alexander. In the conversations which won over the Czar to the cause of France, Napoleon had offered to Alexander the spoils of Sweden and the Ottoman Empire. Finland and the Danubian provinces were not too high a price for the support of a Power whose arms could paralyse Austria and Prussia. In return for the promise of this extension of his Empire, Alexander undertook, in the event of Great Britain refusing terms of peace dictated by himself, to unite his arms to those of Napoleon, and to force the neutral maritime Powers, Denmark and Portugal, to take part in the struggle against England. The annexation of Moldavia and Wallachia to the Russian Empire was provided for under the form of a French mediation. In the event of the Porte declining this mediation, Napoleon undertook to assist Russia to liberate all the European territory subject to the yoke of the Sultan, with the exception of Roumelia and Constantinople. A partition of the liberated territory between France and Russia, as well as the establishment of the Napoleonic house in Spain, probably formed the subject rather of a verbal understanding than of any written agreement.  [140]

Such was this vast and threatening scheme, conceived by the man whose whole career had been one consistent struggle for personal domination, accepted by the man who among the rulers of the Continent had hitherto shown the greatest power of acting for a European end, and of interesting himself in a cause not directly his own. In the imagination of Napoleon, the national forces of the western continent had now ceased to exist. Austria excepted, there was no State upon the mainland whose army and navy were not prospectively in the hands of himself and his new ally. The commerce of Great Britain, already excluded from the greater part of Europe, was now to be shut out from all the rest; the armies which had hitherto fought under British subsidies for the independence of Europe, the navies which had preserved their existence by neutrality or by friendship with England, were soon to be thrown without distinction against that last foe. If even at this moment an English statesman who had learnt the secret agreement of Tilsit might have looked without fear to the future of his country, it was not from any imperfection in the structure of Continental tyranny. The fleets of Denmark and Portugal might be of little real avail against English seamen; the homes of the English people might still be as secure from foreign invasion as when Nelson guarded the seas; but it was not from any vestige of political honour surviving in the Emperor Alexander. Where Alexander's action was of decisive importance, in his mediation between France and Prussia, he threw himself without scruple on to the side of oppression. It lay within his power to gain terms of peace for Prussia as lenient as those which Austria had gained at Campo Formio and at Lunéville: he sacrificed Prussia, as he allied himself against the last upholders of national independence in Europe, in order that he might himself receive Finland and the Danubian Provinces.

[English expedition against Denmark, July, 1807.]

Two days before the signature of the Treaty of Tilsit the British troops which had once been so anxiously expected by the Czar landed in the island of Rügen. The struggle in which they were intended to take their part was over. Sweden alone remained in arms; and even the Quixotic pugnacity of King Gustavus was unable to save Stralsund from a speedy capitulation. But the troops of Great Britain were not destined to return without striking a blow. The negotiations between Napoleon and Alexander had scarcely begun, when secret intelligence of their purport was sent to the British Government.  [141] It became known in London that the fleet of Denmark was to be seized by Napoleon, and forced to fight against Great Britain. Canning and his colleagues acted with the promptitude that seldom failed the British Government when it could effect its object by the fleet alone. They determined to anticipate Napoleon's violation of Danish neutrality, and to seize upon the navy which would otherwise be seized by France and Russia.

[Bombardment of Copenhagen, Sept. 2.]

On the 28th of July a fleet with 20,000 men on board set sail from the British coast. The troops landed in Denmark in the middle of August, and united with the corps which had already been despatched to Rügen. The Danish Government was summoned to place its navy in the hands of Great Britain, in order that it might remain as a deposit in some British port until the conclusion of peace. While demanding this sacrifice of Danish neutrality, England undertook to protect the Danish nation and colonies from the hostility of Napoleon, and to place at the disposal of its Government every means of naval and military defence. Failing the surrender of the fleet, the English declared that they would bombard Copenhagen. The reply given to this summons was such as might be expected from a courageous nation exasperated against Great Britain by its harsh treatment of neutral ships of commerce, and inclined to submit to the despot of the Continent rather than to the tyrants of the seas. Negotiations proved fruitless, and on the 2nd of September the English opened fire on Copenhagen. For three days and nights the city underwent a bombardment of cruel efficiency. Eighteen hundred houses were levelled, the town was set on fire in several places, and a large number of the inhabitants lost their lives. At length the commander found himself compelled to capitulate. The fleet was handed over to Great Britain, with all the stores in the arsenal of Copenhagen. It was brought to England, no longer under the terms of a friendly neutrality, but as a prize of war.

The captors themselves were ashamed of their spoil. England received an armament which had been taken from a people who were not our enemies, and by an attack which was not war, with more misgiving than applause. In Europe the seemingly unprovoked assault upon a weak neutral State excited the utmost indignation. The British Ministry, who were prevented from making public the evidence which they had received of the intention of the two Emperors, were believed to have invented the story of the Secret Treaty. The Danish Government denied that Napoleon had demanded their co-operation; Napoleon and Alexander themselves assumed the air of indignant astonishment. But the facts alleged by Canning and his colleagues were correct. The conspiracy of the two Emperors was no fiction. The only question still remaining open-and this is indeed an essential one-relates to the engagements entered into by the Danish Government itself. Napoleon in his correspondence of this date alludes to certain promises made to him by the Court of Denmark, but he also complains that these promises had not been fulfilled; and the context of the letter renders it almost certain that, whatever may have been demanded by Napoleon, nothing more was promised by Denmark than that its ports should be closed to English vessels.  [142] Had the British Cabinet possessed evidence of the determination of the Danish Government to transfer its fleet to Napoleon without resistance, the attack upon Denmark, considered as virtually an act of war, would not have been unjust. But beyond an alleged expression of Napoleon at Tilsit, no such evidence was even stated to have reached London; and the undoubted conspiracy of the Emperors against Danish neutrality was no sufficient ground for an action on the part of Great Britain which went so far beyond the mere frustration of their designs. The surrender of the Danish fleet demanded by England would have been an unqualified act of war on the part of Denmark against Napoleon; it was no mere guarantee for a continued neutrality. Nor had the British Government the last excuse of an urgent and overwhelming necessity. Nineteen Danish men-of-war would not have turned the scale against England. The memory of Trafalgar might well have given a British Ministry courage to meet its enemies by the ordinary methods of war. Had the forces of Denmark been far larger than they actually were, the peril of Great Britain was not so extreme as to excuse the wrong done to mankind by an example encouraging all future belligerents to anticipate one another in forcing each neutral state to take part with themselves.

[Napoleon's demands upon Portugal.]

The fleet which Napoleon had meant to turn against this country now lay safe within Portsmouth harbour. Denmark, in bitter resentment, declared war against Great Britain, and rendered some service to the Continental League by the attacks of its privateers upon British merchant-vessels in the Baltic. The second neutral Power whose fate had been decided by the two Emperors at Tilsit received the summons of Napoleon a few days before the attack on Copenhagen. The Regent of Portugal himself informed the British Government that he had been required by Napoleon to close his ports to British vessels, to declare war on England, and to confiscate all British property within his dominions. Placed between a Power which could strip him of his dominions on land, and one which could despoil him of everything he possessed beyond the sea, the Regent determined to maintain his ancient friendship with Great Britain, and to submit to Napoleon only in so far as the English Government would excuse him, as acting under coercion. Although a nominal state of war arose between Portugal and England, the Regent really acted in the interest of England, and followed the advice of the British Cabinet up to the end.

[Treaty of Fontainebleau between France and Spain for the partition of Portugal, Oct. 27.]

The end was soon to come. The demands of Napoleon, arbitrary and oppressive as they were, by no means expressed his full intentions towards Portugal. He had determined to seize upon this country, and to employ it as a means for extending his own dominion over the whole of the Spanish Peninsula. An army-corps, under the command of Junot, had been already placed in the Pyrenees. On the 12th of October Napoleon received the answer of the Regent of Portugal, consenting to declare war upon England, and only rejecting the dishonourable order to confiscate all English property. This single act of resistance was sufficient for Napoleon's purpose. He immediately recalled his ambassador from Lisbon, and gave orders to Junot to cross the frontier, and march upon Portugal. The King of Spain, who was to be Napoleon's next victim, was for the moment employed as his accomplice. A treaty was concluded at Fontainebleau between Napoleon and King Charles IV. for the partition of Portugal (Oct. 27).  [143] In return for the cession of the kingdom of Etruria, which was still nominally governed by a member of the Spanish house, the King of Spain was promised half the Portuguese colonies, along with the title of Emperor of the Indies; the northern provinces of Portugal were reserved for the infant King of Etruria, its southern provinces for Godoy, Minister of Charles IV.; the central districts were to remain in the hands of France, and to be employed as a means of regaining the Spanish colonies from England upon the conclusion of a general peace.

[Junot invades Portugal, Nov., 1807.]

[Flight of the House of Braganza.]

Not one of these provisions was intended to be carried into effect. The conquest of Portugal was but a part of the conquest of the whole peninsula. But neither the Spanish Court nor the Spanish people suspected Napoleon's design. Junot advanced without resistance through the intervening Spanish territory, and pushed forward upon Lisbon with the utmost haste. The speed at which Napoleon's orders forced him to march reduced his army to utter prostration, and the least resistance would have resulted in its ruin. But the Court of Lisbon had determined to quit a country which they could not hope to defend against the master of the Continent. Already in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries the House of Braganza had been familiar with the project of transferring the seat of their Government to Brazil; and now, with the approval of Great Britain, the Regent resolved to maintain the independence of his family by flight across the Atlantic. As Junot's troops approached the capital, the servants of the palace hastily stowed the royal property on ship-board. On the 29th of November, when the French were now close at hand, the squadron which bore the House of Braganza to its colonial home dropped down the Tagus, saluted by the cannon of the English fleet that lay in the same river. Junot entered the capital a few hours later, and placed himself at the head of the Government without encountering any opposition. The occupation of Portugal was described by Napoleon as a reprisal for the bombardment of Copenhagen. It excited but little attention in Europe; and even at the Spanish Court the only feeling was one of satisfaction at the approaching aggrandisement of the Bourbon monarchy. The full significance of Napoleon's intervention in the affairs of the Peninsula was not discovered until some months were passed.

[Prussia after the Peace of Tilsit.]

[Stein Minister, Oct. 5, 1807.]

Portugal and Denmark had felt the consequences of the peace made at Tilsit. Less, however, depended upon the fate of the Danish fleet and the Portuguese Royal Family than upon the fate of Prussia, the most cruelly wronged of all the victims sacrificed by Alexander's ambition. The unfortunate Prussian State, reduced to half its former extent, devastated and impoverished by war, and burdened with the support of a French army, found in the crisis of its ruin the beginning of a worthier national life. Napoleon, in his own vindictive jealousy, unwittingly brought to the head of the Prussian Government the ablest and most patriotic statesman of the Continent. Since the spring of 1807 Baron Hardenberg had again been the leading Minister of Prussia, and it was to his counsel that the King's honourable rejection of a separate peace after the battle of Eylau was due. Napoleon could not permit this Minister, whom he had already branded as a partisan of Great Britain, to remain in power; he insisted upon Hardenberg's dismissal, and recommended the King of Prussia to summon Stein, who was as yet known to Napoleon only as a skilful financier, likely to succeed in raising the money which the French intended to extort.

[Edict of Emancipation, Oct. 9, 1807.]

Stein entered upon office on the 5th of October, 1807, with almost dictatorial power. The need of the most radical changes in the public services, as well as in the social order of the Prussian State, had been brought home to all enlightened men by the disasters of the war; and a commission, which included among its members the historian Niebuhr, had already sketched large measures of reform before Hardenberg quitted office. Stein's appointment brought to the head of the State a man immeasurably superior to Hardenberg in the energy necessary for the execution of great changes, and gave to those who were the most sincerely engaged in civil or military reform a leader unrivalled in patriotic zeal, in boldness, and in purity of character. The first great legislative measure of Stein was the abolition of serfage, and of all the legal distinctions which fixed within the limits of their caste the noble, the citizen, and the peasant. In setting his name to the edict  [144] which, on the 9th of October, 1807, made an end of the mediæval framework of Prussian society, Stein was indeed but consummating a change which the progress of neighbouring States must have forced upon Prussia, whoever held its government. The Decree was framed upon the report of Hardenberg's Commission, and was published by Stein within six days after his own entry upon office. Great as were the changes involved in this edict of emancipation, it contained no more than was necessary to bring Prussia up to the level of the least advanced of the western Continental States. In Austria pure serfage had been abolished by Maria Theresa thirty years before; it vanished, along with most of the legal distinctions of class, wherever the victories of France carried a new political order; even the misused peasantry of Poland had been freed from their degrading yoke within the borders of the newly-founded Duchy of Warsaw. If Prussia was not to renounce its partnership in European progress and range itself with its barbarous eastern neighbour, that order which fettered the peasant to the soil, and limited every Prussian to the hereditary occupations of his class could no longer be maintained. It is not as an achievement of individual genius, but as the most vivid expression of the differences between the old and the new Europe, that the first measure of Stein deserves a closer examination.

[The Prussian peasant before and after the Edict of Oct. 9.]

The Edict of October 9, 1807, extinguished all personal servitude; it permitted the noble, the citizen, and the peasant to follow any calling; it abolished the rule which prevented land held by a member of one class from passing into the hands of another class; it empowered families to free their estates from entail. Taken together, these enactments substitute the free disposition of labour and property for the outworn doctrine which Prussia had inherited from the feudal ages, that what a man is born that he shall live and die. The extinction of serfage, though not the most prominent provision of the Edict, was the one whose effects were the soonest felt. In the greater part of Prussia the marks of serfage, as distinct from payments and services amounting to a kind of rent, were the obligation of the peasant to remain on his holding, and the right of the lord to take the peasant's children as unpaid servants into his house. A general relation of obedience and command existed, as between an hereditary subject and master, although the lord could neither exact an arbitrary amount of labour nor inflict the cruel punishments which had been common in Poland and Hungary. What the villein was in England in the thirteenth century, that the serf was in Prussia in the year 1806; and the change which in England gradually elevated the villein into the free copyholder was that change which, so many centuries later, the Prussian legislator effected by one great measure. Stein made the Prussian peasant what the English copyholder had become at the accession of Henry VII., and what the French peasant had been before 1789, a free person, but one bound to render fixed dues and service to the lord of the manor in virtue of the occupation of his land. These feudal dues and services, which the French peasant, accustomed for centuries before the Revolution to consider himself as the full proprietor of the land, treated as a mere grievance and abuse, Stein considered to be the best form in which the joint interest of the lord and the peasant could be maintained. It was reserved for Hardenberg, four years later, to free the peasant from all obligations towards his lord, and to place him in unshackled proprietorship of two-thirds of his former holding, the lord receiving the remaining one-third in compensation for the loss of feudal dues. Neither Stein nor Hardenberg interfered with the right of the lord to act as judge and police-magistrate within the limits of his manor; and the hereditary legal jurisdiction, which was abolished in Scotland in 1747, and in France in 1789, continued unchanged in Prussia down to the year 1848.

[Relative position of the peasant in Prussia and England.]

The history of Agrarian Reform upon the Continent shows how vast was the interval of time by which some of the greatest social changes in England had anticipated the corresponding changes in almost all other nations. But if the Prussian peasant at the beginning of this century remained in the servile condition which had passed out of mind in Great Britain before the Reformation, the early prosperity of the peasant in England was dearly purchased by a subsequent decline which has made his present lot far inferior to that of the children or grandchildren of the Prussian serf. However heavy the load of the Prussian serf, his holding was at least protected by law from absorption into the domain of his lord. Before sufficient capital had been amassed in Prussia to render landed property an object of competition, the forced military service of Frederick had made it a rule of State that the farmsteads of the peasant class must remain undiminished in number, at whatever violence to the laws of the market or the desires of great landlords. No process was permitted to take place corresponding to that by which in England, after the villein had become the free copyholder, the lord, with or without technical legal right, terminated the copyhold tenure of his retainer, and made the land as much his own exclusive property as the chairs and tables in his house. In Prussia, if the law kept the peasant on the land, it also kept the land for the peasant. Economic conditions, in the absence of such control in England, worked against the class of small holders. Their early enfranchisement in fact contributed to their extinction. It would perhaps have been better for the English labouring class to remain bound by a semi-servile tie to their land, than to gain a free holding which the law, siding with the landlord, treated as terminable at the expiration of particular lives, and which the increasing capital of the rich made its favourite prey. It is little profit to the landless, resourceless English labourer to know that his ancestor was a yeoman when the Prussian was a serf. Long as the bondage of the peasant on the mainland endured, prosperity came at last. The conditions which once distinguished agricultural England from the Continent are now reversed. Nowhere on the Continent is there a labouring class so stripped and despoiled of all interest in the soil, so sedulously excluded from all possibilities of proprietorship, as in England. In England alone the absence of internal revolution and foreign pressure has preserved a class whom a life spent in toil leaves as bare and dependent as when it began, and to whom the only boon which their country can offer is the education which may lead them to quit it.

[Reform of Prussian Army.]

[Short service.]

Besides the commission which had drafted the Edict of Emancipation, Stein found a military commission engaged on a plan for the reorganisation of the Prussian army. The existing system forced the peasant to serve in the ranks for twenty years, and drew the officers from the nobility, leaving the inhabitants of towns without either the duty or the right to enter the army at all. Since the battle of Jena, no one doubted that the principle of universal liability to military service must be introduced into Prussia; on the other hand, the very disasters of the State rendered it impossible to maintain an army on anything approaching to its former scale. With half its territory torn from it, and the remainder devastated by war, Prussia could barely afford to keep 40,000 soldiers in arms. Such were the conditions laid before the men who were charged with the construction of a new Prussian military system. Their conclusions, imperfect in themselves, and but partially carried out in the succeeding years, have nevertheless been the basis of the latest military organisation of Prussia and of Europe generally. The problem was solved by the adoption of a short period of service and the rapid drafting of the trained conscript into a reserve-force. Scharnhorst, President of the Military Commission, to whom more than to any one man Prussia owed its military revival, proposed to maintain an Active Army of 40,000 men; a Reserve, into which soldiers should pass after short service in the active army; a Landwehr, to be employed only for the internal defence of the country; and a Landsturm, or general arming of the population, for a species of guerilla warfare. Scharnhorst's project was warmly supported by Stein, who held a seat and a vote on the Military Commission; and the system of short service, with a Reserve, was immediately brought into action, though on a very limited scale. The remainder of the scheme had to wait for the assistance of events. The principle of universal military obligation was first proclaimed in the war of 1813, when also the Landwehr was first enrolled.

[Stein's plans of political reform.]

[Design for a Parliament, for Municipalities, and District boards.]

The reorganisation of the Prussian military system and the emancipation of the peasant, though promoted by Stein's accession to power, did not originate in Stein himself; the distinctive work of Stein was a great scheme of political reform. Had Stein remained longer in power, he would have given to Prussia at least the beginnings of constitutional government. Events drove him from office when but a small part of his project was carried into effect; but the project itself was great and comprehensive. He designed to give Prussia a Parliament, and to establish a system of self-government in its towns and country districts. Stein had visited England in his youth. The history and the literature of England interested him beyond those of any other country; and he had learnt from England that the partnership of the nation in the work of government, so far from weakening authority, animates it with a force which no despotic system can long preserve. Almost every important State-paper written by Stein denounces the apathy of the civil population of Prussia, and attributes it to their exclusion from all exercise of public duties. He declared that the nation must be raised from its torpor by the establishment of representative government and the creation of free local institutions in town and country. Stein was no friend of democracy. Like every other Prussian statesman he took for granted the exercise of a vigorous monarchical power at the centre of the State; but around the permanent executive he desired to gather the Council of the Nation, checking at least the caprices of Cabinet-rule, and making the opinion of the people felt by the monarch. Stein's Parliament would have been a far weaker body than the English House of Commons, but it was at least not intended to be a mockery, like those legislative bodies which Napoleon and his clients erected as the disguise of despotism. The transaction of local business in the towns and country districts, which had hitherto belonged to officials of the Crown, Stein desired to transfer in part to bodies elected by the inhabitants themselves. The functions allotted to the new municipal bodies illustrated the modest and cautious nature of Stein's attempt in the direction of self-government, including no more than the care of the poor, the superintendence of schools, and the maintenance of streets and public buildings. Finance remained partly, police wholly, in the hands of the central Government. Equally limited were the powers which Stein proposed to entrust to the district councils elected by the rural population. In comparison with the self-government of England or America, the self-government which Stein would have introduced into Prussia was of the most elementary character; yet his policy stood out in striking contrast to that which in every client-state of Napoleon was now crushing out the last elements of local independence under a rigid official centralisation.

[Municipal reform alone carried out.]

Stein was indeed unable to transform Prussia as he desired. Of the legislative, the municipal, and the district reforms which he had sketched, the municipal reform was the only one which he had time to carry out before being driven from power; and for forty years the municipal institutions created by Stein were the only fragment of liberty which Prussia enjoyed. A vehement opposition to reform was excited among the landowners, and supported by a powerful party at the Court. Stein was detested by the nobles whose peasants he had emancipated, and by the Berlin aristocracy, which for the last ten years had maintained the policy of friendship with France, and now declared the only safety of the Prussian State to lie in unconditional submission to Napoleon. The fire of patriotism, of energy, of self-sacrifice, which burned in Stein made him no representative of the Prussian governing classes of his time. It was not long before the landowners, who deemed him a Jacobin, and the friends of the French, who called him a madman, had the satisfaction of seeing the Minister sent into banishment by order of Napoleon himself (Dec., 1808). Stein left the greater part of his work uncompleted, but he had not laboured in vain. The years of his ministry in 1807 and 1808 were the years that gathered together everything that was worthiest in Prussia in the dawn of a national revival, and prepared the way for that great movement in which, after an interval of the deepest gloom, Stein was himself to light the nation to its victory.

CHAPTER VIII.

Spain in 1806-Napoleon uses the quarrel between Ferdinand and Godoy-He affects to be Ferdinand's protector-Dupont's army enters Spain-Murat in Spain-Charles abdicates-Ferdinand King-Savary brings Ferdinand to Bayonne-Napoleon makes both Charles and Ferdinand resign-Spirit of the Spanish Nation-Contrast with Germany-Rising of all Spain-The Notables at Bayonne-Campaign of 1808-Capitulation of Baylen-Wellesley lands in Portugal-Vimieiro-Convention of Cintra-Effect of the Spanish Rising on Europe-War Party in Prussia-Napoleon and Alexander at Erfurt-Stein resigns, and is proscribed-Napoleon in Spain-Spanish Misgovernment- Campaign on the Ebro-Campaign of Sir John Moore-Corunna-Napoleon leaves Spain-Siege of Saragossa-Successes of the French.

[Spanish affairs, 1793-1806.]

[Spain in 1806.]

Spain, which had played so insignificant a part throughout the Revolutionary War, was now about to become the theatre of events that opened a new world of hope to Europe. Its King, the Bourbon Charles IV., was more weak and more pitiful than any sovereign of the age. Power belonged to the Queen and to her paramour Godoy, who for the last fourteen years had so conducted the affairs of the country that every change in its policy had brought with it new disaster. In the war of the First Coalition Spain had joined the Allies, and French armies had crossed the Pyrenees. In 1796 Spain entered the service of France, and lost the battle of St. Vincent. At the Peace of Amiens, Napoleon surrendered its colony Trinidad to England; on the renewal of the war he again forced it into hostilities with Great Britain, and brought upon it the disaster of Trafalgar. This unbroken humiliation of the Spanish arms, combined with intolerable oppression and impoverishment at home, raised so bitter an outcry against Godoy's government, that foreign observers, who underrated the loyalty of the Spanish people, believed the country to be on the verge of revolution. At the Court itself the Crown Prince Ferdinand, under the influence of his Neapolitan wife, headed a party in opposition to Godoy and the supporters of French dominion. Godoy, insecure at home, threw himself the more unreservedly into the arms of Napoleon, who bestowed upon him a contemptuous patronage, and flattered him with the promise of an independent principality in Portugal. Izquierdo, Godoy's agent at Paris, received proposals from Napoleon which were concealed from the Spanish Ambassador; and during the first months of 1806 Napoleon possessed no more devoted servant than the man who virtually held the government of Spain.

[Spain intends to join Prussia in 1806.]

The opening of negotiations between Napoleon and Fox's Ministry in May, 1806, first shook this relation of confidence and obedience. Peace between France and England involved the abandonment on the part of Napoleon of any attack upon Portugal; and Napoleon now began to meet Godoy's inquiries after his Portuguese principality with an ominous silence. The next intelligence received was that the Spanish Balearic Islands had been offered by Napoleon to Great Britain, with the view of providing an indemnity for Ferdinand of Naples, if he should give up Sicily to Joseph Bonaparte (July, 1806.) This contemptuous appropriation of Spanish territory, without even the pretence of consulting the Spanish Government, excited scarcely less anger at Madrid than the corresponding proposal with regard to Hanover excited at Berlin. The Court began to meditate a change of policy, and watched the events which were leading Prussia to arm for the war of 1806. A few weeks more passed, and news arrived that Buenos Ayres, the capital of Spanish South America, had fallen into the hands of the English. This disaster produced the deepest impression, for the loss of Buenos Ayres was believed, and with good reason, to be but the prelude to the loss of the entire American empire of Spain. Continuance of the war with England was certain ruin; alliance with the enemies of Napoleon was at least not hopeless, now that Prussia was on the point of throwing its army into the scale against France. An agent was despatched by the Spanish Government to London (Sept., 1806); and, upon the commencement of hostilities by Prussia, a proclamation was issued by Godoy, which, without naming any actual enemy, summoned the Spanish people to prepare for a war on behalf of their country.

[Treaty of Fontainebleau, Oct., 1807.]

Scarcely had the manifesto been read by the Spaniards when the Prussian army was annihilated at Jena. The dream of resistance to Napoleon vanished away; the only anxiety of the Spanish Government was to escape from the consequences of its untimely daring. Godoy hastened to explain that his martial proclamation had been directed not against the Emperor of the French, but against the Emperor of Morocco. Napoleon professed himself satisfied with this palpable absurdity: it appeared as if the events of the last few months had left no trace on his mind. Immediately after the Peace of Tilsit he resumed his negotiations with Godoy upon the old friendly footing, and brought them to a conclusion in the Treaty of Fontainebleau (Oct., 1807), which provided for the invasion of Portugal by a French and a Spanish army, and for its division into principalities, one of which was to be conferred upon Godoy himself. The occupation of Portugal was duly effected, and Godoy looked forward to the speedy retirement of the French from the province which was to be his portion of the spoil.

[Napoleon uses the enmity of Ferdinand against Godoy.]

[Napoleon about to intervene as protector of Ferdinand.]

Napoleon, however, had other ends in view. Spain, not Portugal, was the true prize. Napoleon had gradually formed the determination of taking Spain into his own hands, and the dissensions of the Court itself enabled him to appear upon the scene as the judge to whom all parties appealed. The Crown Prince Ferdinand had long been at open enmity with Godoy and his own mother. So long as Ferdinand's Neapolitan wife was alive, her influence made the Crown Prince the centre of the party hostile to France; but after her death in 1806, at a time when Godoy himself inclined to join Napoleon's enemies, Ferdinand took up a new position, and allied himself with the French Ambassador, at whose instigation he wrote to Napoleon, soliciting the hand of a princess of the Napoleonic House. [145] Godoy, though unaware of the letter, discovered that Ferdinand was engaged in some intrigue. King Charles was made to believe that his son had entered into a conspiracy to dethrone him. The Prince was placed under arrest, and on the 30th of October, 1807, a royal proclamation appeared at Madrid, announcing that Ferdinand had been detected in a conspiracy against his parents, and that he was about to be brought to justice along with his accomplices. King Charles at the same time wrote a letter to Napoleon, of whose connection with Ferdinand he had not the slightest suspicion, stating that he intended to exclude the Crown Prince from the succession to the throne of Spain. No sooner had Napoleon received the communication from the simple King than he saw himself in possession of the pretext for intervention which he had so long desired. The most pressing orders were given for the concentration of troops on the Spanish frontier; Napoleon appeared to be on the point of entering Spain as the defender of the hereditary rights of Ferdinand. The opportunity, however, proved less favourable than Napoleon had expected. The Crown Prince, overcome by his fears, begged forgiveness of his father, and disclosed the negotiations which had taken place between himself and the French Ambassador. Godoy, dismayed at finding Napoleon's hand in what he had supposed to be a mere palace-intrigue, abandoned all thought of proceeding further against the Crown Prince; and a manifesto announced that Ferdinand was restored to the favour of his father. Napoleon now countermanded the order which he had given for the despatch of the Rhenish troops to the Pyrenees, and contented himself with directing General Dupont, the commander of an army-corps nominally destined for Portugal, to cross the Spanish frontier and advance as far as Vittoria.

[Dupont enters Spain, Dec., 1807.]

[French welcomed in Spain as Ferdinand's protectors.]

Dupont's troops entered Spain in the last days of the year 1807, and were received with acclamations. It was universally believed that Napoleon had espoused the cause of Ferdinand, and intended to deliver the Spanish nation from the detested rule of Godoy. Since the open attack made upon Ferdinand in the publication of the pretended conspiracy, the Crown Prince, who was personally as contemptible as any of his enemies, had become the idol of the people. For years past the hatred of the nation towards Godoy and the Queen had been constantly deepening, and the very reforms which Godoy effected in the hope of attaching to himself the more enlightened classes only served to complete his unpopularity with the fanatical mass of the nation. The French, who gradually entered the Peninsula to the number of 80,000, and who described themselves as the protectors of Ferdinand and of the true Catholic faith, were able to spread themselves over the northern provinces without exciting suspicion. It was only when their commanders, by a series of tricks worthy of American savages, obtained possession of the frontier citadels and fortresses, that the wiser part of the nation began to entertain some doubt as to the real purpose of their ally. At the Court itself and among the enemies of Ferdinand the advance of the French roused the utmost alarm. King Charles wrote to Napoleon in the tone of ancient friendship; but the answer he received was threatening and mysterious. The utterances which the Emperor let fall in the presence of persons likely to report them at Madrid were even more alarming, and were intended to terrify the Court into the resolution to take flight from Madrid. The capital once abandoned by the King, Napoleon judged that he might safely take everything into his own hands on the pretence of restoring to Spain the government which it had lost.

[Murat sent to Spain, Feb., 1808.]

[Charles IV. abdicates, March 17, 1808.]

On the 20th of February, 1808, Murat was ordered to quit Paris in order to assume the command in Spain. Not a word was said by Napoleon to him before his departure. His instructions first reached him at Bayonne; they were of a military nature, and gave no indication of the ultimate political object of his mission. Murat entered Spain on the 1st of March, knowing no more than that he was ordered to reassure all parties and to commit himself to none, but with full confidence that he himself was intended by Napoleon to be the successor of the Bourbon dynasty. It was now that the Spanish Court, expecting the appearance of the French army in Madrid, resolved upon that flight which Napoleon considered so necessary to his own success. The project was not kept a secret. It passed from Godoy to the Ministers of State, and from them to the friends of Ferdinand. The populace of Madrid was inflamed by the report that Godoy was about to carry the King to a distance, in order to prolong the misgovernment which the French had determined to overthrow. A tumultuous crowd marched from the capital to Aranjuez, the residence of the Court. On the evening of the 17th of March, the palace of Godoy was stormed by the mob. Godoy himself was seized, and carried to the barracks amid the blows and curses of the populace. The terrified King, who already saw before him the fate of his cousin, Louis XVI., first published a decree depriving Godoy of all his dignities, and then abdicated in favour of his son. On the 19th of March Ferdinand was proclaimed King.

[French enter Madrid, March 23.]

Such was the unexpected intelligence that met Murat as he approached Madrid. The dissensions of the Court, which were to supply his ground of intervention, had been terminated by the Spaniards themselves: in the place of a despised dotard and a menaced favourite, Spain had gained a youthful sovereign around whom all classes of the nation rallied with the utmost enthusiasm. Murat's position became a very difficult one; but he supplied what was wanting in his instructions by the craft of a man bent upon creating a vacancy in his own favour. He sent his aide-de-camp, Monthieu, to visit the dethroned sovereign, and obtained a protest from King Charles IV., declaring his abdication to have been extorted from him by force, and consequently to be null and void. This document Murat kept secret; but he carefully abstained from doing anything which might involve a recognition of Ferdinand's title. On the 23rd of March the French troops entered Madrid. Nothing had as yet become known to the public that indicated an altered policy on the part of the French; and the soldiers of Murat, as the supposed friends of Ferdinand, met with as friendly a reception in Madrid as in the other towns of Spain. On the following day Ferdinand himself made his solemn entry into the capital, amid wild demonstrations of an almost barbaric loyalty.

[Savary brings Ferdinand to Bayonne, April, 1808.]

In the tumult of popular joy it was noticed that Murat's troops continued their exercises without the least regard to the pageant that so deeply stirred the hearts of the Spaniards. Suspicions were aroused; the enthusiasm of the people for the French soldiers began to change into irritation and ill-will. The end of the long drama of deceit was in fact now close at hand. On the 4th of April General Savary arrived at Madrid with instructions independent of those given to Murat. He was charged to entice the new Spanish sovereign from his capital, and to bring him, either as a dupe or as a prisoner, on to French soil. The task was not a difficult one. Savary pretended that Napoleon had actually entered Spain, and that he only required an assurance of Ferdinand's continued friendship before recognising him as the legitimate successor of Charles IV. Ferdinand, he added, could show no greater mark of cordiality to his patron than by advancing to meet him on the road. Snared by these hopes, Ferdinand set out from Madrid, in company with Savary and some of his own foolish confidants. On reaching Burgos, the party found no signs of the Emperor. They continued their journey to Vittoria. Here Ferdinand's suspicions were aroused, and he declined to proceed farther. Savary hastened to Bayonne to report the delay to Napoleon. He returned with a letter which overcame Ferdinand's scruples and induced him to cross the Pyrenees, in spite of the prayers of statesmen and the loyal violence of the simple inhabitants of the district. At Bayonne Ferdinand was visited by Napoleon, but not a word was spoken on the object of his journey. In the afternoon the Emperor received Ferdinand and his suite at a neighbouring château, but preserved the same ominous silence. When the other guests departed, the Canon Escoiquiz, a member of Ferdinand's retinue, was detained, and learned from Napoleon's own lips the fate in store for the Bourbon Monarchy. Savary returned to Bayonne with Ferdinand, and informed the Prince that he must renounce the crown of Spain.  [146]

[Charles and Ferdinand surrender their rights to Napoleon.]

[Attack on the French in Madrid, May 2.]

For some days Ferdinand held out against Napoleon's demands with a stubbornness not often shown by him in the course of his mean and hypocritical career. He was assailed not only by Napoleon but by those whose fall had been his own rise; for Godoy was sent to Bayonne by Murat, and the old King and Queen hurried after their son in order to witness his humiliation. Ferdinand's parents attacked him with an indecency that astonished even Napoleon himself; but the Prince maintained his refusal until news arrived from Madrid which terrified him into submission. The irritation of the capital had culminated in an armed conflict between the populace and the French troops. On an attempt being made by Murat to remove the remaining members of the royal family from the palace, the capital had broken into open insurrection, and wherever French soldiers were found alone or in small bodies they were massacred. (May 2.) Some hundreds of the French perished; but the victory of Murat was speedy, and his vengeance ruthless. The insurgents were driven into the great central square of the city, and cut down by repeated charges of cavalry. When all resistance was over, numbers of the citizens were shot in cold blood. Such was the intelligence which reached Bayonne in the midst of Napoleon's struggle with Ferdinand. There was no further need of argument. Ferdinand was informed that if he withheld his resignation for twenty-four hours longer he would be treated as a rebel. He yielded; and for a couple of country houses and two life-annuities the crown of Spain and the Indies was renounced in favour of Napoleon by father and son.

[National spirit of the Spaniards.]

The crown had indeed been won without a battle. That there remained a Spanish nation ready to fight to the death for its independence was not a circumstance which Napoleon had taken into account. His experience had as yet taught him of no force but that of Governments and armies. In the larger States, or groups of States, which had hitherto been the spoil of France, the sense of nationality scarcely existed. Italy had felt it no disgrace to pass under the rule of Napoleon. The Germans on both sides of the Rhine knew of a fatherland only as an arena of the keenest jealousies. In Prussia and in Austria the bond of citizenship was far less the love of country than the habit of obedience to government. England and Russia, where patriotism existed in the sense in which it existed in Spain, had as yet been untouched by French armies. Judging from the action of the Germans and the Italians, Napoleon might well suppose that in settling with the Spanish Government he had also settled with the Spanish people, or, at the worst, that his troops might have to fight some fanatical peasants, like those who resisted the expulsion of the Bourbons from Naples. But the Spanish nation was no mosaic of political curiosities like the Holy Roman Empire, and no divided and oblivious family like the population of Italy. Spain, as a single nation united under its King, had once played the foremost part in Europe: when its grandeur departed, its pride had remained behind: the Spaniard, in all his torpor and impoverishment, retained the impulse of honour, the spirited self-respect, which periods of national greatness leave behind them among a race capable of cherishing their memory. Nor had those influences of a common European culture, which directly opposed themselves to patriotism in Germany, affected the home-bred energy of Spain. The temper of mind which could find satisfaction in the revival of a form of Greek art when Napoleon's cavalry were scouring Germany, or which could inquire whether mankind would not profit by the removal of the barriers between nations, was unknown among the Spanish people. Their feeling towards a foreign invader was less distant from that of African savages than from that of the civilised and literary nations which had fallen so easy a prey to the French. Government, if it had degenerated into everything that was contemptible, had at least failed to reduce the people to the passive helplessness which resulted from the perfection of uniformity in Prussia. Provincial institutions, though corrupted, were not extinguished; provincial attachments and prejudices existed in unbounded strength. Like the passion of the Spaniard for his native district, his passion for Spain was of a blind and furious character. Enlightened conviction, though not altogether absent, had small place in the Spanish war of defence. Religious fanaticism, hatred of the foreigner, delight in physical barbarity, played their full part by the side of nobler elements in the struggle for national independence.

[Rising of Spain, May, 1808.]

The captivity of Ferdinand, and the conflict of Murat's troops with the inhabitants of Madrid, had become known in the Spanish cities before the middle of May. On the 20th of the same month the Gaceta announced the abdication of the Bourbon family. Nothing more was wanting to throw Spain into tumult. The same irresistible impulse seized provinces and cities separated by the whole breadth of the Peninsula. Without communication, and without the guidance of any central authority, the Spanish people in every part of the kingdom armed themselves against the usurper. Carthagena rose on the 22nd. Valencia forced its magistrates to proclaim King Ferdinand on the 23rd. Two days later the mountain-district of Asturias, with a population of half a million, formally declared war on Napoleon, and despatched envoys to Great Britain to ask for assistance. On the 26th, Santander and Seville, on opposite sides of the Peninsula, joined the national movement. Corunna, Badajoz, and Granada declared themselves on the Feast of St. Ferdinand, the 30th of May. Thus within a week the entire country was in arms, except in those districts where the presence of French troops rendered revolt impossible. The action of the insurgents was everywhere the same. They seized upon the arms and munitions of war collected in the magazines, and forced the magistrates or commanders of towns to place themselves at their head. Where the latter resisted, or were suspected of treachery to the national cause, they were in many cases put to death. Committees of Government were formed in the principal cities, and as many armies came into being as there were independent centres of the insurrection.

[Joseph Bonaparte made King.]

[Napoleon's Assembly at Bayonne, June, 1808.]

Napoleon was in the meantime collecting a body of prelates and grandees at Bayonne, under the pretence of consulting the representatives of the Spanish nation. Half the members of the intended Assembly received a personal summons from the Emperor; the other half were ordered to be chosen by popular election. When the order, however, was issued from Bayonne, the country was already in full revolt. Elections were held only in the districts occupied by the French, and not more than twenty representatives so elected proceeded to Bayonne. The remainder of the Assembly, which numbered in all ninety-one persons, was composed of courtiers who had accompanied the Royal Family across the Pyrenees, and of any Spaniards of distinction upon whom the French could lay their hands. Joseph Bonaparte was brought from Naples to receive the crown of Spain.  [147] On the 15th of June the Assembly of the Notables was opened. Its discussions followed the order prescribed by Napoleon on all similar occasions. Articles disguising a central absolute power with some pretence of national representation were laid before the Assembly, and adopted without criticism. Except in the privileges accorded to the Church, little indicated that the Constitution of Bayonne was intended for the Spanish rather than for any other nation. Its political forms were as valuable or as valueless as those which Napoleon had given to his other client States; its principles of social order were those which even now despotism could not dissever from French supremacy-the abolition of feudal services, equality of taxation, admission of all ranks to public employment. Titles of nobility were preserved, the privileges of nobility abolished. One genuine act of homage was rendered to the national character. The Catholic religion was declared to be the only one permitted in Spain.

[Attempts of Napoleon to suppress the Spanish rising.]

While Napoleon was thus emancipating the peasants from the nobles, and reconciling his supremacy with the claims of the Church, peasants and townspeople were flocking to arms at the call of the priests, who so little appreciated the orthodoxy of their patron as to identify him in their manifestos with Calvin, with the Antichrist, and with Apollyon.  [148] The Emperor underrated the military efficiency of the national revolt, and contented himself with sending his lieutenants to repress it, while he himself, expecting a speedy report of victory, remained in Bayonne. Divisions of the French army moved in all directions against the insurgents. Dupont was ordered to march upon Seville from the capital, Moncey upon Valencia; Marshal Bessières took command of a force intended to disperse the main army of the Spaniards, which threatened the roads from the Pyrenees to Madrid. The first encounters were all favourable to the practised French troops; yet the objects which Napoleon set before his generals were not achieved. Moncey failed to reduce Valencia; Dupont found himself outnumbered on passing the Sierra Morena, and had to retrace his steps and halt at Andujar, where the road to Madrid leaves the valley of the Guadalquivir. Without sustaining any severe loss, the French divisions were disheartened by exhausting and resultless marches; the Spaniards gained new confidence on each successive day which passed without inflicting upon them a defeat. At length, however, the commanders of the northern army were forced by Marshal Bessières to fight a pitched battle at Rio Seco, on the west of Valladolid (July 13th). Bessières won a complete victory, and gained the lavish praises of his master for a battle which, according to Napoleon's own conception, ended the Spanish war by securing the roads from the Pyrenees to Madrid.

[Capitulation of Baylen, July 19.]

[Dupont in Andalusia.]

Never had Napoleon so gravely mistaken the true character of a campaign. The vitality of the Spanish insurrection lay not in the support of the capital, which had never passed out of the hands of the French, but in the very independence of the several provincial movements. Unlike Vienna and Berlin, Madrid might be held by the French without the loss being felt by their adversary; Cadiz, Corunna, Lisbon, were equally serviceable bases for the insurrection. The victory of Marshal Bessières in the north preserved the communication between France and Madrid, and it did nothing more. It failed to restore the balance of military force in the south of Spain, or to affect the operations of the Spanish troops which were now closing round Dupont upon the Guadalquivir. On the 15th of July Dupont was attacked at Andujar by greatly superior forces. His lieutenant, Vedel, knowing the Spaniards to be engaged in a turning movement, made a long march northwards in order to guard the line of retreat. In his absence the position of Baylen, immediately in Dupont's rear, was seized by the Spanish general Reding. Dupont discovered himself to be surrounded. He divided his army into two columns, and moved on the night of the 18th from Andujar towards Baylen, in the hope of overpowering Reding's division. At daybreak on the 19th the positions of Reding were attacked by the French. The struggle continued until mid-day, though the French soldiers sank exhausted with thirst and with the burning heat. At length the sound of cannon was heard in the rear. Castanos, the Spanish general commanding at Andujar, had discovered Dupont's retreat, and pressed behind him with troops fresh and unwearied by conflict. Further resistance was hopeless. Dupont had to negotiate for a surrender. He consented to deliver up Vedel's division as well as his own, although Vedel's troops were in possession of the road to Madrid, the Spanish commander promising, on this condition, that the captives should not be retained as prisoners of war in Spain, but be permitted to return by sea to their native country. The entire army of Andalusia, numbering 23,000 men, thus passed into the hands of an enemy whom Napoleon had not believed to possess a military existence. Dupont's anxiety to save something for France only aggravated the extent of the calamity; for the Junta of Seville declined to ratify the terms of the capitulation, and the prisoners, with the exception of the superior officers, were sent to the galleys at Cadiz. The victorious Spaniards pushed forwards upon Madrid. King Joseph, who had entered the city only a week before, had to fly from his capital. The whole of the French troops in Spain were compelled to retire to a defensive position upon the Ebro.

[Wellesley lands in Portugal, Aug. 1, 1808.]

[Vimieiro, Aug. 21.]

[Convention of Cintra, Aug. 30.]

The disaster of Baylen did not come alone. Napoleon's attack upon Portugal had brought him within the striking-range of Great Britain. On the 1st of August an English army, commanded by Sir Arthur Wellesley, landed on the Portuguese coast at the mouth of the Mondego. Junot, the first invader of the Peninsula, was still at Lisbon; his forces in occupation of Portugal numbered nearly 30,000 men, but they were widely dispersed, and he was unable to bring more than 13,000 men into the field against the 16,000 with whom Wellesley moved upon Lisbon. Junot advanced to meet the invader. A battle was fought at Vimieiro, thirty miles north of Lisbon, on the 21st of August. The victory was gained by the British; and had the first advantage been followed up, Junot's army would scarcely have escaped capture. But the command had passed out of Wellesley's hands. His superior officer, Sir Harry Burrard, took up the direction of the army immediately the battle ended, and Wellesley had to acquiesce in a suspension of operations at a moment when the enemy seemed to be within his grasp. Junot made the best use of his reprieve. He entered into negotiations for the evacuation of Portugal, and obtained the most favourable terms in the Convention of Cintra, signed on the 30th of August. The French army was permitted to return to France with its arms and baggage. Wellesley, who had strongly condemned the inaction of his superior officers after the battle of the 21st, agreed with them that, after the enemy had once been permitted to escape, the evacuation of Portugal was the best result which the English could obtain.  [149] Junot's troops were accordingly conveyed to French ports at the expense of the British Government, to the great displeasure of the public, who expected to see the marshal and his army brought prisoners into Portsmouth. The English were as ill-humoured with their victory as the French with their defeat. When on the point of sending Junot to a court-martial for his capitulation, Napoleon learnt that the British Government had ordered its own generals to be brought to trial for permitting the enemy to escape them.

[Effect of Spanish rising on Europe.]

[War-party in Austria and Prussia.]

[Napoleon and Prussia.]

If the Convention of Cintra gained little glory for England, the tidings of the successful uprising of the Spanish people against Napoleon, and of Dupont's capitulation at Baylen, created the deepest impression in every country of Europe that still entertained the thought of resistance to France. The first great disaster had befallen Napoleon's arms. It had been inflicted by a nation without a government, without a policy, without a plan beyond that of the liberation of its fatherland from the foreigner. What Coalition after Coalition had failed to effect, the patriotism and energy of a single people deserted by its rulers seemed about to accomplish. The victory of the regular troops at Baylen was but a part of that great national movement in which every isolated outbreak had had its share in dividing and paralysing the Emperor's force. The capacity of untrained popular levies to resist practised troops might be exaggerated in the first outburst of wonder and admiration caused by the Spanish rising; but the difference made in the nature of the struggle by the spirit of popular resentment and determination was one upon which mistake was impossible. A sudden light broke in upon the politicians of Austria and Prussia, and explained the powerlessness of those Coalitions in which the wars had always been the affair of the Cabinets, and never the affair of the people. What the Spanish nation had effected for itself against Napoleon was not impossible for the German nation, if once a national movement like that of Spain sprang up among the German race. "I do not see," wrote Blücher some time afterwards, "why we should not think ourselves as good as the Spaniards." The best men in the Austrian and Prussian Governments began to look forward to the kindling of popular spirit as the surest means for combating the tyranny of Napoleon. Military preparations were pushed forward in Austria with unprecedented energy and on a scale rivalling that of France itself. In Prussia the party of Stein determined upon a renewal of the war, and decided to risk the extinction of the Prussian State rather than submit to the extortions by which Napoleon was completing the ruin of their country. It was among the patriots of Northern Germany that the course of the Spanish struggle excited the deepest emotion, and gave rise to the most resolute purpose of striking for European liberty.

Since the nominal restoration of peace between France and Prussia by the cession of half the Prussian kingdom, not a month had passed without the infliction of some gross injustice upon the conquered nation. The evacuation of the country had in the first instance been made conditional upon the payment of certain requisitions in arrear. While the amount of this sum was being settled, all Prussia, except Königsberg, remained in the hands of the French, and 157,000 French soldiers lived at free quarters upon the unfortunate inhabitants. At the end of the year 1807 King Frederick William was informed that, besides paying to Napoleon 60,000,000 francs in money, and ceding domain lands of the same value, he must continue to support 40,000 French troops in five garrison-towns upon the Oder. Such was the dismay caused by this announcement, that Stein quitted Königsberg, now the seat of government, and passed three months at the head-quarters of the French at Berlin, endeavouring to frame some settlement less disastrous to his country. Count Daru, Napoleon's administrator in Prussia, treated the Minister with respect, and accepted his proposal for the evacuation of Prussian territory on payment of a fixed sum to the French. But the agreement required Napoleon's ratification, and for this Stein waited in vain.  [150]

[Stein urges war.]

[Demands of Napoleon, Sept., 1808.]

Month after month dragged on, and Napoleon made no reply. At length the victories of the Spanish insurrection in the summer of 1808 forced the Emperor to draw in his troops from beyond the Elbe. He placed a bold front upon his necessities, and demanded from the Prussian Government, as the price of evacuation, a still larger sum than that which had been named in the previous winter: he insisted that the Prussian army should be limited to 40,000 men, and the formation of the Landwehr abandoned; and he required the support of a Prussian corps of 16,000 men, in the event of hostilities breaking out between France and Austria. Not even on these conditions was Prussia offered the complete evacuation of her territory. Napoleon still insisted on holding the three principal fortresses on the Oder with a garrison of 10,000 men. Such was the treaty proposed to the Prussian Court (September, 1808) at a time when every soldierly spirit thrilled with the tidings from Spain, and every statesman was convinced by the events of the last few months that Napoleon's treaties were but stages in a progression of wrongs. Stein and Scharnhorst urged the King to arm the nation for a struggle as desperate as that of Spain, and to delay only until Napoleon himself was busied in the warfare of the Peninsula. Continued submission was ruin; revolt was at least not hopeless. However forlorn the condition of Prussia, its alliances were of the most formidable character. Austria was arming without disguise; Great Britain had intervened in the warfare of the Peninsula with an efficiency hitherto unknown in its military operations; Spain, on the estimate of Napoleon himself, required an army of 200,000 men. Since the beginning of the Spanish insurrection Stein had occupied himself with the organisation of a general outbreak throughout Northern Germany. Rightly or wrongly, he believed the train to be now laid, and encouraged the King of Prussia to count upon the support of a popular insurrection against the French in all the territories which they had taken from Prussia, from Hanover, and from Hesse.

[Stein resigns, Nov. 24. Proscribed by Napoleon.]

[Napoleon and Alexander meet at Erfurt, Oct. 7, 1808.]

In one point alone Stein was completely misinformed. He believed that Alexander, in spite of the Treaty of Tilsit, would not be unwilling to see the storm burst upon Napoleon, and that in the event of another general war the forces of Russia would more probably be employed against France than in its favour. The illusion was a fatal one. Alexander was still the accomplice of Napoleon. For the sake of the Danubian Principalities, Alexander was willing to hold central Europe in check while Napoleon crushed the Spaniards, and to stifle every bolder impulse in the simple King of Prussia. Napoleon himself dreaded the general explosion of Europe before Spain was conquered, and drew closer to his Russian ally. Difficulties that had been placed in the way of the Russian annexation of Roumania vanished. The Czar and the Emperor determined to display to all Europe the intimacy of their union by a festal meeting at Erfurt in the midst of their victims and their dependents. The whole tribe of vassal German sovereigns was summoned to the meeting-place; representatives attended from the Courts of Vienna and Berlin. On the 7th of October Napoleon and Alexander made their entry into Erfurt. Pageants and festivities required the attendance of the crowned and titled rabble for several days; but the only serious business was the settlement of a treaty confirming the alliance of France and Russia, and the notification of the Czar to the envoy of the King of Prussia that his master must accept the terms demanded by Napoleon, and relinquish the idea of a struggle with France.  [151] Count Goltz, the Prussian envoy, unwillingly signed the treaty which gave Prussia but a partial evacuation at so dear a cost, and wrote to the King that no course now remained for him but to abandon himself to unreserved dependence upon France, and to permit Stein and the patriotic party to retire from the direction of the State. Unless the King could summon up courage to declare war in defiance of Alexander, there was, in fact, no alternative left open to him. Napoleon had discovered Stein's plans for raising an insurrection in Germany several weeks before, and had given vent to the most furious outburst of wrath against Stein in the presence of the Prussian Ambassador at Erfurt. If the great struggle on which Stein's whole heart and soul were set was to be relinquished, if Spain was to be crushed before Prussia moved an arm, and Austria was to be left to fight its inevitable battle alone, then the presence of Stein at the head of the Prussian State was only a snare to Europe, a peril to Prussia, and a misery to himself. Stein asked for and received his dismissal. (Nov. 24, 1808.)

Stein's retirement averted the wrath of Napoleon from the King of Prussia; but the whole malignity of that Corsican nature broke out against the high-spirited patriot as soon as fresh victories had released Napoleon from the ill-endured necessity of self-control. On the 16th of December, when Madrid had again passed into the possession of the French, an imperial order appeared, which gave the measure of Napoleon's hatred of the fallen Minister. Stein was denounced as the enemy of the Empire; his property was confiscated; he was ordered to be seized by the troops of the Emperor or his allies wherever they could lay their hands upon him. As in the days of Roman tyranny, the west of Europe could now afford no asylum to the enemies of the Emperor. Russia and Austria remained the only refuge of the exile. Stein escaped into Bohemia; and, as the crowning humiliation of the Prussian State, its police were forced to pursue as a criminal the statesman whose fortitude had still made it possible in the darkest days for Prussian patriots not to despair of their country.

[Misgovernment of the Spanish Junta.]

[Napoleon goes to Spain, Nov., 1808.]

Central Europe secured by the negotiations with Alexander at Erfurt, Napoleon was now able to place himself at the head of the French forces in Spain without fear of any immediate attack from the side of Germany. Since the victory of Baylen the Spaniards had made little progress either towards good government or towards a good military administration. The provincial Juntas had consented to subordinate themselves to a central committee chosen from among their own members; but this new supreme authority, which held its meetings at Aranjuez, proved one of the worst governments that even Spain itself had ever endured. It numbered thirty persons, twenty-eight of whom were priests, nobles, or officials. [152] Its qualities were those engrained in Spanish official life. In legislation it attempted absolutely nothing but the restoration of the Inquisition and the protection of Church lands; its administration was confined to a foolish interference with the better generals, and the acquisition of enormous supplies of war from Great Britain, which were either stolen by contractors or allowed to fall into the hands of the French. While the members of the Junta discussed the titles of honour which were to attach to them collectively and individually, and voted themselves salaries equal to those of Napoleon's generals, the armies fell into a state of destitution which scarcely any but Spanish troops would have been capable of enduring. The energy of the humbler classes alone prolonged the military existence of the insurrection; the Government organised nothing, comprehended nothing. Its part in the national movement was confined to a system of begging and boasting, which demoralised the Spaniards, and bewildered the agents and generals of England who first attempted the difficult task of assisting the Spaniards to help themselves. When the approach of army after army, the levies of Germany, Poland, Holland, and Italy, in addition to Napoleon's own veteran troops of Austerlitz and Jena, gave to the rest of the world some idea of the enormous force which Napoleon was about to throw on to Spain, the Spanish Government could form no better design than to repeat the movement of Baylen against Napoleon himself on the banks of the Ebro.

[Napoleon enters Madrid, Dec. 4.]

[Campaign on the Ebro, Nov., 1808.]

The Emperor for the first time crossed the Pyrenees in the beginning of November, 1808. The victory of the Spaniards in the summer had forced the invaders to retire into the district between the Ebro and the Pyrenees, and the Ebro now formed the dividing-line between the hostile armies. It was the intention of Napoleon to roll back the extremes of the Spanish line to the east and the west, and, breaking through its centre, to move straight upon Burgos and Madrid. The Spaniards, for their part, were not content to act upon the defensive. When Napoleon arrived at Vittoria on the 5th of November, the left wing of the Spanish army under General Blake had already received orders to move eastwards from the upper waters of the Ebro, and to cut the French off from their communication with the Pyrenees. The movement was exactly that which Napoleon desired; for in executing it, Blake had only to march far enough eastwards to find himself completely surrounded by French divisions. A premature movement of the French generals themselves alone saved Blake from total destruction. He was attacked and defeated at Espinosa, on the upper Ebro, before he had advanced far enough to lose his line of retreat (Nov. 10); and, after suffering great losses, he succeeded in leading off a remnant of his army into the mountains of Asturias. In the centre, Soult drove the enemy before him, and captured Burgos. Of the army which was to have cleared Spain of the French, nothing now remained but a corps on the right at Tudela, commanded by Palafox. The destruction of this body was committed by the Emperor to Lannes and Ney. Ney was ordered to take a long march southwards in order to cut off the retreat of the Spaniards; he found it impossible, however, to execute his march within the time prescribed; and Palafox, beaten by Lannes at Tudela, made good his retreat into Saragossa. A series of accidents had thus saved the divisions of the Spanish army from actual capture, but there no longer existed a force capable of meeting the enemy in the field. Napoleon moved forward from Burgos upon Madrid. The rest of his march was a triumph. The batteries defending the mountain-pass of Somo Sierra were captured by a charge of Polish cavalry; and the capital itself surrendered, after a short artillery fire, on the 4th of December, four weeks after the opening of the campaign.

[Campaign of Sir John Moore.]

An English army was slowly and painfully making its way towards the Ebro at the time when Napoleon broke in pieces the Spanish line of defence. On the 14th of October Sir John Moore had assumed the command of 20,000 British troops at Lisbon. He was instructed to march to the neighbourhood of Burgos, and to co-operate with the Spanish generals upon the Ebro. According to the habit of the English, no allowance was made for the movements of the enemy while their own were under consideration; and the mountain-country which Moore had to traverse placed additional obstacles in the way of an expedition at least a month too late in its starting. Moore believed it to be impossible to carry his artillery over the direct road from Lisbon to Salamanca, and sent it round by way of Madrid, while he himself advanced through Ciudad Rodrigo, reaching Salamanca on the 13th of November. Here, while still waiting for his artillery, rumours reached him of the destruction of Blake's army at Espinosa, and of the fall of Burgos. Later came the report of Palafox's overthrow at Tudela. Yet even now Moore could get no trustworthy information from the Spanish authorities. He remained for some time in suspense, and finally determined to retreat into Portugal. Orders were sent to Sir David Baird, who was approaching with reinforcements from Corunna, to turn back towards the northern coast. Scarcely had Moore formed this decision, when despatches arrived from Frere, the British agent at Madrid, stating that the Spaniards were about to defend the capital to the last extremity, and that Moore would be responsible for the ruin of Spain and the disgrace of England if he failed to advance to its relief. To the great joy of his soldiers, Moore gave orders for a forward march. The army advanced upon Valladolid, with the view of attacking the French upon their line of communication, while the siege of the capital engaged them in front. Baird was again ordered southwards. It was not until the 14th of December, ten days after Madrid had passed into the hands of the French, that Moore received intelligence of its fall. Neither the Spanish Government nor the British agent who had caused Moore to advance took the trouble to inform him of the surrender of the capital; he learnt it from an intercepted French despatch. From the same despatch Moore learnt that to the north of him, at Saldanha, on the river Carrion, there lay a comparatively small French force under the command of Soult. The information was enough for Moore, heart-sick at the mockery to which his army had been subjected, and burning for decisive action. He turned northwards, and marched against Soult, in the hope of surprising him before the news of his danger could reach Napoleon in the capital.

[Napoleon marches against Moore, Dec. 19.]

[Retreat of the English.]

[Corunna, Jan. 16, 1809.]

On the 19th of December a report reached Madrid that Moore had suspended his retreat on Portugal. Napoleon instantly divined the actual movement of the English, and hurried from Madrid against Moore at the head of 40,000 men. Moore had met Baird on the 20th at Mayorga; on the 23rd the united British divisions reached Sahagun, scarcely a day's march from Soult at Saldanha. Here the English commander learnt that Napoleon himself was on his track. Escape was a question of hours. Napoleon had pushed across the Guadarama mountains in forced marches through snow and storm. Had his vanguard been able to seize the bridge over the river Esla at Benavente before the English crossed it, Moore would have been cut off from all possibility of escape. The English reached the river first and blew up the bridge. This rescued them from immediate danger. The defence of the river gave Moore's army a start which rendered the superiority of Napoleon's numbers of little effect. For a while Napoleon followed Moore towards the northern coast. On the 1st of January, 1809, he wrote an order which showed that he looked upon Moore's escape as now inevitable, and on the next day he quitted the army, leaving to his marshals the honour of toiling after Moore to the coast, and of seizing some thousands of frozen or drunken British stragglers. Moore himself pushed on towards Corunna with a rapidity which was dearly paid for by the demoralisation of his army. The sufferings and the excesses of the troops were frightful; only the rear-guard, which had to face the enemy, preserved soldierly order. At length Moore found it necessary to halt and take up position, in order to restore the discipline of his army. He turned upon Soult at Lugo, and offered battle for two successive days; but the French general declined an engagement; and Moore, satisfied with having recruited his troops, continued his march upon Corunna. Soult still followed. On January 11th the English army reached the sea; but the ships which were to convey them back to England were nowhere to be seen. A battle was inevitable, and Moore drew up his troops, 14,000 in number, on a range of low hills outside the town to await the attack of the French. On the 16th, when the fleet had now come into harbour, Soult gave battle. The French were defeated at every point of their attack. Moore fell at the moment of his victory, conscious that the army which he had so bravely led had nothing more to fear. The embarkation was effected that night; on the next day the fleet put out to sea.

[Siege of Saragossa, Dec., 1808.]

[Napoleon leaves Spain, Jan 19, 1809.]

Napoleon quitted Spain on the 19th of January, 1809, leaving his brother Joseph again in possession of the capital, and an army of 300,000 men under the best generals of France engaged with the remnants of a defeated force which had never reached half that number. No brilliant victories remained to be won; no enemy remained in the field important enough to require the presence of Napoleon. Difficulties of transit and the hostility of the people might render the subjugation of Spain a slower process than the subjugation of Prussia or Italy; but, to all appearance, the ultimate success of the Emperor's plans was certain, and the worst that lay before his lieutenants was a series of wearisome and obscure exertions against an inconsiderable foe. Yet, before the Emperor had been many weeks in Paris, a report reached him from Marshal Lannes which told of some strange form of military capacity among the people whose armies were so contemptible in the field. The city of Saragossa, after successfully resisting its besiegers in the summer of 1808, had been a second time invested after the defeats of the Spanish armies upon the Ebro.  [153] The besiegers themselves were suffering from extreme scarcity when, on the 22nd of January, 1809, Lannes took up the command. Lannes immediately called up all the troops within reach, and pressed the battering operations with the utmost vigour. On the 29th, the walls of Saragossa were stormed in four different places.

[Defeats of the Spaniards, March, 1809.]

According to all ordinary precedents of war, the French were now in possession of the city. But the besiegers found that their real work was only beginning. The streets were trenched and barricaded; every dwelling was converted into a fortress; for twenty days the French were forced to besiege house by house. In the centre of the town the popular leaders erected a gallows, and there they hanged every one who flinched from meeting the enemy. Disease was added to the horrors of warfare. In the cellars, where the women and children crowded in filth and darkness, a malignant pestilence broke out, which, at the beginning of February, raised the deaths to five hundred a day. The dead bodies were unburied; in that poisoned atmosphere the slightest wound produced mortification and death. At length the powers of the defenders sank. A fourth part of the town had been won by the French; of the townspeople and peasants who were within the walls at the beginning of the siege, it is said that thirty thousand had perished; the remainder could only prolong their defence to fall in a few days more before disease or the enemy. Even now there were members of the Junta who wished to fight as long as a man remained, but they were outnumbered. On the 20th of February what was left of Saragossa capitulated. Its resistance gave to the bravest of Napoleon's soldiers an impression of horror and dismay new even to men who had passed through seventeen years of revolutionary warfare, but it failed to retard Napoleon's armies in the conquest of Spain. No attempt was made to relieve the heroic or ferocious city. Everywhere the tide of French conquest appeared to be steadily making its advance. Soult invaded Portugal; in combination with him, two armies moved from Madrid upon the southern and the south-western provinces of Spain. Oporto fell on the 28th of March; in the same week the Spanish forces covering the south were decisively beaten at Ciudad Real and at Medellin upon the line of the Guadiana. The hopes of Europe fell. Spain itself could expect no second Saragossa. It appeared as if the complete subjugation of the Peninsula could now only be delayed by the mistakes of the French generals themselves, and by the untimely removal of that controlling will which had hitherto made every movement a step forward in conquest.

CHAPTER IX.

Austria preparing for war-The war to be one on behalf of the German Nation-Patriotic Movement in Prussia-Expected Insurrection in North Germany-Plans of Campaign-Austrian Manifesto to the Germans-Rising of the Tyrolese-Defeats of the Archduke Charles in Bavaria-French in Vienna-Attempts of Dörnberg and Schill-Battle of Aspern-Second Passage of the Danube-Battle of Wagram-Armistice of Znaim-Austria waiting for events-Wellesley in Spain-He gains the Battle of Talavera, but retreats-Expedition against Antwerp fails-Austria makes Peace-Treaty of Vienna-Real Effects of the War of 1809-Austria after 1809-Metternich- Marriage of Napoleon with Marie Louise-Severance of Napoleon and Alexander-Napoleon annexes the Papal States, Holland, La Valais, and the North German Coast-The Napoleonic Empire: Its Benefits and Wrongs-The Czar withdraws from Napoleon's Commercial System-War with Russia imminent-Wellington in Portugal: Lines of Torres Vedras; Massena's Campaign of 1810, and retreat-Soult in Andalusia-Wellington's Campaign of 1810-Capture of Ciudad Rodrigo and Badajoz-Salamanca.

[Austria preparing for war, 1808-9.]

Napoleon, quitting Spain in the third week of January, 1809, travelled to Paris with the utmost haste. He believed Austria to be on the point of declaring war; and on the very day of his arrival at the capital he called out the contingents of the Rhenish Federation. In the course of the next few weeks, however, he formed the opinion that Austria would either decline hostilities altogether, or at least find it impossible to declare war before the middle of May. For once the efforts of Austria outstripped the calculations of her enemy. Count Stadion, the earnest and enlightened statesman who had held power in Austria since the Peace of Presburg, had steadily prepared for a renewal of the struggle with France. He was convinced that Napoleon would soon enter upon new enterprises of conquest, and still farther extend his empire at the expense of Austria, unless attacked before Spain had fallen under his dominion. Metternich, now Austrian Ambassador at Paris, reported that Napoleon was intending to divide Turkey as soon as he had conquered Spain; and, although he advised delay, he agreed with the Cabinet at Vienna that Austria must sooner or later strike in self-defence.  [154] Stadion, more sanguine, was only prevented from declaring war in 1808 by the counsels of the Archduke Charles and of other generals who were engaged in bringing the immense mass of new levies into military formation. Charles himself attached little value to the patriotic enthusiasm which, since the outbreak of the Spanish insurrection, had sprung up in the German provinces of Austria. He saw the approach of war with more apprehension than pleasure; but, however faint his own hopes, he laboured earnestly in creating for Austria a force far superior to anything that she had possessed before, and infused into the mass of the army that confident and patriotic spirit which he saw in others rather than felt in himself. By the beginning of March, 1809, Austria had 260,000 men ready to take the field.

[The war of 1809 to be a war for Germany.]

The war now breaking out was to be a war for the German nation, as the struggle of the Spaniards had been a struggle for Spain. The animated appeals of the Emperor's generals formed a singular contrast to the silence with which the Austrian Cabinet had hitherto entered into its wars. The Hapsburg sovereign now stood before the world less as the inheritor of an ancient empire and the representative of the Balance of Power than as the disinterested champion of the German race. On the part of the Emperor himself the language of devotion for Germany was scarcely more than ironical. Francis belonged to an age and to a system in which the idea of nationality had no existence; and, like other sovereigns, he regarded his possessions as a sort of superior property which ought to be defended by obedient domestic dogs against marauding foreign wolves. The same personal view of public affairs had hitherto satisfied the Austrians. It had been enough for them to be addressed as the dutiful children of a wise and affectionate father. The Emperor spoke the familiar Viennese dialect; he was as homely in his notions and his prejudices as any beerseller in his dominions; his subjects might see him at almost any hour of the day or night; and out of the somewhat tough material of his character popular imagination had no difficulty in framing an idol of parental geniality and wisdom. Fifteen years of failure and mismanagement had, however, impaired the beauty of the domestic fiction; and although old-fashioned Austrians, like Haydn, the composer of the Austrian Hymn, were ready to go down to the grave invoking a blessing on their gracious master, the Emperor himself and his confidants were shrewd enough to see that the newly-excited sense of German patriotism would put them in possession of a force which they could hardly evoke by the old methods.

[Austrian Parties.]

One element of reality lay in the professions which were not for the most part meant very seriously. There was probably now no statesman in Austria who any longer felt a jealousy of the power of Prussia. With Count Stadion and his few real supporters the restoration of Germany was a genuine and deeply-cherished desire; with the majority of Austrian politicians the interests of Austria herself seemed at least for the present to require the liberation of North Germany. Thus the impassioned appeals of the Archduke Charles to all men of German race to rise against their foreign oppressor, and against their native princes who betrayed the interests of the Fatherland, gained the sanction of a Court hitherto very little inclined to form an alliance with popular agitation. If the chaotic disorder of the Austrian Government had been better understood in Europe, less importance would have been attached to this sudden change in its tone. No one in the higher ranks at Vienna was bound by the action of his colleagues. The Emperor, though industrious, had not the capacity to enforce any coherent system of government. His brothers caballed one against another, and against the persons who figured as responsible ministers. State-papers were brought by soldiers to the Emperor for his signature without the knowledge of his advisers. The very manifestos which seemed to herald a new era for Germany owed most of their vigour to the literary men who were entrusted with their composition.  [155]

[Patriotic movement in Prussia.]

[Governing classes in South Germany on the side of Napoleon.]

The answer likely to be rendered by Germany to the appeal of Austria was uncertain. In the Rhenish Federation there were undoubted signs of discontent with French rule among the common people; but the official classes were universally on the side of Napoleon, who had given them their posts and their salaries; while the troops, and especially the officers, who remembered the time when they had been mocked by the Austrians as "harlequins" and "nose-bags," were won by the kindness of the great conqueror, who organised them under the hands of his own generals, and gave them the companionship of his own victorious legions. Little could be expected from districts where to the mass of the population the old régime of German independence had meant nothing more than attendance at the manor-court of a knight, or the occasional spectacle of a ducal wedding, or a deferred interest in the droning jobbery of some hereditary town-councillor. In Northern Germany there was far more prospect of a national insurrection. There the spirit of Stein and of those who had worked with him was making itself felt, in spite of the fall of the Minister. Scharnhorst's reforms had made the Prussian army a school of patriotism, and the work of statesmen and soldiers was promoted by men who spoke to the feelings and the intelligence of the nation. Literature lost its indifference to nationality and to home. The philosopher Fichte, the poet Arndt, the theologian Schleiermacher pressed the claims of Germany and of the manlier virtues upon a middle class singularly open to literary influences, singularly wanting in the experience and the impulses of active public life.  [156] In the Kingdom of Westphalia preparations for an insurrection against the French were made by officers who had served in the Prussian and the Hessian armies. In Prussia itself, by the side of many nobler agencies, the newly-founded Masonic society of the Tugendbund, or League of Virtue, made the cause of the Fatherland popular among thousands to whom it was an agreeable novelty to belong to any society at all. No spontaneous, irresistible uprising, like that which Europe had seen in the Spanish Peninsula, was to be expected among the unimpulsive population of the North German plains; but the military circles of Prussia were generally in favour of war, and an insurrection of the population west of the Elbe was not improbable in the event of Napoleon's army being defeated by Austria in the field. King Frederick William, too timid to resolve upon war himself, too timid even to look with satisfaction upon the bold attitude of Austria, had every reason for striking, if once the balance should incline against Napoleon: even against his own inclination it was possible that the ardour of his soldiers might force him into war.

[Plans of campaign.]

So strong were the hopes of a general rising in Northern Germany, that the Austrian Government to some extent based its plans for the campaign on this event. In the ordinary course of hostilities between France and Austria the line of operations in Germany is the valley of the Danube; but in preparing for the war of 1809 the Austrian Government massed its forces in the north-west of Bohemia, with the object of throwing them directly upon Central Germany. The French troops which were now evacuating Prussia were still on their way westwards at the time when Austria was ready to open the campaign. Davoust, with about 60,000 men, was in Northern Bavaria, separated by a great distance from the nearest French divisions in Baden and on the Rhine. By a sudden incursion of the main army of Austria across the Bohemian mountains, followed by an uprising in Northern Germany, Davoust and his scattered detachments could hardly escape destruction. Such was the original plan of the campaign, and it was probably a wise one in the present exceptional superiority of the Austrian preparations over those of France. For the first time since the creation of the Consulate it appeared as if the opening advantages of the war must inevitably be upon the side of the enemies of France. Napoleon had underrated both the energy and the resources of his adversary. By the middle of March, when the Austrians were ready to descend upon Davoust from Bohemia, Napoleon's first troops had hardly crossed the Rhine. Fortunately for the French commander, the Austrian Government, at the moment of delivering its well-planned blow, was seized with fear at its own boldness. Recollections of Hohenlinden and Ulm filled anxious minds with the thought that the valley of the Danube was insufficiently defended; and on the 20th of March, when the army was on the point of breaking into Northern Bavaria, orders were given to divert the line of march to the south, and to enter the Rhenish Confederacy by the roads of the Danube and the Inn. Thus the fruit of so much energy, and of the enemy's rare neglectfulness, was sacrificed at the last moment. It was not until the 9th of April that the Austrian movement southward was completed, and that the army lay upon the line of the Inn, ready to attack Napoleon in the territory of his principal German ally.

[Austrian manifesto to the Germans.]

The proclamations now published by the Emperor and the Archduke bore striking testimony to the influence of the Spanish insurrection in exciting the sense of national right, and awakening the Governments of Europe to the force which this placed in their hands. For the first time in history a manifesto was addressed "to the German nation." The contrast drawn in the Archduke's address to his army between the Spanish patriots dying in the defence of their country, and the German vassal-contingents dragged by Napoleon into Spain to deprive a gallant nation of its freedom, was one of the most just and the most telling that tyranny has ever given to the leaders of a righteous cause.  [157] The Emperor's address "to the German nation" breathed the same spirit. It was not difficult for the politicians of the Rhenish Federation to ridicule the sudden enthusiasm for liberty and nationality shown by a Government which up to the present time had dreaded nothing so much as the excitement of popular movements; but, however unconcernedly the Emperor and the old school of Austrian statesmen might adopt patriotic phrases which they had no intention to remember when the struggle was over, such language was a reality in the effect which it produced upon the thousands who, both in Austria and other parts of Germany, now for the first time heard the summons to unite in defence of a common Fatherland.

[Austrians invade Bavaria, April 9, 1809.]

[Rising of the Tyrol, April, 1809.]

[Its causes religious.]

The leading divisions of the Archduke's army crossed the Inn on the 9th of April. Besides the forces intended for the invasion of Bavaria, which numbered 170,000 men, the Austrian Government had formed two smaller armies, with which the Princes Ferdinand and John were to take up the offensive in the Grand Duchy of Warsaw and in Northern Italy. On every side Austria was first in the field; but even before its regular forces could encounter the enemy, a popular outbreak of the kind that the Government had invoked wrested from the French the whole of an important province. While the army crossed the Inn, the Tyrolese people rose, and overpowered the French and Bavarian detachments stationed in their country. The Tyrol had been taken from Austria at the Peace of Presburg, and attached to Napoleon's vassal kingdom of Bavaria. In geographical position and in relationship of blood the Tyrolese were as closely connected with the Bavarians as with the Austrians; and the annexation would probably have caused no lasting discontent if the Bavarian Government had condescended to take some account of the character of its new subjects. Under the rule of Austria the Tyrolese had enjoyed many privileges. They were exempt from military service, except in their own militia; they paid few taxes; they possessed forms of self-government which were at least popular enough to be regretted after they had been lost. The people adored their bishops and clergy. Nowhere could the Church exhibit a more winning example of unbroken accord between a simple people and a Catholic Crown. Protestantism and the unholy activities of reason had never brought trouble into the land. The people believed exactly what the priests told them, and delighted in the innumerable holidays provided by the Church. They had so little cupidity that no bribe could induce a Tyrolese peasant to inform the French of any movement; they had so little intelligence that, when their own courage and stout-heartedness had won their first battle, they persuaded one another that they had been led by a Saint on a white horse. Grievances of a substantial character were not wanting under the new Bavarian rule; but it was less the increased taxation and the enforcement of military service that exasperated the people than the attacks made by the Government upon the property and rights of the Church. Montgelas, the reforming Bavarian minister, treated the Tyrolese bishops with as little ceremony as the Swabian knights. The State laid claim to all advowsons; and upon the refusal of the bishops to give up their patronage, the bishops themselves were banished and their revenues sequestrated. A passion for uniformity and common sense prompted the Government to revive the Emperor Joseph's edicts against pilgrimages and Church holidays. It became a police-offence to shut up a shop on a saint's day, or to wear a gay dress at a festival. Bavarian soldiers closed the churches at the end of a prescribed number of masses. At a sale of Church property, ordered by the Government, some of the sacred vessels were permitted to fall into the hands of the Jews.

These were the wrongs that fired the simple Tyrolese. They could have borne the visits of the tax-gatherer and the lists of conscription; they could not bear that their priests should be overruled, or that their observances should be limited to those sufficient for ordinary Catholics. Yet, with all its aspect of unreason, the question in the Tyrol was also part of that larger question whether Napoleon's pleasure should be the rule of European life, or nations should have some voice in the disposal of their own affairs. The Tyrolese were not more superstitious, and they were certainty much less cruel, than the Spaniards. They fought for ecclesiastical absurdities; but their cause was also the cause of national right, and the admiration which their courage excited in Europe was well deserved.

[Tyrolese expel Bavarians and French, April 1809.]

Early in the year 1809 the Archduke John had met the leaders of the Tyrolese peasantry, and planned the first movements of a national insurrection. As soon as the Austrian army crossed the Inn, the peasants thronged to their appointed meeting-places. Scattered detachments of the Bavarians were surrounded, and on the 12th of April the main body of the Tyrolese, numbering about 15,000 men, advanced upon Innsbruck. The town was invested; the Bavarian garrison, consisting of 3,000 regular troops, found itself forced to surrender after a severe engagement. On the next morning a French column, on the march from Italy to the Danube, approached Innsbruck, totally unaware of the events of the preceding day. The Tyrolese closed behind it as it advanced. It was not until the column was close to the town that its commander, General Brisson, discovered that Innsbruck had fallen into an enemy's hands. Retreat was impossible; ammunition was wanting for a battle; and Brisson had no choice but to surrender to the peasants, who had already proved more than a match for the Bavarian regular troops. The Tyrolese had done their work without the help of a single Austrian regiment. In five days the weak fabric of Bavarian rule had been thrown to the ground. The French only maintained themselves in the lower valley of the Adige: and before the end of April their last positions at Trent and Roveredo were evacuated, and no foreign soldier remained on Tyrolese soil.

[Campaign of Archduke Charles in Bavaria.]

The operations of the Austrian commanders upon the Inn formed a melancholy contrast to the activity of the mountaineers. In spite of the delay of three weeks in opening the campaign, Davoust had still not effected his junction with the French troops in Southern Bavaria, and a rapid movement of the Austrians might even now have overwhelmed his isolated divisions at Ratisbon. Napoleon himself had remained in Paris till the last moment, instructing Berthier, the chief of the staff, to concentrate the vanguard at Ratisbon, if by the 15th of April the enemy had not crossed the Inn, but to draw back to the line of the Lech if the enemy crossed the Inn before that day.[158] The Archduke entered Bavaria on the 9th; but, instead of retiring to the Lech, Berthier allowed the army to be scattered over an area sixty miles broad, from Ratisbon to points above Augsburg. Davoust lay at Ratisbon, a certain prey if the Archduke pushed forwards with vigour and thrust his army between the northern and the southern positions of the French. But nothing could change the sluggishness of the Austrian march. The Archduke was six days in moving from the Inn to the Isar; and before the order was given for an advance upon Ratisbon, Napoleon himself had arrived at Donauwörth, and taken the command out of the hands of his feeble lieutenant.

[Napoleon restores superiority of French, April 18, 19.]

It needed all the Emperor's energy to snatch victory from the enemy's grasp. Davoust was bidden to fall back from Ratisbon to Neustadt; the most pressing orders were sent to Massena, who commanded the right at Augsburg, to push forward to the north-east in the direction of his colleague, before the Austrians could throw the mass of their forces upon Davoust's weak corps. Both generals understood the urgency of the command. Davoust set out from Ratisbon on the morning of the 19th. He was attacked by the Archduke, but so feebly and irresolutely that, with all their superiority in numbers, the Austrians failed to overpower the enemy at any one point. Massena, immediately after receiving his orders, hurried from Augsburg north-eastwards, while Napoleon himself advanced into the mid-space between the two generals, and brought the right and left wings of the French army into communication with one another. In two days after the Emperor's arrival all the advantages of the Austrians were gone: the French, so lately exposed to destruction, formed a concentrated mass in the presence of a scattered enemy. The issue of the campaign was decided by the movements of these two days. Napoleon was again at the head of 150,000 men; the Archduke, already baulked in his first attack upon Davoust, was seized with unworthy terror when he found that Napoleon himself was before him, and resigned himself to anticipations of ruin.

[Austrian defeats at Landshut and Eggmühl, April 22.]

[French enter Vienna, May 13.]

A series of manoeuvres and engagements in the finest style of Napoleonic warfare filled the next three days with French victories and Austrian disasters. On April the 20th the long line of the Archduke's army was cut in halves by an attack at Abensberg. The left was driven across the Isar at Landshut; the right, commanded by the Archduke himself, was overpowered at Eggmühl on the 22nd, and forced northwards. The unbroken mass of the French army now thrust itself between the two defeated wings of the enemy. The only road remaining open to the Archduke was that through Ratisbon to the north of the Danube. In five days, although no engagement of the first order had taken place between the French and Austrian armies, Charles had lost 60,000 men; the mass of his army was retreating into Bohemia, and the road to Vienna lay scarcely less open than after Mack's capitulation at Ulm four years before. A desperate battle fought against the advancing French at Edelsberg by the weak divisions that had remained on the south of the Danube, proved that the disasters of the campaign were due to the faults of the general, not to the men whom he commanded. But whatever hopes of ultimate success might still be based on the gallant temper of the army, it was impossible to prevent the fall of the capital. The French, leaving the Archduke on the north of the Danube, pressed forwards along the direct route from the Inn to Vienna. The capital was bombarded and occupied. On the 13th of May Napoleon again took up his quarters in the palace of the Austrian monarchs where he had signed the Peace of 1806. The divisions which had fallen back before him along the southern road crossed the Danube at Vienna, and joined the Archduke on the bank of the river opposite the capital.

[Attempts of Dörnberg and Schill in Northern Germany, April, 1809.]

The disasters of the Bavarian campaign involved the sacrifice of all that had resulted from Austrian victories elsewhere, and of all that might have been won by a general insurrection in Northern Germany. In Poland and in Italy the war had opened favourably for Austria. Warsaw had been seized; Eugene Beauharnais, the Viceroy of Italy, had been defeated by the Archduke John at Sacile, in Venetia; but it was impossible to pursue these advantages when the capital itself was on the point of falling into the hands of the enemy. The invading armies halted, and ere long the Archduke John commenced his retreat into the mountains. In Northern Germany no popular uprising could be expected when once Austria had been defeated. The only movements that took place were undertaken by soldiers, and undertaken before the disasters in Bavaria became known. The leaders in this military conspiracy were Dörnberg, an officer in the service of King Jerome of Westphalia, and Schill, the Prussian cavalry leader who had so brilliantly distinguished himself in the defence of Colberg. Dörnberg had taken service under Jerome with the design of raising Jerome's own army against him. It had been agreed by the conspirators that at the same moment Dörnberg should raise the Hessian standard in Westphalia, and Schill, marching from Berlin with any part of the Prussian army that would follow him, should proclaim war against the French in defiance of the Prussian Government. Dörnberg had made sure of the support of his own regiment; but at the last moment the plot was discovered, and he was transferred to the command of a body of men upon whom he could not rely. He placed himself at the head of a band of peasants, and raised the standard of insurrection. King Jerome's troops met the solicitations of their countrymen with a volley of bullets. Dörnberg fled for his life; and the revolt ended on the day after it had begun (April 23). Schill, unconscious of Dörnberg's ruin, and deceived by reports of Austrian victories upon the Danube, led out his regiment from Berlin as if for a day's manoeuvring, and then summoned his men to follow him in raising a national insurrection against Napoleon. The soldiers answered Schill's eloquent words with shouts of applause; the march was continued westwards, and Schill crossed the Elbe, intending to fall upon the communications of Napoleon's army, already, as he believed, staggering under the blows delivered by the Archduke in the valley of the Danube.

[Schill at Stralsund, May 23.]

On reaching Halle, Schill learnt of the overthrow of the Archduke and of Dörnberg's ruin in Westphalia. All hope of success in the enterprise on which he had quitted Berlin was dashed to the ground. The possibility of raising a popular insurrection vanished. Schill, however, had gone too far to recede; and even now it was not too late to join the armies of Napoleon's enemies. Schill might move into Bohemia, or to some point on the northern coast where he would be within reach of English vessels. But in any case quick and steady decision was necessary; and this Schill could not attain. Though brave even to recklessness, and gifted with qualities which made him the idol of the public, Schill lacked the disinterestedness and self-mastery which calm the judgment in time of trial. The sudden ruin of his hopes left him without a plan. He wasted day after day in purposeless marches, while the enemy collected a force to overwhelm him. His influence over his men became impaired; the denunciations of the Prussian Government prevented other soldiers from joining him. At length Schill determined to recross the Elbe, and to throw himself into the coast town of Stralsund, in Swedish Pomerania. He marched through Mecklenburg, and suddenly appeared before Stralsund at moment when the French cannoneers in garrison were firing a salvo in honour of Napoleon's entry into Vienna. A hand-to-hand fight gave Schill possession of the town, with all its stores. For a moment it seemed as if Stralsund might become a second Saragossa; but the French were at hand before it was possible to create works of defence. Schill had but eighteen hundred men, half of whom were cavalry; he understood nothing of military science, and would listen to no counsels. A week after his entry into Stralsund the town was stormed by a force four times more numerous than its defenders. Capitulation was no word for the man who had dared to make a private war upon Napoleon; Schill could only set the example of an heroic death.  [159] The officers who were not so fortunate as to fall with their leader were shot in cold blood, after trial by a French court-martial. Six hundred common soldiers who surrendered were sent to the galleys of Toulon to sicken among French thieves and murderers. The cruelty of the conqueror, the heroism of the conquered, gave to Schill's ill-planned venture the importance of a great act of patriotic martyrdom. Another example had been given of self-sacrifice in the just cause. Schill's faults were forgotten; his memory deepened the passion with which all the braver spirits of Germany now looked for the day of reckoning with their oppressor.  [160]

[Napoleon crosses the Danube, May 20.]

[Battle of Aspern, May 21, 22.]

Napoleon had finished the first act of the war of 1809 by the occupation of Vienna; but no peace was possible until the Austrian army, which lay upon the opposite bank of the river, had been attacked and beaten. Four miles below Vienna the Danube is divided into two streams by the island of Lobau: the southern stream is the main channel of the river, the northern is only a hundred and fifty yards broad. It was here that Napoleon determined to make the passage. The broad arm of the Danube, sheltered by the island from the enemy's fire, was easily bridged by boats; the passage from the island to the northern bank, though liable to be disputed by the Austrians, was facilitated by the narrowing of the stream. On the 18th of May, Napoleon, supposing himself to have made good the connection between the island and the southern bank, began to bridge the northern arm of the river. His movements were observed by the enemy, but no opposition was offered. On the 20th a body of 40,000 French crossed to the northern bank, and occupied the villages of Aspern and Essling. This was the movement for which the Archduke Charles, who had now 80,000 men under arms, had been waiting. Early on the 21st a mass of heavily-laden barges was let loose by the Austrians above the island. The waters of the Danube were swollen by the melting of the snows, and at midday the bridges of the French over the broad arm of the river were swept away. A little later, dense Austrian columns were seen advancing upon the villages of Aspern and Essling, where the French, cut off from their supports, had to meet an overpowering enemy in front, with an impassable river in their rear. The attack began at four in the afternoon; when night fell the French had been driven out of Aspern, though they still held the Austrians at bay in their other position at Essling. During the night the long bridges were repaired; forty thousand additional troops moved across the island to the northern bank of the Danube; and the engagement was renewed, now between equal numbers, on the following morning. Five times the village of Aspern was lost and won. In the midst of the struggle the long bridges were again carried away. Unable to break the enemy, unable to bring up any new forces from Vienna, Napoleon ordered a retreat. The army was slowly withdrawn into the island of Lobau. There for the next two days it lay without food and without ammunition, severed from Vienna, and exposed to certain destruction if the Archduke could have thrown his army across the narrow arm of the river and renewed the engagement. But the Austrians were in no condition to follow up their victory. Their losses were enormous; their stores were exhausted. The moments in which a single stroke might have overthrown the whole fabric of Napoleon's power were spent in forced inaction. By the third day after the battle of Aspern the communications between the island and the mainland were restored, and Napoleon's energy had brought the army out of immediate danger.

[Effect on Europe.]

[Brunswick invades Saxony.]

Nevertheless, although the worst was averted, and the French now lay secure in their island fortress, the defeat of Aspern changed the position of Napoleon in the eyes of all Europe. The belief in his invincibility was destroyed; he had suffered a defeat in person, at the head of his finest troops, from an enemy little superior in strength to himself. The disasters of the Austrians in the opening of the campaign were forgotten; everywhere the hopes of resistance woke into new life. Prussian statesmen urged their King to promise his support if Austria should gain one more victory. Other enemies were ready to fall upon Napoleon without waiting for this condition. England collected an immense armament destined for an attack upon some point of the northern coast. Germany, lately mute and nerveless, gave threatening signs. The Duke of Brunswick, driven from his inheritance after his father's death at Jena, invaded the dominions of Napoleon's vassal, the King of Saxony, and expelled him from his capital. Popular insurrections broke out in Würtemberg and in Westphalia, and proved the rising force of national feeling even in districts where the cause of Germany lately seemed so hopelessly lost.

[Napoleon's preparations for the second passage of the Danube, June.]

[French cross the Danube, July 4.]

But Napoleon concerned himself little with these remoter enemies. Every energy of his mind was bent to the one great issue on which victory depended, the passage of the Danube. His chances of success were still good, if the French troops watching the enemy between Vienna and the Adriatic could be brought up in time for the final struggle. The Archduke Charles was in no hurry for a battle, believing that every hour increased the probability of an attack upon Napoleon by England or Prussia, or insurgent Germany. Never was the difference between Napoleon and his ablest adversaries more strikingly displayed than in the work which was accomplished by him during this same interval. He had determined that in the next battle his army should march across the Danube as safely and as rapidly as it could march along the streets of Vienna. Two solid bridges were built on piles across the broad arm of the river; no less than six bridges of rafts were made ready to be thrown across the narrow arm when the moment arrived for the attack. By the end of June all the outlying divisions of the French army had gathered to the great rallying-point; a hundred and eighty thousand men were in the island, or ready to enter it; every movement, every position to be occupied by each member of this vast mass in its passage and advance, was fixed down to the minutest details. Napoleon had decided to cross from the eastern, not from the northern side of the island, and thus to pass outside the fortifications which the Archduke had erected on the former battle-field. Towards midnight on the 4th of July, in the midst of a violent storm, the six bridges were successively swung across the river. The artillery opened fire. One army corps after another, each drawn up opposite to its own bridge, marched to the northern shore, and by sunrise nearly the whole of Napoleon's force deployed on the left bank of the Danube. The river had been converted into a great highway; the fortifications which had been erected by the Archduke were turned by the eastward direction of the passage. All that remained for the Austrian commander was to fight a pitched battle on ground that was now at least thoroughly familiar to him. Charles had taken up a good position on the hills that look over the village of Wagram. Here, with 130,000 men, he awaited the attack of the French. The first attack was made in the afternoon after the crossing of the river. It failed; and the French army lay stretched during the night between the river and the hills, while the Archduke prepared to descend upon their left on the morrow, and to force himself between the enemy and the bridges behind them.

[Battle of Wagram, July 5, 6.]

[Armistice of Znaim, July 12.]

Early on the morning of the 6th the two largest armies that had ever been brought face to face in Europe began their onslaught. Spectators from the steeples of Vienna saw the fire of the French little by little receding on their left, and dense masses of the Austrians pressing on towards the bridges, on whose safety the existence of the French army depended. But ere long the forward movement stopped. Napoleon had thrown an overpowering force against the Austrian centre, and the Archduke found himself compelled to recall his victorious divisions and defend his own threatened line. Gradually the superior numbers of the French forced the enemy back. The Archduke John, who had been ordered up from Presburg, failed to appear on the field; and at two o'clock Charles ordered a retreat. The order of the Austrians was unbroken; they had captured more prisoners than they had lost; their retreat was covered by so powerful an artillery that the French could make no pursuit. The victory was no doubt Napoleon's, but it was a victory that had nothing in common with Jena and Austerlitz. Nothing was lost by the Austrians at Wagram but their positions and the reputation of their general. The army was still in fighting-order, with the fortresses of Bohemia behind it. Whether Austria would continue the war depended on the action of the other European Powers. If Great Britain successfully landed an armament in Northern Germany or dealt any overwhelming blow in Spain, if Prussia declared war on Napoleon, Austria might fight on. If the other Powers failed, Austria, must make peace. The armistice of Znaim, concluded on the 12th of July, was recognised on all sides as a mere device to gain time. There was a pause in the great struggle in the central Continent. Its renewal or its termination depended upon the issue of events at a distance.

[Wellesley invades Spain, June, 1809.]

[Talavera, July 27.]

[Wellesley retreats to Portugal.]

For the moment the eyes of all Europe were fixed upon the British army in Spain. Sir Arthur Wellesley, who took command at Lisbon in the spring, had driven Soult out of Oporto, and was advancing by the valley of the Tagus upon the Spanish capital. Some appearance of additional strength was given to him by the support of a Spanish army under the command of General Cuesta. Wellesley's march had, however, been delayed by the neglect and bad faith of the Spanish Government, and time had been given to Soult to collect a large force in the neighbourhood of Salamanca, ready either to fall upon Wellesley from the north, or to unite with another French army which lay at Talavera, if its commander, Victor, had the wisdom to postpone an engagement. The English general knew nothing of Soult's presence on his flank: he continued his march towards Madrid along the valley of the Tagus, and finally drew up for battle at Talavera, when Victor, after retreating before Cuesta to some distance, hunted back his Spanish pursuer to the point from which he had started.[161] The first attack was made by Victor upon the English positions at evening on the 27th of July. Next morning the assault was renewed, and the battle became general. Wellesley gained a complete victory, but the English themselves suffered heavily, and the army remained in its position. Within the next few days Soult was discovered to be descending from the mountains between Salamanca and the Tagus. A force superior to Wellesley's own threatened to close upon him from the rear, and to hem him in between two fires. The sacrifices of Talavera proved to have been made in vain. Wellesley had no choice but to abandon his advance upon the Spanish capital, and to fall back upon Portugal by the roads south of the Tagus. In spite of the defeat of Victor, the French were the winners of the campaign. Madrid was still secure; the fabric of French rule in the Spanish Peninsula was still unshaken. The tidings of Wellesley's retreat reached Napoleon and the Austrian negotiators, damping the hopes of Austria, and easing Napoleon's fears. Austria's continuance of the war now depended upon the success or failure of the long-expected descent of an English army upon the northern coast of Europe.

Three months before the Austrian Government declared war upon Napoleon, it had acquainted Great Britain with its own plans, and urged the Cabinet to dispatch an English force to Northern Germany. Such a force, landing at the time of the battle of Aspern, would certainly have aroused both Prussia and the country between the Elbe and the Maine. But the difference between a movement executed in time and one executed weeks and months too late was still unknown at the English War Office. The Ministry did not even begin their preparations till the middle of June, and then they determined, in pursuance of a plan made some years earlier, to attack the French fleet and docks at Antwerp, and to ignore that patriotic movement in Northern Germany from which they had so much to hope.

[British Expedition against Antwerp, July, 1809.]

[Total failure.]

On the 28th of July, two months after the battle of Aspern and three weeks after the battle of Wagram, a fleet of thirty-seven ships of the line, with innumerable transports and gunboats, set sail from Dover for the Schelde. Forty thousand troops were on board; the commander of the expedition was the Earl of Chatham, a court-favourite in whom Nature avenged herself upon Great Britain for what she had given to this country in his father and his younger brother. The troops were landed on the island of Walcheren. Instead of pushing forward to Antwerp with all possible haste, and surprising it before any preparations could be made for its defence, Lord Chatham placed half his army on the banks of various canals, and with the other half proceeded to invest Flushing. On the 16th of August this unfortunate town surrendered, after a bombardment that had reduced it to a mass of ruins. During the next ten days the English commander advanced about as many miles, and then discovered that for all prospect of taking Antwerp he might as well have remained in England. Whilst Chatham was groping about in Walcheren, the fortifications of Antwerp were restored, the fleet carried up the river, and a mass of troops collected sufficient to defend the town against a regular siege. Defeat stared the English in the face. At the end of August the general recommended the Government to recall the expedition, only leaving a force of 15,000 soldiers to occupy the marshes of Walcheren. Chatham's recommendations were accepted; and on a spot so notoriously pestiferous that Napoleon had refused to permit a single French soldier to serve there on garrison duty,  [162] an English army-corps, which might at least have earned the same honour as Schill and Brunswick in Northern Germany, was left to perish of fever and ague. When two thousand soldiers were in their graves, the rest were recalled to England.

[Austria makes peace.]

Great Britain had failed to weaken or to alarm Napoleon; the King of Prussia made no movement on behalf of the losing cause; and the Austrian Government unwillingly found itself compelled to accept conditions of peace. It was not so much a deficiency in its forces as the universal distrust of its generals that made it impossible for Austria to continue the war. The soldiers had fought as bravely as the French, but in vain. "If we had a million soldiers," it was said, "we must make peace; for we have no one to command them." Count Stadion, who was for carrying on the war to the bitter end, despaired of throwing his own energetic courage into the men who surrounded the Emperor, and withdrew from public affairs. For week after week the Emperor fluctuated between the acceptance of Napoleon's hard conditions and the renewal of a struggle which was likely to involve his own dethronement as well as the total conquest of the Austrian State. At length Napoleon's demands were presented in the form of an ultimatum. In his distress the Emperor's thoughts turned towards the Minister who, eight years before, had been so strong, so resolute, when all around him wavered. Thugut, now seventy-six years old, was living in retirement. The Emperor sent one of his generals to ask his opinion on peace or war. "I thought to find him," reported the general, "broken in mind and body; but the fire of his spirit is in its full force." Thugut's reply did honour to his foresight: "Make peace at any price. The existence of the Austrian monarchy is at stake: the dissolution of the French Empire is not far off." On the 14th of October the Emperor Francis accepted his conqueror's terms, and signed conditions of peace.  [163]

[Peace of Vienna, Oct. 14, 1809.]

[Real effects of the war of 1809.]

The Treaty of Vienna, the last which Napoleon signed as a conqueror, took from the Austrian Empire 50,000 square miles of territory and more than 4,000,000 inhabitants. Salzburg, with part of Upper Austria, was ceded to Bavaria; Western Galicia, the territory gained by Austria in the final partition of Poland, was transferred to the Grand-Duchy of Warsaw; part of Carinthia, with the whole of the country lying between the Adriatic and the Save as far as the frontier of Bosnia, was annexed to Napoleon's own Empire, under the title of the Illyrian Provinces. Austria was cut off from the sea, and the dominion of Napoleon extended without a break to the borders of Turkey. Bavaria and Saxony, the outposts of French sovereignty in Central Europe, were enriched at the expense of the Power which had called Germany to arms; Austria, which at the beginning of the Revolutionary War had owned territory upon the Rhine and exercised a predominating influence over all Italy, seemed now to be finally excluded both from Germany and the Mediterranean. Yet, however striking the change of frontier which gave to Napoleon continuous dominion from the Straits of Calais to the border of Bosnia, the victories of France in 1809 brought in their train none of those great moral changes which had hitherto made each French conquest a stage in European progress. The campaign of 1796 had aroused the hope of national independence in Italy; the settlements of 1801 and 1806 had put an end to Feudalism in Western Germany; the victories of 1809 originated nothing but a change of frontier such as the next war might obliterate and undo. All that was permanent in the effects of the year 1809 was due, not to any new creations of Napoleon, but to the spirit of resistance which France had at length excited in Europe. The revolt of the Tyrol, the exploits of Brunswick and Schill, gave a stimulus to German patriotism which survived the defeat of Austria. Austria itself, though overpowered, had inflicted a deadly injury upon Napoleon, by withdrawing him from Spain at the moment when he might have completed its conquest, and by enabling Wellesley to gain a footing in the Peninsula. Napoleon appeared to have gathered a richer spoil from the victories of 1809 than from any of his previous wars; in reality he had never surrounded himself with so many dangers. Russia was alienated by the annexation of West Galicia to the Polish Grand Duchy of Warsaw; Northern Germany had profited by the examples of courage and patriotism shown so largely in 1809 on behalf of the Fatherland; Spain, supported by Wellesley's army, was still far from submission. The old indifference which had smoothed the way for the earlier French conquests was no longer the characteristic of Europe. The estrangement of Russia, the growth of national spirit in Germany and in Spain, involved a danger to Napoleon's power which far outweighed the visible results of his victory.

[Austria and the Tyrol.]

Austria itself could only acquiesce in defeat: nor perhaps would the permanent interests of Europe have been promoted by its success. The championship of Germany which it assumed at the beginning of the war would no doubt have resulted in the temporary establishment of some form of German union under Austrian leadership, if the event of the war had been different; but the sovereign of Hungary and Croatia could never be the true head of the German people; and the conduct of the Austrian Government after the peace of 1809 gave little reason to regret its failure to revive a Teutonic Empire. No portion of the Emperor's subjects had fought for him with such determined loyalty as the Tyrolese. After having been the first to throw off the yoke of the stranger, they had again and again freed their country when Napoleon's generals supposed all resistance overcome; and in return for their efforts the Emperor had solemnly assured them that he would never accept a peace which did not restore them to his Empire. If fair dealing was due anywhere it was due from the Court of Austria to the Tyrolese. Yet the only reward of the simple courage of these mountaineers was that the war-party at head-quarters recklessly employed them as a means of prolonging, hostilities after the armistice of Znaim, and that up to the moment when peace was signed they were left in the belief that the Emperor meant to keep his promise, Austria, however, could not ruin herself to please the Tyrolese. Circumstances were changed; and the phrases of patriotism which had excited so much rejoicing at the beginning of the war were now fallen out of fashion at Vienna. Nothing more was heard about the rights of nations and the deliverance of Germany. Austria had made a great venture and failed; and the Government rather resumed than abandoned its normal attitude in turning its back upon the professions of 1809.

[Austrian policy after 1809.]

[Metternich.]

Henceforward the policy of Austria was one of calculation, untinged by national sympathies. France had been a cruel enemy; yet if there was a prospect of winning something for Austria by a French alliance, considerations of sentiment could not be allowed to stand in the way. A statesman who, like Count Stadion, had identified the interests of Austria with the liberation of Germany, was no fitting helmsman for the State in the shifting course that now lay before it. A diplomatist was called to power who had hitherto by Napoleon's own desire represented the Austrian State at Paris. Count Metternich, the new Chief Minister, was the son of a Rhenish nobleman who had held high office under the Austrian crown. His youth had been passed at Coblentz, and his character and tastes were those which in the eighteenth century had marked the court-circles of the little Rhenish Principalities, French in their outer life, unconscious of the instinct of nationality, polished and seductive in that personal management which passed for the highest type of statesmanship. Metternich had been ambassador at Dresden and at Berlin before he went to Paris. Napoleon had requested that he might be transferred to the Court of the Tuileries, on account of the marked personal courtesy shown by Metternich to the French ambassador at Berlin during the war between France and Austria in 1805. Metternich carried with him all the friendliness of personal intercourse which Napoleon expected in him, but he also carried with him a calm and penetrating self-possession, and the conviction that Napoleon would give Europe no rest until his power was greatly diminished. He served Austria well at Paris, and in the negotiations for peace which followed the battle of Wagram he took a leading part. After the disasters of 1809, when war was impossible and isolation ruin, no statesman could so well serve Austria as one who had never confessed himself the enemy of any Power; and, with the full approval of Napoleon, the late Ambassador at Paris was placed at the head of the Austrian State.

[Marriage of Napoleon with Marie Louise, 1810.]

[Severance of Napoleon and Alexander.]

Metternich's first undertaking gave singular evidence of the flexibility of system which was henceforward to guard Austria's interests. Before the grass had grown over the graves at Wagram, the Emperor Francis was persuaded to give his daughter in marriage to Napoleon. For some time past Napoleon had determined on divorcing Josephine and allying himself to one of the reigning houses of the Continent. His first advances were made at St. Petersburg; but the Czar hesitated to form a connection which his subjects would view as a dishonour; and the opportunity was seized by the less fastidious Austrians as soon as the fancies of the imperial suitor turned towards Vienna. The Emperor Francis, who had been bullied by Napoleon upon the field of Austerlitz, ridiculed and insulted in every proclamation issued during the late campaign, gave up his daughter for what was called the good of his people, and reconciled himself to a son-in-law who had taken so many provinces for his dowry. Peace had not been proclaimed four months when the treaty was signed which united the House of Bonaparte to the family of Marie Antoinette. The Archduke Charles represented Napoleon in the espousals; the Archbishop of Vienna anointed the bride with the same sacred oil with which he had consecrated the banners of 1809; the servile press which narrated the wedding festivities found no space to mention that the Emperor's bravest subject, the Tyrolese leader Hofer, was executed by Napoleon as a brigand in the interval between the contract and the celebration of the marriage. Old Austrian families, members of the only aristocracy upon the Continent that still possessed political weight and a political tradition, lamented the Emperor's consent to a union which their prejudices called a mis-alliance, and their consciences an adultery; but the object of Metternich was attained. The friendship between France and Russia, which had inflicted so much evil on the Continent since the Peace of Tilsit, was dissolved; the sword of Napoleon was turned away from Austria for at least some years; the restoration of the lost provinces of the Hapsburg seemed not impossible, now that Napoleon and Alexander were left face to face in Europe, and the alliance of Austria had become so important to the power which had hitherto enriched itself at Austria's expense.

[Napoleon annexes Papal States, May, 1809.]

Napoleon crowned his new bride, and felt himself at length the equal of the Hapsburgs and the Bourbons. Except in Spain, his arms were no longer resisted upon the Continent, and the period immediately succeeding the Peace of Vienna was that which brought the Napoleonic Empire to its widest bounds. Already, in the pride of the first victories of 1809, Napoleon had completed his aggressions upon the Papal sovereignty by declaring the Ecclesiastical States to be united to the French Empire (May 17, 1809). The Pope retorted upon his despoiler with a Bull of Excommunication; but the spiritual terrors were among the least formidable of those then active in Europe, and the sanctity of the Pontiff did not prevent Napoleon's soldiers from arresting him in the Quirinal, and carrying him as a prisoner to Savona. Here Pius VII., was detained for the next three years. The Roman States received the laws and the civil organisation of France. [164] Bishops and clergy who refused the oath of fidelity to Napoleon were imprisoned or exiled; the monasteries and convents were dissolved; the cardinals and great officers, along with the archives and the whole apparatus of ecclesiastical rule, were carried to Paris. In relation to the future of European Catholicism, the breach between Napoleon and Pius VII., was a more important event than was understood at the time; its immediate and visible result was that there was one sovereign the fewer in Europe, and one more province opened to the French conscription.

[Napoleon annexes, Holland, July, 1810.]

The next of Napoleon's vassals who lost his throne was the King of Holland. Like Joseph in Spain, and like Murat in Naples, Louis Bonaparte had made an honest effort to govern for the benefit of his subjects. He had endeavoured to lighten the burdens which Napoleon laid upon the Dutch nation, already deprived of its colonies, its commerce, and its independence; and every plea which Louis had made for his subjects had been treated by Napoleon as a breach of duty towards himself. The offence of the unfortunate King of Holland became unpardonable when he neglected to enforce the orders of Napoleon against the admission of English goods. Louis was summoned to Paris, and compelled to sign a treaty, ceding part of his dominions and placing his custom-houses in the hands of French officers. He returned to Holland, but affairs grew worse and worse. French troops overran the country; Napoleon's letters were each more menacing than the last; and at length Louis fled from his dominions (July 1, 1810), and delivered himself from a royalty which had proved the most intolerable kind of servitude. A week later Holland was incorporated with the French Empire.

[Annexation of Le Valais, and of the North German coast.]

Two more annexations followed before the end of the year. The Republic of the Valais was declared to have neglected the duty imposed upon it of repairing the road over the Simplon, and forfeited its independence. The North German coast district, comprising the Hanse towns, Oldenburg, and part of the Kingdom of Westphalia, was annexed to the French Empire, with the alleged object of more effectually shutting out British goods from the ports of the Elbe and the Weser. Hamburg, however, and most of the territory now incorporated with France, had been occupied by French troops ever since the war of 1806, and the legal change in its position scarcely made its subjection more complete. Had the history of this annexation been written by men of the peasant-class, it would probably have been described in terms of unmixed thankfulness and praise. In the Decree introducing the French principle of the free tenure of land, thirty-six distinct forms of feudal service are enumerated, as abolished without compensation.  [165]

[Extent of Napoleon's Empire and Dependencies, 1810.]

Napoleon's dominion had now reached its widest bounds. The frontier of the Empire began at Lübeck on the Baltic, touched the Rhine at Wesel, and followed the river and the Jura mountains to the foot of the Lake of Geneva; then, crossing the Alps above the source of the Rhone, it ran with the rivers Sesia and Po to a point nearly opposite Mantua, mounted to the watershed of the Apennines, and descended to the Mediterranean at Terracina. The late Ecclesiastical States were formed into the two Departments of the Tiber and of Trasimene; Tuscany, also divided into French Departments, and represented in the French Legislative Body, gave the title of Archduchess and the ceremonial of a Court to Napoleon's sister Eliza; the Kingdom of Italy, formed by Lombardy, Venice, and the country east of the Apennines as far south as Ascoli, belonged to Napoleon himself, but was not constitutionally united with the French Empire. On the east of the Adriatic the Illyrian Provinces extended Napoleon's rule to the borders of Bosnia and Montenegro. Outside the frontier of this great Empire an order of feudatories ruled in Italy, in Germany, and in Poland. Murat, King of Naples, and the client-princes of the Confederation of the Rhine, holding all Germany up to the frontiers of Prussia and Austria, as well as the Grand-Duchy of Warsaw, were nominally sovereigns within their own dominions; but they held their dignities at Napoleon's pleasure, and the population and revenues of their States were at his service.

[Benefits of Napoleon's rule.]

[Wrongs of Napoleon's rule.]

[Commercial blockade.]

The close of the year 1810 saw the last changes effected which Europe was destined to receive at the hands of Napoleon. The fabric of his sovereignty was raised upon the ruins of all that was obsolete and forceless upon the western Continent; the benefits as well as the wrongs or his supremacy were now seen in their widest operation. All Italy, the northern districts of Germany which were incorporated with the Empire, and a great part of the Confederate Territory of the Rhine, received in the Code Napoleon a law which, to an extent hitherto unknown in Europe, brought social justice into the daily affairs of life. The privileges of the noble, the feudal burdens of the peasant, the monopolies of the guilds, passed away, in most instances for ever. The comfort and improvement of mankind were vindicated as the true aim of property by the abolition of the devices which convert the soil into an instrument of family pride, and by the enforcement of a fair division of inheritances among the children of the possessor. Legal process, both civil and criminal, was brought within the comprehension of ordinary citizens, and submitted to the test of publicity. These were among the fruits of an earlier enlightenment which Napoleon's supremacy bestowed upon a great part of Europe. The price which was paid for them was the suppression of every vestige of liberty, the conscription, and the Continental blockade. On the whole, the yoke was patiently borne. The Italians and the Germans of the Rhenish Confederacy cared little what Government they obeyed; their recruits who were sent to be killed by the Austrians or the Spaniards felt it no especial hardship to fight Napoleon's battles. More galling was the pressure of Napoleon's commercial system and of the agencies by which he attempted to enforce it. In the hope of ruining the trade of Great Britain, Napoleon spared no severity against the owners of anything that had touched British hands, and deprived the Continent of its entire supply of colonial produce, with the exception of such as was imported at enormous charges by traders licensed by himself. The possession of English goods became a capital offence. In the great trading towns a system of permanent terrorism was put in force against the merchants. Soldiers ransacked their houses; their letters were opened; spies dogged their steps. It was in Hamburg, where Davoust exercised a sort of independent sovereignty, that the violence and injustice of the Napoleonic commercial system was seen in its most repulsive form; in the greater part of the Empire it was felt more in the general decline of trade and in a multitude of annoying privations than in acts of obtrusive cruelty.  [166] The French were themselves compelled to extract sugar from beetroot, and to substitute chicory for coffee; the Germans, less favoured by nature, and less rapid in adaptation, thirsted and sulked. Even in such torpid communities as Saxony political discontent was at length engendered by bodily discomfort. Men who were proof against all the patriotic exaltation of Stein and Fichte felt that there must be something wrong in a system which sent up the price of coffee to five shillings a pound, and reduced the tobacconist to exclusive dependence upon the market-gardener.

[The Czar withdraws from Napoleon's commercial system, Dec., 1810.]

[France and Russia preparing for war, 1811.]

It was not, however, by its effects upon Napoleon's German vassals that the Continental system contributed to the fall of its author. Whatever the discontent of these communities, they obeyed Napoleon as long as he was victorious, and abandoned him only when his cause was lost. Its real political importance lay in the hostility which it excited between France and Russia. The Czar, who had attached himself to Napoleon's commercial system at the Peace of Tilsit, withdrew from it in the year succeeding the Peace of Vienna. The trade of the Russian Empire had been ruined by the closure of its ports to British vessels and British goods. Napoleon had broken his promise to Russia by adding West Galicia to the Polish Duchy of Warsaw; and the Czar refused to sacrifice the wealth of his subjects any longer in the interest of an insincere ally. At the end of the year 1810 an order was published at St. Petersburg, opening the harbours of Russia to all ships bearing a neutral flag, and imposing a duty upon many of the products of France. This edict was scarcely less than a direct challenge to the French Emperor. Napoleon exaggerated the effect of his Continental prohibitions upon English traffic. He imagined that the command of the European coast-line, and nothing short of this, would enable him to exhaust his enemy; and he was prepared to risk a war with Russia rather than permit it to frustrate his long-cherished hopes. Already in the Austrian marriage Napoleon had marked the severance of his interests from those of Alexander. An attempted compromise upon the affairs of Poland produced only new alienation and distrust; an open affront was offered to Alexander in the annexation of the Duchy of Oldenburg, whose sovereign was a member of his own family. The last event was immediately followed by the publication of the new Russian tariff. In the spring of 1811 Napoleon had determined upon war. With Spain still unsubdued, he had no motive to hurry on hostilities; Alexander on his part was still less ready for action; and the forms of diplomatic intercourse were in consequence maintained for some time longer at Paris and St. Petersburg. But the true nature of the situation was shown by the immense levies that were ordered both in France and Russia; and the rest of the year was spent in preparations for the campaign which was destined to decide the fate of Europe.

[Affairs in Spain and Portugal, 1809-1812.]

[Lines of Torres Vedras, 1809-1810.]

We have seen that during the period of more than two years that elapsed between the Peace of Vienna and the outbreak of war with Russia, Napoleon had no enemy in arms upon the Continent except in the Spanish Peninsula. Had the Emperor himself taken up the command in Spain, he would probably within a few months have crushed both the Spanish armies and their English ally. A fatal error in judgment made him willing to look on from a distance whilst his generals engaged with this last foe. The disputes with the Pope and the King of Holland might well have been adjourned for another year; but Napoleon felt no suspicions that the conquest of the Spanish Peninsula was too difficult a task for his marshals; nor perhaps would it have been so if Wellington had been like any of the generals whom Napoleon had himself encountered. The French forces in the Peninsula numbered over 300,000 men: in spite of the victory of Talavera, the English had been forced to retreat into Portugal. But the warfare of Wellington was a different thing from that even of the best Austrian or Russian commanders. From the time of the retreat from Talavera he had foreseen that Portugal would be invaded by an army far outnumbering his own; and he planned a scheme of defence as original, as strongly marked with true military insight, as Napoleon's own most daring schemes of attack. Behind Lisbon a rugged mountainous tract stretches from the Tagus to the sea: here, while the English army wintered in the neighbourhood of Almeida, Wellington employed thousands of Portuguese labourers in turning the promontory into one vast fortress. No rumour of the operation was allowed to reach the enemy. A double series of fortifications, known as the Lines of Torres Vedras, followed the mountain-bastion on the north of Lisbon, and left no single point open between the Tagus and the sea. This was the barrier to which Wellington meant in the last resort to draw his assailants, whilst the country was swept of everything that might sustain an invading army, and the irregular troops of Portugal closed in upon its rear.  [167]

[Retreat of Massena, 1810-11.]

[Massena's campaign against Wellington, 1810.]

In June, 1810, Marshal Massena, who had won the highest distinction at Aspern and Wagram, arrived in Spain, and took up the command of the army destined for the conquest of Portugal. Ciudad Rodrigo was invested: Wellington, too weak to effect its relief, too wise to jeopardise his army for the sake of Spanish praise, lay motionless while this great fortress fell into the hands of the invader. In September, the French, 70,000 strong, entered Portugal. Wellington retreated down the valley of the Mondego, devastating the country. At length he halted at Busaco and gave battle (September 27). The French were defeated; the victory gave the Portuguese full confidence in the English leader; but other roads were open to the invader, and Wellington continued his retreat. Massena followed, and heard for the first time of the fortifications of Torres Vedras when he was within five days' march of them. On nearing the mountain-barrier, Massena searched in vain for an unprotected point. Fifty thousand English and Portuguese regular troops, besides a multitude of Portuguese militia, were collected behind the lines; with the present number of the French an assault was hopeless. Massena waited for reinforcements. It was with the utmost difficulty that he could keep his army from starving; at length, when the country was utterly exhausted, he commenced his retreat (Nov. 14). Wellington descended from the heights, but his marching force was still too weak to risk a pitched battle. Massena halted and took post at Santarem, on the Tagus. Here, and in the neighbouring valley of the Zezere, he maintained himself during the winter. But in March, 1811, reinforcements arrived from England: Wellington moved forward against his enemy, and the retreat of the French began in real earnest. Massena made his way northwards, hard pressed by the English, and devastating the country with merciless severity in order to retard pursuit. Fire and ruin marked the track of the retreating army; but such were the sufferings of the French themselves, both during the invasion and the retreat, that when Massena re-entered Spain, after a campaign in which only one pitched battle had been fought, his loss exceeded 30,000 men.

[Soult conquers Spain as far as Cadiz.]

[Wellington's campaign of 1811.]

Other French armies, in spite of a most destructive guerilla warfare, were in the meantime completing the conquest of the south and the east of Spain. Soult captured Seville, and began to lay siege to Cadiz. Here, at the end of 1810, an order reached him from Napoleon to move to the support of Massena. Leaving Victor in command at Cadiz, Soult marched northwards, routed the Spaniards, and conquered the fortress of Badajoz, commanding the southern road into Portugal. Massena, however, was already in retreat, and Soult's own advance was cut short by intelligence that Graham, the English general in Cadiz, had broken out upon the besiegers and inflicted a heavy defeat. Soult returned to Cadiz and resumed the blockade. Wellington, thus freed from danger of attack from the south, and believing Massena to be thoroughly disabled, considered that the time had come for a forward movement into Spain. It was necessary for him to capture the fortresses of Almeida and Ciudad Rodrigo on the northern road, and to secure his own communications with Portugal by wresting back Badajoz from the French. He left a small force to besiege Almeida, and moved to Elvas to make arrangements with Beresford for the siege of Badajoz. But before the English commander had deemed it possible, the energy of Massena had restored his troops to efficiency; and the two armies of Massena and Soult were now ready to assail the English on the north and the south. Massena marched against the corps investing Almeida. Wellington hastened back to meet him, and fought a battle at Fuentes d'Onoro. The French were defeated; Almeida passed into the hands of the English. In the south, Soult advanced to the relief of Badajoz. He was overthrown by Beresford in the bloody engagement of Albuera (May 16th); but his junction with the army of the north, which was now transferred from Massena to Marmont, forced the English to raise the siege; and Wellington, after audaciously offering battle to the combined French armies, retired within the Portuguese frontier, and marched northwards with the design of laying siege to Ciudad Rodrigo. Again outnumbered by the French, he was compelled to retire to cantonments on the Coa.

[Capture of Ciudad Rodrigo, Jan. 19, 1812.]

[Capture of Badajoz, April 6.]

Throughout the autumn months, which were spent in forced inaction, Wellington held patiently to his belief that the French would be unable to keep their armies long united, on account of the scarcity of food. His calculations were correct, and at the close of the year 1811 the English were again superior in the field. Wellington moved against Ciudad Rodrigo, and took it by storm on the 19th of January, 1812. The road into Spain was opened; it only remained to secure Portugal itself by the capture of Badajoz. Wellington crossed the Tagus on the 8th of March, and completed the investment of Badajoz ten days later. It was necessary to gain possession of the city, at whatever cost, before Soult could advance to its relief. On the night of the 6th of April Wellington gave orders for the assault. The fury of the attack, the ferocity of the English soldiers in the moment of their victory, have made the storm of Badajoz conspicuous amongst the most terrible events of war. But the purpose of Wellington was effected; the base of the English army in Portugal was secured from all possibility of attack; and at the moment when Napoleon was summoning his veteran regiments from beyond the Pyrenees for the invasion of Russia, the English commander, master of the frontier fortresses of Spain, was preparing to overwhelm the weakened armies in the Peninsula, and to drive the French from Madrid.

[Wellington invades Spain, June 1812.]

[Salamanca, July 22.]

[Wellington retires to Portugal.]

It was in the summer of 1812, when Napoleon was now upon the point of opening the Russian campaign, that Wellington advanced against Marmont's positions in the north of Spain and the French lines of communication with the capital. Marmont fell back and allowed Wellington to pass Salamanca; but on reaching the Douro he turned upon his adversary, and by a succession of swift and skilful marches brought the English into some danger of losing their communications with Portugal. Wellington himself now retreated as far as Salamanca, and there gave battle (July 22). A decisive victory freed the English army from its peril, and annihilated all the advantages gained by Marmont's strategy and speed. The French were so heavily defeated that they had to fall back on Burgos. Wellington marched upon Madrid. At his approach King Joseph fled from the capital, and ordered Soult to evacuate Andalusia, and to meet him at Valencia, on the eastern coast. Wellington entered Madrid amidst the wild rejoicing of the Spaniards, and then turned northwards to complete the destruction of the army which he had beaten at Salamanca. But the hour of his final success was not yet come. His advance upon Madrid, though wise as a political measure, had given the French northern army time to rally. He was checked by the obstinate defence of Burgos; and finding the French strengthened by the very abandonment of territory which his victory had forced upon them, he retired to Portugal, giving to King Joseph a few months' more precarious enjoyment of his vassal-sovereignty before his final and irrevocable overthrow.

[The war excites a constitutional movement in Spain.]

In Spain itself the struggle of the nation for its independence had produced a political revolution as little foreseen by the Spaniards as by Napoleon himself when the conflict began. When, in 1808, the people had taken up arms for its native dynasty, the voices of those who demanded a reform in the abuses of the Bourbon government had scarcely been heard amid the tumult of loyal enthusiasm for Ferdinand. There existed, however, a group of liberally-minded men in Spain; and as soon as the invasion of the French and the subsequent successes of the Spaniards had overthrown both the old repressive system of the Bourbons and that which Napoleon attempted to put in its place, the opinions of these men, hitherto scarcely known outside the circle of their own acquaintances, suddenly became a power in the country through the liberation of the press. Jovellanos, an upright and large-minded statesman, who had suffered a long imprisonment in the last reign in consequence of his labours in the cause of progress, now represented in the Central Junta the party of constitutional reform. The Junta itself acted with but little insight or sincerity. A majority of its members neither desired nor understood the great changes in government which Jovellanos advocated; yet the Junta itself was an irregular and revolutionary body, and was forced to appeal to the nation in order to hold its ground against the old legal Councils of the monarchy, which possessed not only a better formal right, but all the habits of authority. The victories of Napoleon at the end of 1808, and the threatening attitude both of the old official bodies and of the new provincial governments which had sprung up in every part of the kingdom, extorted from the Junta in the spring of 1809 a declaration in favour of the assembling of the Cortes, or National Parliament, in the following year. Once made, the declaration could not be nullified or withdrawn. It was in vain that the Junta, alarmed at the progress of popular opinions, restored the censorship of the press, and attempted to suppress the liberal journals. The current of political agitation swept steadily on; and before the end of the year 1809 the conflict of parties, which Spain was henceforward to experience in common with the other Mediterranean States, had fairly begun.  [168]

[Spanish Liberals in 1809 and 1810.]

The Spanish Liberals of 1809 made the same attack upon despotic power, and upheld the same theories of popular right, as the leaders of the French nation twenty years before. Against them was ranged the whole force of Spanish officialism, soon to be supported by the overwhelming power of the clergy. In the outset, however, the Liberals carefully avoided infringing on the prerogatives of the Church. Thus accommodating its policy to the Catholic spirit of the nation, the party of reform gathered strength throughout the year 1809, as disaster after disaster excited the wrath of the people against both the past and the present holders of power. It was determined by the Junta that the Cortes should assemble on the 1st of March, 1810. According to the ancient usage of Spain, each of the Three Estates, the Clergy, the Nobles, and the Commons, would have been represented in the Cortes by a separate assembly. The opponents of reform pressed for the maintenance of this mediæval order, the Liberals declared for a single Chamber; the Junta, guided by Jovellanos, adopted a middle course, and decided that the higher clergy and nobles should be jointly represented by one Chamber, the Commons by a second. Writs of election had already been issued, when the Junta, driven to Cadiz by the advance of the French armies, and assailed alike by Liberals, by reactionists, and by city mobs, ended its ineffective career, and resigned its powers into the hands of a Regency composed of five persons (Jan. 30, 1810). Had the Regency immediately taken steps to assemble the Cortes, Spain would probably have been content with the moderate reforms which two Chambers, formed according to the plans of Jovellanos, would have been likely to sanction. The Regency, however, preferred to keep power in its own hands and ignored the promise which the Junta had given to the nation. Its policy of obstruction, which was continued for months after the time when the Cortes ought to have assembled, threw the Liberal party into the hands of men of extremes, and prepared the way for revolution instead of reform. It was only when the report reached Spain that Ferdinand was about to marry the daughter of King Joseph, and to accept the succession to the Spanish crown from the usurper himself, that the Regency consented to convoke the Cortes. But it was now no longer possible to create an Upper House to serve as a check upon the popular Assembly. A single Chamber was elected, and elected in great part within the walls of Cadiz itself; for the representatives of districts where the presence of French soldiery rendered election impossible were chosen by refugees from those districts within Cadiz, amid the tumults of political passion which stir a great city in time of war and revolution.

[Constitution made by the Cortes, 1812.]

On the 24th of September, 1810, the Cortes opened. Its first act was to declare the sovereignty of the people, its next act to declare the freedom of the Press. In every debate a spirit of bitter hatred towards the old system of government and of deep distrust towards Ferdinand himself revealed itself in the speeches of the Liberal deputies, although no one in the Assembly dared to avow the least want of loyalty towards the exiled House. The Liberals knew how passionate was the love of the Spanish people for their Prince; but they resolved that, if Ferdinand returned to his throne, he should return without the power to revive the old abuses of Bourbon rule. In this spirit the Assembly proceeded to frame a Constitution for Spain. The Crown was treated as the antagonist and corrupter of the people; its administrative powers were jealously reduced; it was confronted by an Assembly to be elected every two years, and the members of this Assembly were prohibited both from holding office under the Crown, and from presenting themselves for re-election at the end of their two years' service. To a Representative Body thus excluded from all possibility of gaining any practical acquaintance with public affairs was entrusted not only the right of making laws, but the control of every branch of government. The executive was reduced to a mere cypher.

[The Clergy against the Constitution.]

Such was the Constitution which, under the fire of the French artillery now encompassing Cadiz, the Cortes of Spain proclaimed in the spring of the year 1812. Its principles had excited the most vehement opposition within the Assembly itself; by the nation, or at least that part of it which was in communication with Cadiz, it appeared to be received with enthusiasm. The Liberals, who had triumphed over their opponents in the debates in the Assembly, believed that their own victory was the victory of the Spanish people over the forces of despotism. But before the first rejoicings were over, ominous signs appeared of the strength of the opposite party, and of the incapacity of the Liberals themselves to form any effective Government. The fanaticism of the clergy was excited by a law partly ratifying the suppression of monasteries begun by Joseph Bonaparte; the enactments of the Cortes regarding the censorship of religious writings threw the Church into open revolt. In declaring the freedom of the Press, the Cortes had expressly guarded themselves against extending this freedom to religious discussion; the clergy now demanded the restoration of the powers of the Inquisition, which had been in abeyance since the beginning of the war. The Cortes were willing to grant to the Bishops the right of condemning any writing as heretical, and they were willing to enforce by means of the ordinary tribunals the law which declared the Catholic religion to be the only one permitted in Spain; but they declined to restore the jurisdiction of the Holy Office (Feb., 1813). Without this engine for the suppression of all mental independence the priesthood of Spain conceived its cause to be lost. The anathema of the Church went out against the new order. Uniting with the partisans of absolutism, whom Wellington, provoked by the extravagances of the Liberals, now took under his protection, the clergy excited an ignorant people against its own emancipators, and awaited the time when the return of Ferdinand, and a combination of all the interests hostile to reform, should overthrow the Constitution which the Liberals fondly imagined to have given freedom to Spain.

CHAPTER X.

War approaching between France and Russia-Policy of Prussia-Hardenberg's Ministry-Prussia forced into Alliance with Napoleon-Austrian Alliance- Napoleon's Preparations-He enters Russia-Alexander and Bernadotte-Plan of the Russians to fight a Battle at Drissa frustrated-They retreat on Witepsk-Sufferings of the French-French enter Smolensko-Battle of Borodino-Evacuation of Moscow-Moscow fired-The Retreat from Moscow-The French at Smolensko-Advance of Russian Armies from North and South- Battle of Krasnoi-Passage of the Beresina-The French reach the Niemen- York's Convention with the Russians-The Czar and Stein-Russian Army enters Prussia-Stein raises East Prussia-Treaty of Kalisch-Prussia declares War-Enthusiasm of the Nation-Idea of German Unity-The Landwehr.

[Austria and Prussia in 1811.]

[Hardenberg's Ministry.]

War between France and Russia was known to be imminent as early as the spring of 1811. The approach of the conflict was watched with the deepest anxiety by the two States of central Europe which still retained some degree of independence. The Governments of Berlin and Vienna had been drawn together by misfortune. The same ultimate deliverance formed the secret hope of both; but their danger was too great to permit them to combine in open resistance to Napoleon's will. In spite of a tacit understanding between the two powers, each was compelled for the present to accept the conditions necessary to secure its own existence. The situation of Prussia in especial was one of the utmost danger. Its territory lay directly between the French Empire and Russia; its fortresses were in the hands of Napoleon, its resources were certain to be seized by one or other of the hostile armies. Neutrality was impossible, however much desired by Prussia itself; and the only question to be decided by the Government was whether Prussia should enter the war as the ally of France or of Russia. Had the party of Stein been in power, Prussia would have taken arms against Napoleon at every risk. Stein, however, was in exile his friends, though strong in the army, were not masters of the Government; the foreign policy of the country was directed by a statesman who trusted more to time and prudent management than to desperate resolves. Hardenberg had been recalled to office in 1810, and permitted to resume the great measures of civil reform which had been broken off two years before. The machinery of Government was reconstructed upon principles that had been laid down by Stein; agrarian reform was carried still farther by the abolition of peasant's service, and the partition of peasant's land between the occupant and his lord; an experiment, though a very ill-managed one, was made in the forms of constitutional Government by the convocation of three successive assemblies of the Notables. On the part of the privileged orders Hardenberg encountered the most bitter opposition; his own love of absolute power prevented him from winning popular confidence by any real approach towards a Representative System. Nor was the foreign policy of the Minister of a character to excite enthusiasm. A true patriot at heart, he seemed at times to be destitute of patriotism, when he was in fact only destitute of the power to reveal his real motives.

[Hardenberg's foreign policy, 1811.]

Convinced that Prussia could not remain neutral in the coming war, and believing some relief from its present burdens to be absolutely necessary, Hardenberg determined in the first instance to offer Prussia's support to Napoleon, demanding in return for it a reduction of the payments still due to France, and the removal of the limits imposed upon the Prussian army.  [169] The offer of the Prussian alliance reached Napoleon in the spring of 1811: he maintained an obstinate silence. While the Prussian envoy at Paris vainly waited for an audience, masses of troops advanced from the Rhine towards the Prussian frontier, and the French garrisons on the Oder were raised far beyond their stipulated strength. In July the envoy returned from Paris, announcing that Napoleon declined even to enter upon a discussion of the terms proposed by Hardenberg. King Frederick William now wrote to the Czar, proposing an alliance between Prussia and Russia. It was not long before the report of Hardenberg's military preparations reached Paris. Napoleon announced that if they were not immediately suspended he should order Davoust to march on Berlin; and he presented a counter-proposition for a Prussian alliance, which was in fact one of unqualified submission. The Government had to decide between accepting a treaty which placed Prussia among Napoleon's vassals, or certain war. Hardenberg, expecting favourable news from St. Petersburg, pronounced in favour of war; but the Czar, though anxious for the support of Prussia, had determined on a defensive plan of operations, and declared that he could send no troops beyond the Russian frontier.

[Prussia accepts alliance with Napoleon Feb, 1812.]

Prussia was thus left to face Napoleon alone. Hardenberg shrank from the responsibility of proclaiming a war for life or death, and a treaty was signed which added the people of Frederick the Great to that inglorious crowd which fought at Napoleon's orders against whatever remained of independence and nationality in Europe.  [170] (Feb. 24th, 1812.) Prussia undertook to supply Napoleon with 20,000 men for the impending campaign, and to raise no levies and to give no orders to its troops without Napoleon's consent. Such was the bitter termination of all those patriotic hopes and efforts which had carried Prussia through its darkest days. Hardenberg himself might make a merit of bending before the storm, and of preserving for Prussia the means of striking when the time should come; but the simpler instincts of the patriotic party felt his submission to be the very surrender of national existence. Stein in his exile denounced the Minister with unsparing bitterness. Scharnhorst resigned his post; many of the best officers in the Prussian army quitted the service of King Frederick William in order to join the Russians in the last struggle for European liberty.

[Alliance of Austria with Napoleon.]

The alliance which Napoleon pressed upon Austria was not of the same humiliating character as that which Prussia was forced to accept. Both Metternich and the Emperor Francis would have preferred to remain neutral, for the country was suffering from a fearful State-bankruptcy, and the Government had been compelled to reduce its paper money, in which all debts and salaries were payable, to a fifth of its nominal value. Napoleon, however, insisted on Austria's co-operation. The family-relations of the two Emperors pointed to a close alliance, and the reward which Napoleon held out to Austria, the restoration of the Illyrian provinces, was one of the utmost value. Nor was the Austrian contingent to be treated, like the Prussian, as a mere French army-corps. Its operations were to be separate from those of the French, and its command was to be held by an Austrian general, subordinate only to Napoleon himself. On these terms Metternich was not unwilling to enter the campaign. He satisfied his scruples by inventing a strange diplomatic form in which Austria was still described as a neutral, although she took part in the war,  [171] and felt as little compunction in uniting with France as in explaining to the Courts of St. Petersburg and Berlin that the union was a hypocritical one. The Sovereign who was about to be attacked by Napoleon, and the Sovereigns who sent their troops to Napoleon's support, perfectly well understood one another's position. The Prussian corps, watched and outnumbered by the French, might have to fight the Russians because they could not help it; the Austrians, directed by their own commander, would do no serious harm to the Russians so long as the Russians did no harm to them. Should the Czar succeed in giving a good account of his adversary, he would have no difficulty in coming to a settlement with his adversary's forced allies.

[Preparations of Napoleon for invasion of Russia.]

The Treaties which gave to Napoleon the hollow support of Austria and Prussia were signed early in the year 1812. During the next three months all Northern Germany was covered with enormous masses of troops and waggon-trains, on their way from the Rhine to the Vistula. No expedition had ever been organised on anything approaching to the scale of the invasion of Russia. In all the wars of the French since 1793 the enemy's country had furnished their armies with supplies, and the generals had trusted to their own exertions for everything but guns and ammunition. Such a method could not, however, be followed in an invasion of Russia. The country beyond the Niemen was no well-stocked garden, like Lombardy or Bavaria. Provisions for a mass of 450,000 men, with all the means of transport for carrying them far into Russia, had to be collected at Dantzig and the fortresses of the Vistula. No mercy was shown to the unfortunate countries whose position now made them Napoleon's harvest-field and storehouse. Prussia was forced to supplement its military assistance with colossal grants of supplies. The whole of Napoleon's troops upon the march through Germany lived at the expense of the towns and villages through which they passed; in Westphalia such was the ruin caused by military requisitions that King Jerome wrote to Napoleon, warning him to fear the despair of men who had nothing more to lose.  [172]

[Napoleon crosses Russian frontier, June, 1812.]

[Alexander and Bernadotte.]

At length the vast stores were collected, and the invading army reached the Vistula. Napoleon himself quitted Paris on the 9th of May, and received the homage of the Austrian and Prussian Sovereigns at Dresden. The eastward movement of the army continued. The Polish and East Prussian districts which had been the scene of the combats of 1807 were again traversed by French columns. On the 23rd of June the order was given to cross the Niemen and enter Russian territory. Out of 600,000 troops whom Napoleon had organised for this campaign, 450,000 were actually upon the frontier. Of these, 380,000 formed the central army, under Napoleon's own command, at Kowno, on the Niemen; to the north, at Tilsit, there was formed a corps of 32,000, which included the contingent furnished by Prussia; the Austrians, under Schwarzenburg, with a small French division, lay to the south, on the borders of Galicia. Against the main army of Napoleon, the real invading force, the Russians could only bring up 150,000 men. These were formed into the First and Second Armies of the West. The First, or Northern Army, with which the Czar himself was present, numbered about 100,000, under the command of Barclay de Tolly; the Second Army, half that strength, was led by Prince Bagration. In Southern Poland and on the Lower Niemen the French auxiliary corps were faced by weak divisions. In all, the Russians had only 220,000 men to oppose to more than double that number of the enemy. The principal reinforcements which they had to expect were from the armies hitherto engaged with the Turks upon the Danube. Alexander found it necessary to make peace with the Porte at the cost of a part of the spoils of Tilsit. The Danubian provinces, with the exception of Bessarabia, were restored to the Sultan, in order that Russia might withdraw its forces from the south. Bernadotte, Crown Prince of Sweden, who was threatened with the loss of his own dominions in the event of Napoleon's victory, concluded an alliance with the Czar. In return for the co-operation of a Swedish army, Alexander undertook, with an indifference to national right worthy of Napoleon himself, to wrest Norway from Denmark, and to annex it to the Swedish crown.

[Russians intend to fight at Drissa.]

[Russian armies severed, and retreat on Witepsk.]

The head-quarters of the Russian army were at Wilna when Napoleon crossed the Niemen. It was unknown whether the French intended to advance upon Moscow or upon St. Petersburg; nor had any systematic plan of the campaign been adopted by the Czar. The idea of falling back before the enemy was indeed familiar in Russia since the war between Peter the Great and Charles XII. of Sweden, and there was no want of good counsel in favour of a defensive warfare;  [173] but neither the Czar nor any one of his generals understood the simple theory of a retreat in which no battles at all should be fought. The most that was understood by a defensive system was the occupation of an entrenched position for battle, and a retreat to a second line of entrenchments before the engagement was repeated. The actual course of the campaign was no result of a profound design; it resulted from the disagreements of the general's plans, and the frustration of them all. It was intended in the first instance to fight a battle at Drissa, on the river Dwina. In this position, which was supposed to cover the roads both to Moscow and St. Petersburg, a great entrenched camp had been formed, and here the Russian army was to make its first stand against Napoleon. Accordingly, as soon as the French crossed the Niemen, both Barclay and Bagration were ordered by the Czar to fall back upon Drissa. But the movements of the French army were too rapid for the Russian commanders to effect their junction. Bagration, who lay at some distance to the south, was cut off from his colleague, and forced to retreat along the eastern road towards Witepsk. Barclay reached Drissa in safety, but he knew himself to be unable to hold it alone against 300,000 men. He evacuated the lines without waiting for the approach of the French, and fell back in the direction taken by the second army. The first movement of defence had thus failed, and the Czar now quitted the camp, leaving to Barclay the command of the whole Russian forces.

[Collapse of the French transport.]

[Barclay and Bagration unite at Smolensko, Aug. 3.]

Napoleon entered Wilna, the capital of Russian Poland, on the 28th of June. The last Russian detachments had only left it a few hours before; but the French were in no condition for immediate pursuit. Before the army reached the Niemen the unparalleled difficulties of the campaign had become only too clear. The vast waggon-trains broke down on the highways. The stores were abundant, but the animals which had to transport them died of exhaustion. No human genius, no perfection of foresight and care, could have achieved the enormous task which Napoleon had undertaken. In spite of a year's preparations the French suffered from hunger and thirst from the moment that they set foot on Russian soil. Thirty thousand stragglers had left the army before it reached Wilna; twenty-five thousand sick were in the hospitals; the transports were at an unknown distance in the rear. At the end of six days' march from the Niemen, Napoleon found himself compelled to halt for nearly three weeks. The army did not leave Wilna till the 16th of July, when Barclay had already evacuated the camp at Drissa. When at length a march became possible, Napoleon moved upon the Upper Dwina, hoping to intercept Barclay upon the road to Witepsk; but difficulties of transport again brought him to a halt, and the Russian commander reached Witepsk before his adversary. Here Barclay drew up for battle, supposing Bagration's army to be but a short distance to the south. In the course of the night intelligence arrived that Bagration's army was nowhere near the rallying-point, but had been driven back towards Smolensko. Barclay immediately gave up the thought of fighting a battle, and took the road to Smolensko himself, leaving his watch-fires burning. His movement was unperceived by the French; the retreat was made in good order; and the two severed Russian armies at length effected their junction at a point three hundred miles distant from the frontier.

[The French waste away.]

[French enter Smolensko, Aug. 18.]

[Barclay superseded by Kutusoff.]

Napoleon, disappointed of battle, entered Witepsk on the evening after the Russians had abandoned it (July 28). Barclay's escape was, for the French, a disaster of the first magnitude, since it extinguished all hope of crushing the larger of the two Russian armies by overwhelming numbers in one great and decisive engagement. The march of the French during the last twelve days showed at what cost every further step must be made. Since quitting Wilna the 50,000 sick and stragglers had risen to 100,000. Fever and disease struck down whole regiments. The provisioning of the army was beyond all human power. Of the 200,000 men who still remained, it might almost be calculated in how many weeks the last would perish. So fearful was the prospect that Napoleon himself thought of abandoning any further advance until the next year, and of permitting the army to enter into winter-quarters upon the Dwina. But the conviction that all Russian resistance would end with the capture of Moscow hurried him on. The army left Witepsk on the 13th of August, and followed the Russians to Smolensko. Here the entire Russian army clamoured for battle. Barclay stood alone in perceiving the necessity for retreat. The generals caballed against him; the soldiers were on the point of mutiny; the Czar himself wrote to express his impatience for an attack upon the French. Barclay nevertheless persisted in his resolution to abandon Smolensko. He so far yielded to the army as to permit the rearguard to engage in a bloody struggle with the French when they assaulted the town; but the evacuation was completed under cover of night; and when the French made their entrance into Smolensko on the next morning they found it deserted and in rums. The surrender of Smolensko was the last sacrifice that Barclay could extort from Russian pride. He no longer opposed the universal cry for battle, and the retreat was continued only with the intention of halting at the first strong position. Barclay himself was surveying a battleground when he heard that the command had been taken out of his hands. The Czar had been forced by national indignation at the loss of Smolensko to remove this able soldier, who was a Livonian by birth, and to transfer the command to Kutusoff, a thorough Russian, whom a life-time spent in victories over the Turk had made, in spite of his defeat at Austerlitz, the idol of the nation.

[The French advance from Smolensko.]

When Kutusoff reached the camp, the prolonged miseries of the French advance had already reduced the invaders to the number of the army opposed to them. As far as Smolensko the French had at least not suffered from the hostility of the population, who were Poles, not Russians; but on reaching Smolensko they entered a country where every peasant was a fanatical enemy. The villages were burnt down by their inhabitants, the corn destroyed, and the cattle driven into the woods. Every day's march onward from Smolensko cost the French three thousand men. On reaching the river Moskwa in the first week of September, a hundred and seventy-five thousand out of Napoleon's three hundred and eighty thousand soldiers were in the hospitals, or missing, or dead. About sixty thousand guarded the line of march. The Russians, on the other hand, had received reinforcements which covered their losses at Smolensko; and although detachments had been sent to support the army of Riga, Kutusoff was still able to place over one hundred thousand men in the field.

[Battle of Borodino, Sept. 7.]

[Evacuation of Moscow. French enter Moscow, Sept. 14.]

On the 5th of September the Russian army drew up for battle at Borodino, on the Moskwa, seventy miles west of the capital. At early morning on the 7th the French advanced to the attack. The battle was, in proportion to its numbers, the most sanguinary of modern times. Forty thousand French, thirty thousand Russians were struck down. At the close of the day the French were in possession of the enemy's ground, but the Russians, unbroken in their order, had only retreated to a second line of defence. Both sides claimed the victory; neither had won it. It was no catastrophe such as Napoleon required for the decision of the war, it was no triumph sufficient to save Russia from the necessity of abandoning its capital. Kutusoff had sustained too heavy a loss to face the French beneath the walls of Moscow. Peace was no nearer for the 70,000 men who had been killed or wounded in the fight. The French steadily advanced; the Russians retreated to Moscow, and evacuated the capital when their generals decided that they could not encounter the French assault. The Holy City was left undefended before the invader. But the departure of the army was the smallest part of the evacuation. The inhabitants, partly of their own free will, partly under the compulsion of the Governor, abandoned the city in a mass. No gloomy or excited crowd, as at Vienna and Berlin, thronged the streets to witness the entrance of the great conqueror, when on the 14th of September Napoleon took possession of Moscow. His troops marched through silent and deserted streets. In the solitude of the Kremlin Napoleon received the homage of a few foreigners, who alone could be collected by his servants to tender to him the submission of the city.

[Moscow fired.]

But the worst was yet to come. On the night after Napoleon's entry, fires broke out in different parts of Moscow. They were ascribed at first to accident; but when on the next day the French saw the flames gaining ground in every direction, and found that all the means for extinguishing fire had been removed from the city, they understood the doom to which Moscow had been devoted by its own defenders. Count Rostopchin, the governor, had determined on the destruction of Moscow without the knowledge of the Czar. The doors of the prisons were thrown open. Rostopchin gave the signal by setting fire to his own palace, and let loose his bands of incendiaries over the city. For five days the flames rose and fell; and when, on the evening of the 20th, the last fires ceased, three-fourths of Moscow lay in ruins.

[Napoleon at Moscow, Sept. 14-Oct. 19.]

Such was the prize for which Napoleon had sacrificed 200,000 men, and engulfed the weak remnant of his army six hundred miles deep in an enemy's country. Throughout all the terrors of the advance Napoleon had held fast to the belief that Alexander's resistance would end with the fall of his capital. The events that accompanied the entry of the French into Moscow shook his confidence; yet even now Napoleon could not believe that the Czar remained firm against all thoughts of peace. His experience in all earlier wars had given him confidence in the power of one conspicuous disaster to unhinge the resolution of kings. His trust in the deepening impression made by the fall of Moscow was fostered by negotiations begun by Kutusoff for the very purpose of delaying the French retreat. For five weeks Napoleon remained at Moscow as if spell-bound, unable to convince himself of his powerlessness to break Alexander's determination, unable to face a retreat which would display to all Europe the failure of his arms and the termination of his career of victory. At length the approach of winter forced him to action. It was impossible to provision the army at Moscow during the winter months, even if there had been nothing to fear from the enemy. Even the mocking overtures of Kutusoff had ceased. The frightful reality could no longer be concealed. On the 19th of October the order for retreat was given. It was not the destruction of Moscow, but the departure of its inhabitants, that had brought the conqueror to ruin. Above two thousand houses were still standing; but whether the buildings remained or perished made little difference; the whole value of the capital to Napoleon was lost when the inhabitants, whom he could have forced to procure supplies for his army, disappeared. Vienna and Berlin had been of such incalculable service to Napoleon because the whole native administration placed itself under his orders, and every rich and important citizen became a hostage for the activity of the rest. When the French gained Moscow, they gained nothing beyond the supplies which were at that moment in the city. All was lost to Napoleon when the class who in other capitals had been his instruments fled at his approach. The conflagration of Moscow acted upon all Europe as a signal of inextinguishable national hatred; as a military operation, it neither accelerated the retreat of Napoleon nor added to the miseries which his army had to undergo.

[Napoleon leaves Moscow, Oct. 19.]

[Forced to retreat by the same road.]

The French forces which quitted Moscow in October numbered about 100,000 men. Reinforcements had come in during the occupation of the city, and the health of the soldiers had been in some degree restored by a month's rest. Everything now depended upon gaining a line of retreat where food could be found. Though but a fourth part of the army which entered Russia in the summer, the army which left Moscow was still large enough to protect itself against the enemy, if allowed to retreat through a fresh country; if forced back upon the devastated line of its advance it was impossible for it to escape destruction. Napoleon therefore determined to make for Kaluga, on the south of Moscow, and to endeavour to gain a road to Smolensko far distant from that by which he had come. The army moved from Moscow in a southern direction. But its route had been foreseen by Kutusoff. At the end of four days' march it was met by a Russian corps at Jaroslavitz. A bloody struggle left the French in possession of the road: they continued their advance; but it was only to find that Kutusoff, with his full strength, had occupied a line of heights farther south, and barred the way to Kaluga. The effort of an assault was beyond the powers of the French. Napoleon surveyed the enemy's position, and recognised the fatal necessity of abandoning the march southwards and returning to the wasted road by which he had advanced. The meaning of the backward movement was quickly understood by the army. From the moment of quitting Jaroslavitz, disorder and despair increased with every march. Thirty thousand men were lost upon the road before a pursuer appeared in sight. When, on the 2nd of November, the army reached Wiazma, it numbered no more than 65,000 men.

[Kutusoff follows by parallel road.]

Kutusoff was unadventurous in pursuit. The necessity of moving his army along a parallel road south of the French, in order to avoid starvation, diminished the opportunities for attack; but the general himself disliked risking his forces, and preferred to see the enemy's destruction effected by the elements. At Wiazma, where, on the 3rd of November, the French were for the first time attacked in force, Kutusoff's own delay alone saved them from total ruin. In spite of heavy loss the French kept possession of the road, and secured their retreat to Smolensko, where stores of food had been accumulated, and where other and less exhausted French troops were at hand.

[Frost, Nov. 6.]

[French reach Smolensko, Nov. 9.]

Up to the 6th of November the weather had been sunny and dry. On the 6th the long-delayed terrors of Russian winter broke upon the pursuers and the pursued. Snow darkened the air and hid the last traces of vegetation from the starving cavalry trains. The temperature sank at times to forty degrees of frost. Death came, sometimes in the unfelt release from misery, sometimes in horrible forms of mutilation and disease. Both armies were exposed to the same sufferings; but the Russians had at least such succour as their countrymen could give; where the French sank, they died. The order of war disappeared under conditions which made life itself the accident of a meal or of a place by the camp-fire. Though most of the French soldiery continued to carry their arms, the Guard alone kept its separate formation; the other regiments marched in confused masses. From the 9th to the 13th of November these starving bands arrived one after another at Smolensko, expecting that here their sufferings would end. But the organisation for distributing the stores accumulated in Smolensko no longer existed. The perishing crowds were left to find shelter where they could; sacks of corn were thrown to them for food.

[Russian armies from north and south attempt to cut off French retreat.]

[Krasnoi, Nov. 17.]

It was impossible for Napoleon to give his wearied soldiers rest, for new Russian armies were advancing from the north and the south to cut off their retreat. From the Danube and from the Baltic Sea troops were pressing forward to their meeting-point upon the rear of the invader. Witgenstein, moving southwards at the head of the army of the Dwina, had overpowered the French corps stationed upon that river, and made himself master of Witepsk. The army of Bucharest, which had been toiling northwards ever since the beginning of August, had advanced to within a few days' march of its meeting-point with the army of the Dwina upon the line of Napoleon's communications. Before Napoleon reached Smolensko he sent orders to Victor, who was at Smolensko with some reserves, to march against Witgenstein and drive him back upon the Dwina. Victor set out on his mission. During the short halt of Napoleon in Smolensko, Kutusoff pushed forward to the west of the French, and took post at Krasnoi, thirty miles farther along the road by which Napoleon had to pass. The retreat of the French seemed to be actually cut off. Had the Russian general dared to face Napoleon and his Guards, he might have held the French in check until the arrival of the two auxiliary armies from the north and south enabled him to capture Napoleon and his entire force. Kutusoff, however, preferred a partial and certain victory to a struggle with Napoleon for life or death. He permitted Napoleon and the Guard to pass by unattacked, and then fell upon the hinder divisions of the French army. (Nov. 17.) These unfortunate troops were successively cut to pieces. Twenty-six thousand were made prisoners. Ney, with a part of the rear-guard, only escaped by crossing the Dnieper on the ice. Of the army that had quitted Moscow there now remained but 10,000 combatants and 20,000 followers. Kutusoff himself was brought to such a state of exhaustion that he could carry the pursuit no further, and entered into quarters upon the Dnieper.

[Victor joins Napoleon.]

[Passage of the Beresina, Nov. 28th.]

It was a few days after the battle at Krasnoi that the divisions of Victor, coming from the direction of the Dwina, suddenly encountered the remnant of Napoleon's army. Though aware that Napoleon was in retreat, they knew nothing of the calamities that had befallen him, and were struck with amazement when, in the middle of a forest, they met with what seemed more like a miserable troop of captives than an army upon the march. Victor's soldiers of a mere auxiliary corps found themselves more than double the effective strength of the whole army of Moscow. Their arrival again placed Napoleon at the head of 30,000 disciplined troops, and gave the French a gleam of victory in the last and seemingly most hopeless struggle in the campaign. Admiral Tchitchagoff, in command of the army marching from the Danube, had at length reached the line of Napoleon's retreat, and established himself at Borisov, where the road through Poland crosses the river Beresina. The bridge was destroyed by the Russians, and Tchitchagoff opened communication with Witgenstein's army, which lay only a few miles to the north. It appeared as if the retreat of the French was now finally intercepted, and the surrender of Napoleon inevitable. Yet even in this hopeless situation the military skill and daring of the French worked with something of its ancient power. The army reached the Beresina; Napoleon succeeded in withdrawing the enemy from the real point of passage; bridges were thrown across the river, and after desperate fighting a great part of the army made good its footing upon the western bank (Nov. 28). But the losses even among the effective troops were enormous. The fate of the miserable crowd that followed them, torn by the cannon-fire of the Russians, and precipitated into the river by the breaking of one of the bridges, has made the passage of the Beresina a synonym for the utmost degree of human woe.

[French reach the Niemen, Dec. 13.]

This was the last engagement fought by the army. The Guards still preserved their order: Marshal Ney still found soldiers capable of turning upon the pursuer with his own steady and unflagging courage; but the bulk of the army struggled forward in confused crowds, harassed by the Cossacks, and laying down their arms by thousands before the enemy. The frost, which had broken up on the 19th, returned on the 30th of November with even greater severity. Twenty thousand fresh troops which joined the army between the Beresina and Wilna scarcely arrested the process of dissolution. On the 3rd of December Napoleon quitted the army. Wilna itself was abandoned with all its stores; and when at length the fugitives reached the Niemen, they numbered little more than twenty thousand. Here, six months earlier, three hundred and eighty thousand men had crossed with Napoleon. A hundred thousand more had joined the army in the course of its retreat. Of all this host, not the twentieth part reached the Prussian frontier. A hundred and seventy thousand remained prisoners in the hands of the Russians; a greater number had perished. Of the twenty thousand men who now beheld the Niemen, probably not seven thousand had crossed with Napoleon. In the presence of a catastrophe so overwhelming and so unparalleled the Russian generals might well be content with their own share in the work of destruction. Yet the event proved that Kutusoff had done ill in sparing the extremest effort to capture or annihilate his foe. Not only was Napoleon's own escape the pledge of continued war, but the remnant that escaped with him possessed a military value out of all proportion to its insignificant numbers. The best of the army were the last to succumb. Out of those few thousands who endured to the end, a very large proportion were veteran officers, who immediately took their place at the head of Napoleon's newly-raised armies, and gave to them a military efficiency soon to be bitterly proved by Europe on many a German battle-field.

[York's convention with the Russians, Dec. 30.]

[York and the Prussian contingent at Riga.]

Four hundred thousand men were lost to a conqueror who could still stake the lives of half a million more. The material power of Napoleon, though largely, was not fatally diminished by the Russian campaign; it was through its moral effect, first proved in the action of Prussia, that the retreat from Moscow created a new order of things in Europe. The Prussian contingent, commanded by General von York, lay in front of Riga, where it formed part of the French subsidiary army-corps led by Marshal Macdonald. Early in November the Russian governor of Riga addressed himself to York, assuring him that Napoleon was ruined, and soliciting York himself to take up arms against Macdonald.  [174] York had no evidence, beyond the word of the Russian commander, of the extent of Napoleon's losses; and even if the facts were as stated, it was by no means clear that the Czar might not be inclined to take vengeance on Prussia on account of its alliance with Napoleon. York returned a guarded answer to the Russian, and sent an officer to Wilna to ascertain the real state of the French army. On the 8th of December the officer returned, and described what he had himself seen. Soon afterwards the Russian commandant produced a letter from the Czar, declaring his intention to deal with Prussia as a friend, not as an enemy. On these points all doubt was removed; York's decision was thrown upon himself. York was a rigid soldier of the old Prussian type, dominated by the idea of military duty. The act to which the Russian commander invited him, and which the younger officers were ready to hail as the liberation of Prussia, might be branded by his sovereign as desertion and treason. Whatever scruples and perplexity might be felt in such a situation by a loyal and obedient soldier were felt by York. He nevertheless chose the course which seemed to be for his country's good; and having chosen it, he accepted all the consequences which it involved. On the 30th of December a convention was signed at Tauroggen, which, under the guise of a truce, practically withdrew the Prussian army from Napoleon, and gave the Russians possession of Königsberg. The momentous character of the act was recognised by Napoleon as soon as the news reached Paris. York's force was the strongest military body upon the Russian frontier; united with Macdonald, it would have forced the Russian pursuit to stop at the Niemen; abandoning Napoleon, it brought his enemies on to the Vistula, and threatened incalculable danger by its example to all the rest of Germany. For the moment, however, Napoleon could count upon the spiritless obedience of King Frederick William. In the midst of the French regiments that garrisoned Berlin, the King wrote orders pronouncing York's convention null and void, and ordering York himself to be tried by court-martial. The news reached the loyal soldier: he received it with grief, but maintained his resolution to act for his country's good. "With bleeding heart," he wrote, "I burst the bond of obedience, and carry on the war upon my own responsibility. The army desires war with France; the nation desires it; the King himself desires it, but his will is not free. The army must make his will free."

[The Czar and Stein.]

[Alexander enters Prussia, Jan., 1813.]

York's act was nothing less than the turning-point in Prussian history. Another Prussian, at this great crisis of Europe, played as great, though not so conspicuous, a part. Before the outbreak of the Russian war, the Czar had requested the exile Stein to come to St. Petersburg to aid him with his counsels during the struggle with Napoleon. Stein gladly accepted the call; and throughout the campaign he encouraged the Czar in the resolute resistance which the Russian nation itself required of its Government. So long as French soldiers remained on Russian soil, there was indeed little need for a foreigner to stimulate the Czar's energies; but when the pursuit had gloriously ended on the Niemen, the case became very different. Kutusoff and the generals were disinclined to carry the war into Germany. The Russian army had itself lost three-fourths of its numbers; Russian honour was satisfied; the liberation of Western Europe might be left to Western Europe itself. Among the politicians who surrounded Alexander, there were a considerable number, including the first minister Romanzoff, who still believed in the good policy of a French alliance. These were the influences with which Stein had to contend, when the question arose whether Russia should rest satisfied with its own victories, or summon all Europe to unite in overthrowing Napoleon's tyranny. No record remains of the stages by which Alexander's mind rose to the clear and firm conception of a single European interest against Napoleon; indications exist that it was Stein's personal influence which most largely affected his decision. Even in the darkest moments of the war, when the forces of Russia seemed wholly incapable of checking Napoleon's advance, Stein had never abandoned his scheme for raising the German nation against Napoleon. The confidence with which he had assured Alexander of ultimate victory over the invader had been thoroughly justified; the triumph which he had predicted had come with a rapidity and completeness even surpassing his hopes. For a moment Alexander identified himself with the statesman who, in the midst of Germany's humiliation, had been so resolute, so far-sighted, so aspiring.  [175] The minister of the peace-party was dismissed: Alexander ordered his troops to advance into Prussia, and charged Stein himself to assume the government of the Prussian districts occupied by Russian armies. Stein's mission was to arm the Landwehr, and to gather all the resources of the country for war against France; his powers were to continue until some definite arrangement should be made between the King of Prussia and the Czar.

[Stein's commission from Alexander.]

[Province of East Prussia arms, Jan., 1813.]

Armed with this commission from a foreign sovereign, Stein appeared at Königsberg on the 22nd of January, 1813, and published an order requiring the governor of the province of East Prussia to convoke an assembly for the purpose of arming the people. Stein would have desired York to appear as President of the Assembly; but York, like most of the Prussian officials, was alarmed and indignant at Stein's assumption of power in Prussia as the representative of the Russian Czar, and hesitated to connect himself with so revolutionary a measure as the arming of the people. It was only upon condition that Stein himself should not appear in the Assembly that York consented to recognise its powers. The Assembly met. York entered the house, and spoke a few soul-stirring words. His undisguised declaration of war with France was received with enthusiastic cheers. A plan for the formation of a Landwehr, based on Scharnhorst's plans of 1808, was laid before the Assembly, and accepted. Forty thousand men were called to arms in a province which included nothing west of the Vistula. The nation itself had begun the war, and left its Government no choice but to follow. Stein's task was fulfilled; and he retired to the quarters of Alexander, unwilling to mar by the appearance of foreign intervention the work to which the Prussian nation had now committed itself beyond power of recall. It was the fortune of the Prussian State, while its King dissembled before the French in Berlin, to possess a soldier brave enough to emancipate its army, and a citizen bold enough to usurp the government of its provinces. Frederick William forgave York his intrepidity; Stein's action was never forgiven by the timid and jealous sovereign whose subjects he had summoned to arm themselves for their country's deliverance.

[Policy of Hardenberg.]

[Treaty of Kalisch, Feb. 27.]

The Government of Berlin, which since the beginning of the Revolutionary War had neither been able to fight, nor to deceive, nor to be honest, was at length forced by circumstances into a certain effectiveness in all three forms of action. In the interval between the first tidings of Napoleon's disasters and the announcement of York's convention with the Russians, Hardenberg had been assuring Napoleon of his devotion, and collecting troops which he carefully prevented from joining him.  [176] The desire of the King was to gain concessions without taking part in the war either against Napoleon or on his side. When, however, the balance turned more decidedly against Napoleon, he grew bolder; and the news of York's defection, though it seriously embarrassed the Cabinet for the moment, practically decided it in favour of war with France. The messenger who was sent to remove York from his command received private instructions to fall into the hands of the Russians, and to inform the Czar that, if his troops advanced as far as the Oder, King Frederick William would be ready to conclude an alliance. Every post that arrived from East Prussia strengthened the warlike resolutions of the Government. At length the King ventured on the decisive step of quitting Berlin and placing himself at Breslau (Jan. 25). At Berlin he was in the power of the French; at Breslau he was within easy reach of Alexander. The significance of the journey could not be mistaken: it was immediately followed by open preparation for war with France. On February 3rd there appeared an edict inviting volunteers to enrol themselves: a week later all exemptions from military service were abolished, and the entire male population of Prussia between the ages of seventeen and twenty-four was declared liable to serve. General Knesebeck was sent to the headquarters of the Czar, which were now between Warsaw and Kalisch, to conclude a treaty of alliance. Knesebeck demanded securities for the restoration to Prussia of all the Polish territory which it had possessed before 1806; the Czar, unwilling either to grant this condition or to lose the Prussian alliance, kept Knesebeck at his quarters, and sent Stein with a Russian plenipotentiary to Breslau to conclude the treaty with Hardenberg himself. Stein and Hardenberg met at Breslau on the 26th of February. Hardenberg accepted the Czar's terms, and the treaty, known as the Treaty of Kalisch,  [177] was signed on the following day. By this treaty, without guaranteeing the restoration of Prussian Poland, Russia undertook not to lay down its arms until the Prussian State as a whole was restored to the area and strength which it had possessed before 1806. For this purpose annexations were promised in Northern Germany. With regard to Poland, Russia promised no more than to permit Prussia to retain what it had received in 1772, together with a strip of territory to connect this district with Silesia. The meaning of the agreement was that Prussia should abandon to Russia the greater part of its late Polish provinces, and receive an equivalent German territory in its stead. The Treaty of Kalisch virtually surrendered to the Czar all that Prussia had gained in the partitions of Poland made in 1793 and in 1795. The sacrifice was deemed a most severe one by every Prussian politician, and was accepted only as a less evil than the loss of Russia's friendship, and a renewed submission to Napoleon. No single statesman, not even Stein himself, appears to have understood that in exchanging its Polish conquests for German annexations, in turning to the German west instead of to the alien Slavonic east, Prussia was in fact taking the very step which made it the possible head of a future united Germany.

[French retreat to the Elbe.]

War was still undeclared upon Napoleon by King Frederick William, but throughout the month of February the light cavalry of the Russians pushed forward unhindered through Prussian territory towards the Oder, and crowds of volunteers, marching through Berlin on their way to the camps in Silesia, gave the French clear signs of the storm that was about to burst upon them.[178] The remnant of Napoleon's army, now commanded by Eugene Beauharnais, had fallen back step by step to the Oder. Here, resting on the fortresses, it might probably have checked the Russian advance; but the heart of Eugene failed; the line of the Oder was abandoned, and the retreat continued to Berlin and the Elbe. The Cossacks followed. On the 20th of February they actually entered Berlin and fought with the French in the streets. The French garrison was far superior in force; but the appearance of the Cossacks caused such a ferment that, although the alliance between France and Prussia was still in nominal existence, the French troops expected to be cut to pieces by the people. For some days they continued to bivouac in the streets, and as soon as it became known that a regular Russian force had reached the Oder, Eugene determined to evacuate Berlin. On the 4th of March the last French soldier quitted the Prussian capital. The Cossacks rode through the town as the French left it, and fought with their rear-guard. Some days later Witgenstein appeared with Russian infantry. On March 17th York made his triumphal entry at the head of his corps, himself cold and rigid in the midst of tumultuous outbursts of patriotic joy.

[King of Prussia declares war March 17.]

It was on this same day that King Frederick William issued his proclamation to the Prussian people, declaring that war had begun with France, and summoning the nation to enter upon the struggle as one that must end either in victory or in total destruction. The proclamation was such as became a monarch conscious that his own faint-heartedness had been the principal cause of Prussia's humiliation. It was simple and unboastful, admitting that the King had made every effort to preserve the French alliance, and ascribing the necessity for war to the intolerable wrongs inflicted by Napoleon in spite of Prussia's fulfilment of its treaty-obligations. The appeal to the great memories of Prussia's earlier sovereigns, and to the example of Russia, Spain, and all countries which in present or in earlier times had fought for their independence against a stronger foe, was worthy of the truthful and modest tone in which the King spoke of the misfortunes of Prussia under his own rule.

[Spirit of the Prussian nation.]

[Idea of Germany unity.]

But no exhortations were necessary to fire the spirit of the Prussian people. Seven years of suffering and humiliation had done their work. The old apathy of all classes had vanished under the pressure of a bitter sense of wrong. If among the Court party of Berlin and the Conservative landowners there existed a secret dread of the awakening of popular forces, the suspicion could not be now avowed. A movement as penetrating and as universal as that which France had experienced in 1792 swept through the Prussian State. It had required the experience of years of wretchedness, the intrusion of the French soldier upon the peace of the family, the sight of the homestead swept bare of its stock to supply the invaders of Russia, the memory of Schill's companions shot in cold blood for the cause of the Fatherland, before the Prussian nation caught that flame which had spontaneously burst out in France, in Spain, and in Russia at the first shock of foreign aggression. But the passion of the Prussian people, if it had taken long to kindle, was deep, steadfast, and rational. It was undisgraced by the frenzies of 1792, or by the religious fanaticism of the Spanish war of liberation; where religion entered into the struggle, it heightened the spirit of self-sacrifice rather than that of hatred to the enemy. Nor was it a thing of small moment to the future of Europe that in every leading mind the cause of Prussia was identified with the cause of the whole German race. The actual condition of Germany warranted no such conclusion, for Saxony, Bavaria, and the whole of the Rhenish Federation still followed Napoleon: but the spirit and the ideas which became a living force when at length the contest with Napoleon broke out were those of men like Stein, who in the depths of Germany's humiliation had created the bright and noble image of a common Fatherland. It was no more given to Stein to see his hopes fulfilled than it was given to Mirabeau to establish constitutional liberty in France, or to the Italian patriots of 1797 to create a united Italy. A group of States where kings like Frederick William and Francis, ministers like Hardenberg and Metternich, governed millions of people totally destitute of political instincts and training, was not to be suddenly transformed into a free nation by the genius of an individual or the patriotism of a single epoch. But if the work of German union was one which, even in the barren form of military empire, required the efforts of two more generations, the ideals of 1813 were no transient and ineffective fancy. Time was on the side of those who called the Prussian monarchy the true centre round which Germany could gather. If in the sequel Prussia was slow to recognise its own opportunities, the fault was less with patriots who hoped too much than with kings and ministers who dared too little.

[Formation of the Landwehr.]

For the moment, the measures of the Prussian Government were worthy of the spirit shown by the nation. Scharnhorst's military system had given Prussia 100,000 trained soldiers ready to join the existing army of 45,000. The scheme for the formation of a Landwehr, though not yet carried into effect, needed only to receive the sanction of the King. On the same day that Frederick William issued his proclamation to the people, he decreed the formation of the Landwehr and the Landsturm. The latter force, which was intended in case of necessity to imitate the peasant warfare of Spain and La Vendée, had no occasion to act: the Landwehr, though its arming was delayed by the poverty and exhaustion of the country, gradually became a most formidable reserve, and sent its battalions to fight by the side of the regulars in some of the greatest engagements in the war. It was the want of arms and money, not of willing soldiers, that prevented Prussia from instantly attacking Napoleon with 200,000 men. The conscription was scarcely needed from the immense number of volunteers who joined the ranks. Though the completion of the Prussian armaments required some months more, Prussia did not need to stand upon the defensive. An army of 50,000 men was ready to cross the Elbe immediately on the arrival of the Russians, and to open the next campaign in the territory of Napoleon's allies of the Rhenish Federation.

CHAPTER XI.

The War of Liberation-Blücher crosses the Elbe-Battle of Lützen-The Allies retreat to Silesia-Battle of Bautzen-Armistice-Napoleon intends to intimidate Austria-Mistaken as to the Forces of Austria-Metternich's Policy-Treaty of Reichenbach-Austria offers its Mediation-Congress of Prague-Austria enters the War-Armies and Plans of Napoleon and the Allies-Campaign of August-Battles of Dresden, Grosbeeren, the Katzbach, and Kulm-Effect of these Actions-Battle of Dennewitz-German Policy of Austria favourable to the Princes of the Rhenish Confederacy-Frustrated Hopes of German Unity-Battle of Leipzig-The Allies reach the Rhine- Offers of Peace at Frankfort-Plan of Invasion of France-Backwardness of Austria-The Allies enter France-Campaign of 1814-Congress of Châtillon- Napoleon moves to the rear of the Allies-The Allies advance on Paris- Capitulation of Paris-Entry of the Allies-Dethronement of Napoleon- Restoration of the Bourbons-The Charta-Treaty of Paris-Territorial Effects of the War, 1792-1814-Every Power except France had gained-France relatively weaker in Europe-Summary of the Permanent Effects of this Period on Europe.

[Napoleon in 1813.]

The first three months of the year 1813 were spent by Napoleon in vigorous preparation for a campaign in Northern Germany. Immediately after receiving the news of York's convention with the Russians he had ordered a levy of 350,000 men. It was in vain that Frederick William and Hardenberg affected to disavow the general as a traitor; Napoleon divined the national character of York's act, and laid his account for a war against the combined forces of Prussia and Russia. In spite of the catastrophe of the last campaign, Napoleon was still stronger than his enemies. Italy and the Rhenish Federation had never wavered in their allegiance; Austria, though a cold ally, had at least shown no signs of hostility. The resources of an empire of forty million inhabitants were still at Napoleon's command. It was in the youth and inexperience of the new soldiers, and in the scarcity of good officers,  [179] that the losses of the previous year showed their most visible effect. Lads of seventeen, commanded in great part by officers who had never been through a campaign, took the place of the soldiers who had fought at Friedland and Wagram. They were as brave as their predecessors, but they failed in bodily strength and endurance. Against them came the remnant of the men who had pursued Napoleon from Moscow, and a Prussian army which was but the vanguard of an armed nation. Nevertheless, Napoleon had no cause to expect defeat, provided that Austria remained on his side. Though the Prussian nation entered upon the conflict in the most determined spirit, a war on the Elbe against Russia and Prussia combined was a less desperate venture than a war with Russia alone beyond the Niemen.

[Blücher crosses the Elbe, March, 1813.]

When King Frederick William published his declaration of war (March 17), the army of Eugène had already fallen back as far west as Magdeburg, leaving garrisons in most of the fortresses between the Elbe and the Russian frontier. Napoleon was massing troops on the Main, and preparing for an advance in force, when the Prussians, commanded by Blücher, and some weak divisions of the Russian army, pushed forward to the Elbe. On the 18th of March the Cossacks appeared in the suburbs of Dresden, on the right bank of the river. Davoust, who was in command of the French garrison, blew up two arches of the bridge, and retired to Magdeburg: Blücher soon afterwards entered Dresden, and called upon the Saxon nation to rise against Napoleon. But he spoke to deaf ears. The common people were indifferent; the officials waited to see which side would conquer. Blücher could scarcely obtain provisions for his army; he passed on westwards, and came into the neighbourhood of Leipzig. Here he found himself forced to halt, and to wait for his allies. Though a detachment of the Russian army under Witgenstein had already crossed the Elbe, the main army, with Kutusoff, was still lingering at Kalisch on the Polish frontier, where it had arrived six weeks before. As yet the Prussians had only 50,000 men ready for action; until the Russians came up, it was unsafe to advance far beyond the Elbe. Blücher counted every moment lost that kept him from battle: the Russian commander-in-chief, sated with glory and sinking beneath the infirmities of a veteran, could scarcely be induced to sign an order of march. At length Kutusoff's illness placed the command in younger hands. His strength failed him during the march from Poland; he was left dying in Silesia; and on the 24th of April the Czar and the King of Prussia led forward his veteran troops into Dresden.

[Napoleon enters Dresden, May 14.]

[Battle of Lützen, May 2.]

Napoleon was now known to be approaching with considerable force by the roads of the Saale. A pitched battle west of the Elbe was necessary before the Allies could hope to win over any of the States of the Rhenish Confederacy; the flat country beyond Leipzig offered the best possible field for cavalry, in which the Allies were strong and Napoleon extremely deficient. It was accordingly determined to unite all the divisions of the army with Blücher on the west of Leipzig, and to attack the French as soon as they descended from the hilly country of the Saale, and began their march across the Saxon plain. The Allies took post at Lützen: the French advanced, and at midday on the 2nd of May the battle of Lützen began. Till evening, victory inclined to the Allies. The Prussian soldiery fought with the utmost spirit; for the first time in Napoleon's campaigns, the French infantry proved weaker than an enemy when fighting against them in equal numbers. But the generalship of Napoleon turned the scale. Seventy thousand of the French were thrown upon fifty thousand of the Allies; the battle was fought in village streets and gardens, where cavalry were useless; and at the close of the day, though the losses on each side were equal, the Allies were forced from the positions which they had gained. Such a result was equivalent to a lost battle. Napoleon's junction with the army of Eugène at Magdeburg was now inevitable, unless a second engagement was fought and won. No course remained to the Allies but to stake everything upon a renewed attack, or to retire behind the Elbe and meet the reinforcements assembling in Silesia. King Frederick William declared for a second battle;  [180] he was over-ruled, and the retreat commenced. Napoleon entered Dresden on May 14th. No attempt was made by the Allies to hold the line of the Elbe; all the sanguine hopes with which Blücher and his comrades had advanced to attack Napoleon within the borders of the Rhenish Confederacy were dashed to the ground. The Fatherland remained divided against itself. Saxony and the rest of the vassal States were secured to France by the victory of Lützen; the liberation of Germany was only to be wrought by prolonged and obstinate warfare, and by the wholesale sacrifice of Prussian life.

[Armistice, June 4.]

[Battle of Bautzen, May 21.]

It was with deep disappointment, but not with any wavering of purpose, that the allied generals fell back before Napoleon towards the Silesian fortresses. The Prussian troops which had hitherto taken part in the war were not the third part of those which the Government was arming; new Russian divisions were on the march from Poland. As the Allies moved eastwards from the Elbe, both their own forces and those of Napoleon gathered strength. The retreat stopped at Bautzen, on the river Spree; and here, on the 19th of May, 90,000 of the Allies and the same number of the French drew up in order of battle. The Allies held a long, broken chain of hills behind the river, and the ground lying between these hills and the village of Bautzen. On the 20th the French began the attack, and won the passage of the river. In spite of the approach of Ney with 40,000 more troops, the Czar and the King of Prussia determined to continue the battle on the following day. The struggle of the 21st was of the same obstinate and indecisive character as that at Lützen. Twenty-five thousand French had been killed or wounded before the day was over, but the bad generalship of the Allies had again given Napoleon the victory. The Prussian and Russian commanders were all at variance; Alexander, who had to decide in their contentions, possessed no real military faculty. It was not for want of brave fighting and steadfastness before the enemy that Bautzen was lost. The Allies retreated in perfect order, and without the loss of a single gun. Napoleon followed, forcing his wearied regiments to ceaseless exertion, in the hope of ruining by pursuit an enemy whom he could not overthrow in battle. In a few more days the discord of the allied generals and the sufferings of the troops would probably have made them unable to resist Napoleon's army, weakened as it was. But the conqueror himself halted in the moment of victory. On the 4th of June an armistice of seven weeks arrested the pursuit, and brought the first act of the War of Liberation to a close.

[Napoleon and Austria.]

Napoleon's motive for granting this interval to his enemies, the most fatal step in his whole career, has been vaguely sought among the general reasons for military delay; as a matter of fact, Napoleon was thinking neither of the condition of his own army nor of that of the Allies when he broke off hostilities, but of the probable action of the Court of Vienna.  [181] "I shall grant a truce," he wrote to the Viceroy of Italy (June 2, 1813), "on account of the armaments of Austria, and in order to gain time to bring up the Italian army to Laibach to threaten Vienna." Austria had indeed resolved to regain, either by war or negotiation, the provinces which it had lost in 1809. It was now preparing to offer its mediation, but it was also preparing to join the Allies in case Napoleon rejected its demands. Metternich was anxious to attain his object, if possible, without war. The Austrian State was bankrupt; its army had greatly deteriorated since 1809; Metternich himself dreaded both the ambition of Russia and what he considered the revolutionary schemes of the German patriots. It was his object not to drive Napoleon from his throne, but to establish a European system in which neither France nor Russia should be absolutely dominant. Soon after the retreat from Moscow the Cabinet of Vienna had informed Napoleon, though in the most friendly terms, that Austria could not longer remain in the position of a dependent ally.  [182] Metternich stated, and not insincerely, that by certain concessions Napoleon might still count on Austria's friendship; but at the same time he negotiated with the allied Powers, and encouraged them to believe that Austria would, under certain circumstances, strike on their behalf. The course of the campaign of May was singularly favourable to Metternich's policy. Napoleon had not won a decided victory; the Allies, on the other hand, were so far from success that Austria could set almost any price it pleased upon its alliance. By the beginning of June it had become a settled matter in the Austrian Cabinet that Napoleon must be made to resign the Illyrian Provinces conquered in 1809 and the districts of North Germany annexed in 1810; but it was still the hope of the Government to obtain this result by peaceful means. Napoleon saw that Austria was about to change its attitude, but he had by no means penetrated the real intentions of Metternich. He credited the Viennese Government with a stronger sentiment of hostility towards himself than it actually possessed; at the same time he failed to appreciate the fixed and settled character of its purpose. He believed that the action of Austria would depend simply upon the means which he possessed to intimidate it; that, if the army of Italy were absent, Austria would attack him; that, on the other hand, if he could gain time to bring the army of Italy into Carniola, Austria would keep the peace. It was with this belief, and solely for the purpose of bringing up a force to menace Austria, that Napoleon stayed his hand against the Prussian and Russian armies after the battle of Bautzen, and gave time for the gathering of the immense forces which were destined to effect his destruction.

[Metternich offers Austria's mediation.]

Immediately after the conclusion of the armistice of June 4th, Metternich invited Napoleon to accept Austria's mediation for a general peace. The settlement which Metternich contemplated was a very different one from that on which Stein and the Prussian patriots had set their hopes. Austria was willing to leave to Napoleon the whole of Italy and Holland, the frontier of the Rhine, and the Protectorate of Western Germany: all that was required by Metternich, as arbiter of Europe, was the restoration of the provinces taken from Austria after the war of 1809, the reinstatement of Prussia in Western Poland, and the abandonment by France of the North-German district annexed in 1810. But to Napoleon the greater or less extent of the concessions asked by Austria was a matter of no moment. He was determined to make no concessions at all, and he entered into negotiations only for the purpose of disguising from Austria the real object with which he had granted the armistice. While Napoleon affected to be weighing the proposals of Austria, he was in fact calculating the number of marches which would place the Italian army on the Austrian frontier; this once effected, he expected to hear nothing more of Metternich's demands.

[Napoleon deceived as to the forces of Austria.]

It was a game of deceit; but there was no one who was so thoroughly deceived as Napoleon himself. By some extraordinary miscalculation on the part of his secret agents, he was led to believe that the whole force of Austria, both in the north and the south, amounted to only 100,000 men,  [183] and it was on this estimate that he had formed his plans of intimidation. In reality Austria had double that number of men ready to take the field. By degrees Napoleon saw reason to suspect himself in error. On the 11th of July he wrote to his Foreign Minister, Maret, bitterly reproaching him with the failure of the secret service to gain any trustworthy information. It was not too late to accept Metternich's terms. Yet even now, when the design of intimidating Austria had proved an utter delusion, and Napoleon was convinced that Austria would fight, and fight with very powerful forces, his pride and his invincible belief in his own superiority prevented him from drawing back. He made an attempt to enter upon a separate negotiation with Russia, and, when this failed, he resolved to face the conflict with the whole of Europe.

[Treaty of Reichenbach, June 27.]

There was no longer any uncertainty among Napoleon's enemies. On the 27th of June, Austria had signed a treaty at Reichenbach, pledging itself to join the allied Powers in the event of Napoleon rejecting the conditions to be proposed by Austria as mediator; and the conditions so to be proposed were fixed by the same treaty. They were the following:-The suppression of the Duchy of Warsaw; the restoration to Austria of the Illyrian Provinces; and the surrender by Napoleon of the North-German district annexed to his Empire in 1810. Terms more hostile to France than these Austria declined to embody in its mediation. The Elbe might still sever Prussia from its German provinces lost in 1807; Napoleon might still retain, as chief of the Rhenish Confederacy, his sovereignty over the greater part of the German race.

[Austria enters the war, Aug. 10.]

[Congress of Prague, July 15-Aug. 10.]

From the moment when these conditions were fixed, there was nothing which the Prussian generals so much dreaded as that Napoleon might accept them, and so rob the Allies of the chance of crushing him by means of Austria's support. But their fears were groundless. The counsels of Napoleon were exactly those which his worst enemies would have desired him to adopt. War, and nothing but war, was his fixed resolve. He affected to entertain Austria's propositions, and sent his envoy Caulaincourt to a Congress which Austria summoned at Prague; but it was only for the purpose of gaining a few more weeks of preparation. The Congress met; the armistice was prolonged to the 10th of August. Caulaincourt, however, was given no power to close with Austria's demands. He was ignorant that he had only been sent to Prague in order to gain time. He saw the storm gathering: unable to believe that Napoleon intended to fight all Europe rather than make the concessions demanded of him, he imagined that his master still felt some doubt whether Austria and the other Powers meant to adhere to their word. As the day drew nigh which closed the armistice and the period given for a reply to Austria's ultimatum, Caulaincourt implored Napoleon not to deceive himself with hopes that Austria would draw back. Napoleon had no such hope; he knew well that Austria would declare war, and he accepted the issue. Caulaincourt heard nothing more. At midnight on the 10th of August the Congress declared itself dissolved. Before the dawn of the next morning the army in Silesia saw the blaze of the beacon-fires which told that negotiation was at an end, and that Austria was entering the war on the side of the Allies.  [184]

[Armies of Napoleon and the Allies.]

Seven days' notice was necessary before the commencement of actual hostilities. Napoleon, himself stationed at Dresden, held all the lower course of the Elbe; and his generals had long had orders to be ready to march on the morning of the 18th. Forces had come up from all parts of the Empire, raising the French army at the front to 300,000 men; but, for the first time in Napoleon's career, his enemies had won from a pause in war results even surpassing his own. The strength of the Prussian and Russian armies was now enormously different from what it had been at Lützen and Bautzen. The Prussian Landwehr, then a weaponless and ill-clad militia drilling in the villages, was now fully armed, and in great part at the front. New Russian divisions had reached Silesia. Austria took the field with a force as numerous as that which had checked Napoleon in 1809. At the close of the armistice, 350,000 men actually faced the French positions upon the Elbe; 300,000 more were on the march, or watching the German fortresses and the frontier of Italy. The allied troops operating against Napoleon were divided into three armies. In the north, between Wittenberg and Berlin, Bernadotte commanded 60,000 Russians and Prussians, in addition to his own Swedish contingent. Blücher was placed at the head of 100,000 Russians and Prussians in Silesia. The Austrians remained undivided, and formed, together with some Russian and Prussian divisions, the great army of Bohemia, 200,000 strong, under the command of Schwarzenberg. The plan of the campaign had been agreed upon by the Allies soon after the Treaty of Reichenbach had been made with Austria. It was a sound, though not a daring one.

[Plan of the Allies.]

The three armies, now forming an arc from Wittenberg to the north of Bohemia, were to converge upon the line of Napoleon's communications behind Dresden; if separately attacked, their generals were to avoid all hazardous engagements, and to manoeuvre so as to weary the enemy and preserve their own general relations, as far as possible, unchanged. Blücher, as the most exposed, was expected to content himself the longest with the defensive; the great army of Bohemia, after securing the mountain-passes between Bohemia and Saxony, might safely turn Napoleon's position at Dresden, and so draw the two weaker armies towards it for one vast and combined engagement in the plain of Leipzig.

[Napoleon's plan of attack.]

In outline, the plan of the Allies was that which Napoleon expected them to adopt. His own design was to anticipate it by an offensive of extraordinary suddenness and effect. Hostilities could not begin before the morning of the 18th of August; by the 21st or the 22nd, Napoleon calculated that he should have captured Berlin. Oudinot, who was at Wittenberg with 80,000 men, had received orders to advance upon the Prussian capital at the moment that the armistice expired, and to force it, if necessary by bombardment, into immediate surrender. The effect of this blow, as Napoleon supposed, would be to disperse the entire reserve-force of the Prussian monarchy, and paralyse the action of its army in the field. While Oudinot marched on Berlin, Blücher was to be attacked in Silesia, and prevented from rendering any assistance either on the north or on the south. The mass of Napoleon's forces, centred at Dresden, and keeping watch upon the movements of the army of Bohemia, would either fight a great battle, or, if the Allies made a false movement, march straight upon Prague, the centre of Austria's supplies, and reach it before the enemy. All the daring imagination of Napoleon's earlier campaigns displayed itself in such a project, which, if successful, would have terminated the war within ten days; but this imagination was no longer, as in those earlier campaigns, identical with insight into real possibilities. The success of Napoleon's plan involved the surprise or total defeat of Bernadotte before Berlin, the disablement of Blücher, and a victory, or a strategical success equivalent to a victory, over the vast army of the south. It demanded of a soldiery, inferior to the enemy in numerical strength, the personal superiority which had belonged to the men of Jena and Austerlitz, when in fact the French regiments of conscripts had ceased to be a match for equal numbers of the enemy. But no experience could alter Napoleon's fixed belief in the fatuity of all warfare except his own. After the havoc of Borodino, after the even struggles of Lützen and Bautzen, he still reasoned as if he had before him the armies of Brunswick and Mack. His plan assumed the certainty of success in each of its parts; for the failure of a single operation hazarded all the rest, by requiring the transfer of reinforcements from armies already too weak for the tasks assigned to them. Nevertheless, the utmost that Napoleon would acknowledge was that the execution of his design needed energy. He still underrated the force which Austria had brought into the field against him. Though ignorant of the real position and strength of the army in Bohemia, and compelled to wait for the enemy's movements before striking on this side, he already in imagination saw the war decided by the fall of the Prussian capital.

[Triple movement, Aug. 18-26.]

[Battle of Dresden, Aug. 26, 27.]

[Battles of Grossbeeren, Aug. 23, and the Katzbach, Aug. 26.]

On the 18th of August the forward movement began. Oudinot advanced from Wittenberg towards Berlin; Napoleon himself hurried into Silesia, intending to deal Blücher one heavy blow, and instantly to return and place himself before Schwarzenberg. On the 21st, and following days, the Prussian general was attacked and driven eastwards. Napoleon committed the pursuit to Macdonald, and hastened back to Dresden, already threatened by the advance of the Austrians from Bohemia. Schwarzenberg and the allied sovereigns, as soon as they heard that Napoleon had gone to seek Blücher in Silesia, had in fact abandoned their cautious plans, and determined to make an assault upon Dresden with the Bohemian army alone. But it was in vain that they tried to surprise Napoleon. He was back at Dresden on the 25th, and ready for the attack. Never were Napoleon's hopes higher than on this day. His success in Silesia had filled him with confidence. He imagined Oudinot to be already in Berlin; and the advance of Schwarzenberg against Dresden gave him the very opportunity which he desired for crushing the Bohemian army in one great battle, before it could draw support either from Blücher or from Bernadotte. Another Austerlitz seemed to be at hand. Napoleon wrote to Paris that he should be in Prague before the enemy; and, while he completed his defences in front of Dresden, he ordered Vandamme, with 40,000 men, to cross the Elbe at Königstein, and force his way south-westwards on to the roads into Bohemia, in the rear of the Great Army, in order to destroy its magazines and menace its line of retreat on Prague. On August 26th Schwarzenberg's host assailed the positions of Napoleon on the slopes and gardens outside Dresden. Austrians, Russians, and Prussians all took part in the attack. Moreau, the victor of Hohenlinden, stood by the side of the Emperor Alexander, whom he had come to help against his own countrymen. He lived only to witness one of the last and greatest victories of France. The attack was everywhere repelled: the Austrian divisions were not only beaten, but disgraced and overthrown. At the end of two days' fighting the Allies were in full retreat, leaving 20,000 prisoners in the hands of Napoleon. It was a moment when the hearts of the bravest sank, and when hope itself might well vanish, as the rumour passed through the Prussian regiments that Metternich was again in friendly communication with Napoleon. But in the midst of Napoleon's triumph intelligence arrived which robbed it of all its worth. Oudinot, instead of conquering Berlin, had been defeated by the Prussians of Bernadotte's army at Grossbeeren (Aug. 23), and driven back upon the Elbe. Blücher had turned upon Macdonald in Silesia, and completely overthrown his army on the river Katzbach, at the very moment when the Allies were making their assault upon Dresden. It was vain to think of a march upon Prague, or of the annihilation of the Austrians, when on the north and the east Napoleon's troops were meeting with nothing but disaster. The divisions which had been intended to support Vandamme's movement from Königstein upon the rear of the Great Army were retained in the neighbourhood of Dresden, in order to be within reach of the points where their aid might be needed. Vandamme, ignorant of his isolation, was left with scarcely 40,000 men to encounter the Great Army in its retreat.

[Battle of Kulm, Aug. 29, 30.]

He threw himself upon a Russian corps at Kulm, in the Bohemian mountains, on the morning of the 29th. The Russians, at first few in number, held their ground during the day; in the night, and after the battle had recommenced on the morrow, vast masses of the allied troops poured in. The French fought desperately, but were overwhelmed. Vandamme himself was made prisoner, with 10,000 of his men. The whole of the stores and most of the cannon of his army remained in the enemy's hands.

[Effect of the twelve days, Aug. 18-30.]

[Battle of Dennewitz, Sept. 6.]

The victory at Kulm secured the Bohemian army from pursuit, and almost extinguished the effects of its defeat at Dresden. Thanks to the successes of Blücher and of Bernadotte's Prussian generals, which prevented Napoleon from throwing all his forces on to the rear of the Great Army, Schwarzenberg's rash attack had proved of no worse significance than an unsuccessful raid. The Austrians were again in the situation assigned to them in the original plan of the campaign, and capable of resuming their advance into the interior of Saxony: Blücher and the northern commanders had not only escaped separate destruction, but won great victories over the French: Napoleon, weakened by the loss of 100,000 men, remained exactly where he had been at the beginning of the campaign. Had the triple movement by which he meant to overwhelm his adversaries been capable of execution, it would now have been fully executed. The balance, however, had turned against Napoleon; and the twelve days from the 18th to the 29th of August, though marked by no catastrophe like Leipzig or Waterloo, were in fact the decisive period in the struggle of Europe against Napoleon. The attack by which he intended to prevent the junction of the three armies had been made, and had failed. Nothing now remained for him but to repeat the same movements with a discouraged force against an emboldened enemy, or to quit the line of the Elbe, and prepare for one vast and decisive encounter with all three armies combined. Napoleon drove from his mind the thought of failure; he ordered Ney to take command of Oudinot's army, and to lead it again, in increased strength, upon Berlin; he himself hastened to Macdonald's beaten troops in Silesia, and rallied them for a new assault upon Blücher. All was in vain. Ney, advancing on Berlin, was met by the Prussian general Billow at Dennewitz, and totally routed (Sept. 6): Blücher, finding that Napoleon himself was before him, skilfully avoided battle, and forced his adversary to waste in fruitless marches the brief interval which he had snatched from his watch on Schwarzenberg. Each conflict with the enemy, each vain and exhausting march, told that the superiority had passed from the French to their foes, and that Napoleon's retreat was now only a matter of time. "These creatures have learnt something," said Napoleon in the bitterness of his heart, as he saw the columns of Blücher manoeuvring out of his grasp. Ney's report of his own overthrow at Dennewitz sounded like an omen of the ruin of Waterloo. "I have been totally defeated," he wrote, "and do not yet know whether my army has re-assembled. The spirit of the generals and officers is shattered. To command in such conditions is but half to command. I had rather be a common grenadier."

[Metternich.]

[German policy of Stein and of Austria.]

The accession of Austria had turned the scale in favour of the Allies; it rested only with the allied generals themselves to terminate the warfare round Dresden, and to lead their armies into the heart of Saxony. For a while the course of the war flagged, and military interests gave place to political. It was in the interval between the first great battles and the final advance on Leipzig that the future of Germany was fixed by the three allied Powers. In the excitement of the last twelve months little thought had been given, except by Stein and his friends, to the political form to be set in the place of the Napoleonic Federation of the Rhine. Stein, in the midst of the Russian campaign, had hoped for a universal rising of the German people against Napoleon, and had proposed the dethronement of all the German princes who supported his cause. His policy had received the general approval of Alexander, and, on the entrance of the Russian army into Germany, a manifesto had been issued appealing to the whole German nation, and warning the vassals of Napoleon that they could only save themselves by submission.  [185] A committee had been appointed by the allied sovereigns, under the presidency of Stein himself, to administer the revenues of all Confederate territory that should be occupied by the allied armies. Whether the reigning Houses should be actually expelled might remain in uncertainty; but it was the fixed hope of Stein and his friends that those princes who were permitted to retain their thrones would be permitted to retain them only as officers in a great German Empire, without sovereign rights either over their own subjects or in relation to foreign States. The Kings of Bavaria and Würtemberg had gained their titles and much of their despotic power at home from Napoleon; their independence of the Head of Germany had made them nothing more than the instruments of a foreign conqueror. Under whatever form the central authority might be revived, Stein desired that it should be the true and only sovereign Power in Germany, a Power to which every German might appeal against the oppression of a minor Government, and in which the whole nation should find its representative before the rest of Europe. In the face of such a central authority, whether an elected Parliament or an Imperial Council, the minor princes could at best retain but a fragment of their powers; and such was the theory accepted at the allied head-quarters down to the time when Austria proffered its mediation and support. Then everything changed. The views of the Austrian Government upon the future system of Germany were in direct opposition to those of Stein's party. Metternich dreaded the thought of popular agitation, and looked upon Stein, with his idea of a National Parliament and his plans for dethroning the Rhenish princes, as little better than the Jacobins of 1792. The offer of a restored imperial dignity in Germany was declined by the Emperor of Austria at the instance of his Minister. With characteristic sense of present difficulties, and blindness to the great forces which really contained their solution, Metternich argued that the minor princes would only be driven into the arms of the foreigner by the establishment of any supreme German Power. They would probably desert Napoleon if the Allies guaranteed to them everything that they at present possessed; they would be freed from all future temptation to attach themselves to France if Austria contented itself with a diplomatic influence and with the ties of a well-constructed system of treaties. In spite of the influence of Stein with the Emperor Alexander, Metternich's views prevailed. Austria had so deliberately kept itself in balance during the first part of the year 1813, that the Allies were now willing to concede everything, both in this matter and in others, in return for its support. Nothing more was heard of the dethronement of the Confederate princes, or even of the limitation of their powers. It was agreed by the Treaty of Teplitz, signed by Prussia, Russia, and Austria on September 9th, that every State of the Rhenish Confederacy should be placed in a position of absolute independence. Negotiations were opened with the King of Bavaria, whose army had steadily fought on the side of Napoleon in every campaign since 1806. Instead of being outlawed as a criminal, he was welcomed as an ally. The Treaty of Ried, signed on the 3rd of October, guaranteed to the King of Bavaria, in return for his desertion of Napoleon, full sovereign rights, and the whole of the territory which he had received from Napoleon, except the Tyrol and the Austrian district on the Inn. What had been accorded to the King of Bavaria could not be refused to the rest of Napoleon's vassals who were willing to make their peace with the Allies in time. Germany was thus left at the mercy of a score of petty Cabinets. It was seen by the patriotic party in Prussia at what price the alliance of Austria had been purchased. Austria had indeed made it possible to conquer Napoleon, but it had also made an end of all prospect of the union of the German nation.

[Allies cross the Elbe, Oct. 3.]

Till the last days of September the position of the hostile armies round Dresden remained little changed, Napoleon unweariedly repeated his attacks, now on one side, now on another, but without result. The Allies on their part seemed rooted to the soil. Bernadotte, balanced between the desire to obtain Norway from the Allies and a foolish hope of being called to the throne of France, was bent on doing the French as little harm as possible; Schwarzenberg, himself an indifferent general, was distracted by the councillors of all the three monarchs; Blücher alone pressed for decided and rapid action. At length the Prussian commander gained permission to march northwards, and unite his army with Bernadotte's in a forward movement across the Elbe. The long-expected Russian reserves, led by Bennigsen, reached the Bohemian mountains; and at the beginning of October the operation began which was to collect the whole of the allied forces in the plain of Leipzig. Blücher forced the passage of the Elbe at Wartenburg. It was not until Napoleon learnt that the army of Silesia had actually crossed the river that he finally quitted Dresden. Then, hastening northwards, he threw himself upon the Prussian general; but Blücher again avoided battle, as he had done in Silesia; and on the 7th of October his army united with Bernadotte's, which had crossed the Elbe two days before.

The enemy was closing in upon Napoleon. Obstinately as he had held on to the line of the Elbe, he could hold on no longer. In the frustration of all his hopes there flashed across his mind the wild project of a march eastwards to the Oder, and the gathering of all the besieged garrisons for a campaign in which the enemy should stand between himself and France; but the dream lasted only long enough to gain a record. Napoleon ventured no more than to send a corps back to the Elbe to threaten Berlin, in the hope of tempting Blücher and Bernadotte to abandon the advance which they had now begun in co-operation with the great army of Schwarzenberg. From the 10th to the 14th of October, Napoleon lingered at Düben, between Dresden and Leipzig, restlessly expecting to hear of Blücher's or Bernadotte's retreat. The only definite information that he could gain was that Schwarzenberg was pressing on towards the west. At length he fell back to Leipzig, believing that Blücher, but not Bernadotte, was advancing to meet Schwarzenberg and take part in a great engagement. As he entered Leipzig on October 14th the cannon of Schwarzenberg was heard on the south.

[Battle of Leipzig. Oct 16-19.]

Napoleon drew up for battle. The number of his troops in position around the city was 170,000: about 15,000 others lay within call. He placed Marmont and Ney on the north of Leipzig at the village of Möckern, to meet the expected onslaught of Blücher; and himself, with the great mass of his army, took post on the south, facing Schwarzenberg. On the morning of the 16th, Schwarzenberg began the attack. His numbers did not exceed 150,000, for the greater part of the Russian army was a march in the rear. The battle was an even one. The Austrians failed to gain ground: with one more army-corps Napoleon saw that he could overpower the enemy. He was still without intelligence of Blücher's actual appearance in the north; and in the rash hope that Blücher's coming might be delayed, he sent orders to Ney and Marmont to leave their positions and hurry to the south to throw themselves upon Schwarzenberg. Ney obeyed. Marmont, when the order reached him, was actually receiving Blücher's first fire. He determined to remain and defend the village of Möckern, though left without support. York, commanding the vanguard of Blücher's army, assailed him with the utmost fury. A third part of the troops engaged on each side were killed or wounded before the day closed; but in the end the victory of the Prussians was complete. It was the only triumph won by the Allies on this first day of the battle, but it turned the scale against Napoleon. Marmont's corps was destroyed; Ney, divided between Napoleon and Marmont, had rendered no effective help to either. Schwarzenberg, saved from a great disaster, needed only to wait for Bernadotte and the Russian reserves, and to renew the battle with an additional force of 100,000 men.

[Storm of Leipzig, 19th. French retreat.]

[Battle of the 18th.]

In the course of the night Napoleon sent proposals for peace. It was in the vain hope of receiving some friendly answer from his father-in-law, the Austrian Emperor, that he delayed making his retreat during the next day, while it might still have been unmolested. No answer was returned to his letter. In the evening of the 17th, Bennigsen's army reached the field of battle. Next morning began that vast and decisive encounter known in the language of Germany as "the battle of the nations," the greatest battle in all authentic history, the culmination of all the military effort of the Napoleonic age. Not less than 300,000 men fought on the side of the Allies; Napoleon's own forces numbered 170,000. The battle raged all round Leipzig, except on the west, where no attempt was made to interpose between Napoleon and the line of his retreat. As in the first engagement, the decisive successes were those of Blücher, now tardily aided by Bernadotte, on the north; Schwarzenberg's divisions, on the south side of the town, fought steadily, but without gaining much ground. But there was no longer any doubt as to the issue of the struggle. If Napoleon could not break the Allies in the first engagement, he had no chance against them now when they had been joined by 100,000 more men. The storm of attack grew wilder and wilder: there were no new forces to call up for the defence. Before the day was half over Napoleon drew in his outer line, and began to make dispositions for a retreat from Leipzig. At evening long trains of wounded from the hospitals passed through the western gates of the city along the road towards the Rhine. In the darkness of night the whole army was withdrawn from its positions, and dense masses poured into the town, until every street was blocked with confused and impenetrable crowds of cavalry and infantry. The leading divisions moved out of the gates before sunrise. As the throng lessened, some degree of order was restored, and the troops which Napoleon intended to cover the retreat took their places under the walls of Leipzig. The Allies advanced to the storm on the morning of the 19th. The French were driven into the town; the victorious enemy pressed on towards the rear of the retreating columns. In the midst of the struggle an explosion was heard above the roar of the battle. The bridge over the Elster, the only outlet from Leipzig to the west, had been blown up by -the mistake of a French soldier before the rear-guard began to cross. The mass of fugitives, driven from the streets of the town, found before them an impassable river. Some swam to the opposite bank or perished in attempting to do so; the rest, to the number of 15,000, laid down their arms. This was the end of the battle. Napoleon had lost in the three days 40,000 killed and wounded, 260 guns, and 30,000 prisoners. The killed and wounded of the Allies reached the enormous sum of 54,000.

[Conditions of peace offered to Napoleon at Frankfort, Nov. 9th.]

[Allies follow Napoleon to the Rhine.]

The campaign was at an end. Napoleon led off a large army, but one that was in no condition to turn upon its pursuers. At each stage in the retreat thousands of fever-stricken wretches were left to terrify even the pursuing army with the dread of their infection. It was only when the French found the road to Frankfort blocked at Hanau by a Bavarian force that they rallied to the order of battle. The Bavarians were cut to pieces; the road was opened; and, a fortnight after the Battle of Leipzig, Napoleon, with the remnant of his great army, re-crossed the Rhine. Behind him the fabric of his Empire fell to the ground. Jerome fled from Westphalia;  [186] the princes of the Rhenish Confederacy came one after another to make their peace with the Allies; Bülow, with the army which had conquered Ney at Dennewitz, marched through the north of Germany to the deliverance of Holland. Three days after Napoleon had crossed the Rhine the Czar reached Frankfort; and here, on the 7th of November, a military council was held, in which Blücher and Gneisenau, against almost all the other generals, advocated an immediate invasion of France. The soldiers, however, had time to re-consider their opinions, for, on the 9th, it was decided by the representatives of the Powers to send an offer of peace to Napoleon, and the operations of the war were suspended by common consent. The condition on which peace was offered to Napoleon was the surrender of the conquests of France beyond the Alps and the Rhine. The Allies were still willing to permit the Emperor to retain Belgium, Savoy, and the Rhenish Provinces; they declined, however, to enter into any negotiation until Napoleon had accepted this basis of peace; and they demanded a distinct reply before the end of the month of November.

[Offer of peace withdrawn, Dec. 1.]

[Plan of invasion of France.]

[Allies enter France, Jan., 1814.]

Napoleon, who had now arrived in Paris, and saw around him all the signs of power, returned indefinite answers. The month ended without the reply which the Allies required; and on the 1st of December the offer of peace was declared to be withdrawn. It was still undecided whether the war should take the form of an actual invasion of France. The memory of Brunswick's campaign of 1792, and of the disasters of the first coalition in 1793, even now exercised a powerful influence over men's minds. Austria was unwilling to drive Napoleon to extremities, or to give to Russia and Prussia the increased influence which they would gain in Europe from the total overthrow of Napoleon's power. It was ultimately determined that the allied armies should enter France, but that the Austrians, instead of crossing the north-eastern frontier, should make a détour by Switzerland, and gain the plateau of Langres in Champagne, from which the rivers Seine, Marne, and Aube, with the roads following their valleys, descend in the direction of the capital. The plateau of Langres was said to be of such strategical importance that its occupation by an invader would immediately force Napoleon to make peace. As a matter of fact, the plateau was of no strategical importance whatever; but the Austrians desired to occupy it, partly with the view of guarding against any attack from the direction of Italy and Lyons, partly from their want of the heavy artillery necessary for besieging the fortresses farther north,  [187] and from a just appreciation of the dangers of a campaign conducted in a hostile country intersected by several rivers. Anything was welcomed by Metternich that seemed likely to avert, or even to postpone, a struggle with Napoleon for life or death. Blücher correctly judged the march through Switzerland to be mere procrastination. He was himself permitted to take the straight road into France, though his movements were retarded in order to keep pace with the cautious steps of Schwarzenberg. On the last day of the year 1813 the Prussian general crossed the Rhine near Coblentz; on the 18th of January, 1814, the Austrian army, having advanced from Switzerland by Belfort and Vesoul, reached its halting-place on the plateau of Langres. Here the march stopped; and here it was expected that terms of peace would be proposed by Napoleon.

[Wellington entering France from the south.]

It was not on the eastern side alone that the invader was now entering France. Wellington had passed the Pyrenees. His last victorious march into the north of Spain began on the day when the Prussian and Russian armies were defeated by Napoleon at Bautzen (May 21, 1813). During the armistice of Dresden, a week before Austria signed the treaty which fixed the conditions of its armed mediation, he had gained an overwhelming triumph at Vittoria over King Joseph and the French army, as it retreated with all the spoils gathered in five years' occupation of Spain (June 21). A series of bloody engagements had given the English the passes of the Pyrenees in those same days of August and September that saw the allied armies close around Napoleon at Dresden; and when, after the catastrophe of Leipzig, the wreck of Napoleon's host was retreating beyond the Rhine, Soult, the defender of the Pyrenees, was driven by the British general from his entrenchments on the Nivelle, and forced back under the walls of Bayonne.

[French armies unable to hold the frontier.]

[Napoleon's plan of defence.]

Twenty years had passed since, in the tempestuous morn of the Revolution, Hoche swept the armies of the first coalition across the Alsatian frontier. Since then, French soldiers had visited every capital, and watered every soil with their blood; but no foreign soldier had set foot on French soil. Now the cruel goads of Napoleon's military glory had spent the nation's strength, and the force no longer existed which could bar the way to its gathered enemies. The armies placed upon the eastern frontier had to fall back before an enemy five times more numerous than themselves. Napoleon had not expected that the Allies would enter France before the spring. With three months given him for organisation, he could have made the frontier-armies strong enough to maintain their actual positions; the winter advance of the Allies compelled him to abandon the border districts of France, and to concentrate his defence in Champagne, between the Marne, the Seine, and the Aube. This district was one which offered extraordinary advantages to a great general acting against an irresolute and ill-commanded enemy. By holding the bridges over the three rivers, and drawing his own supplies along the central road from Paris to Arcis-sur-Aube, Napoleon could securely throw the bulk of his forces from one side to the other against the flank of the Allies, while his own movements were covered by the rivers, which could not be passed except at the bridges. A capable commander at the head of the Allies would have employed the same river-strategy against Napoleon himself, after conquering one or two points of passage by main force; but Napoleon had nothing of the kind to fear from Schwarzenberg; and if the Austrian head-quarters continued to control the movements of the allied armies, it was even now doubtful whether the campaign would close at Paris or on the Rhine.

[Campaign of 1814.]

For some days after the arrival of the monarchs and diplomatists at Langres (Jan. 22), Metternich and the more timorous among the generals opposed any further advance into France, and argued that the army had already gained all it needed by the occupation of the border provinces. It was only upon the threat of the Czar to continue the war by himself that the Austrians consented to move forward upon Paris. After several days had been lost in discussion, the advance from Langres was begun. Orders were given to Blücher, who had pushed back the French divisions commanded by Marmont and Mortier, and who was now near St. Dizier on the Marne, to meet the Great Army at Brienne. This was the situation of the Allies when, on the 25th of January, Napoleon left Paris, and placed himself at Châlons on the Marne, at the head of his left wing, having his right at Troyes and at Arcis, guarding the bridges over the Seine and the Aube. Napoleon knew that Blücher was moving towards the Austrians; he hoped to hold the Prussian general in check at St. Dizier, and to throw himself upon the heads of Schwarzenberg's columns as they moved towards the Aube. Blücher, however, had already passed St. Dizier when Napoleon reached it. Napoleon pursued, and overtook the Prussians at Brienne. After an indecisive battle, Blücher fell back towards Schwarzenberg. The allied armies effected their junction, and Blücher, now supported by the Austrians, turned and marched down the right bank of the Aube to meet Napoleon. Napoleon, though far outnumbered, accepted battle. He was attacked at La Rothière close above Brienne, and defeated with heavy loss (Feb. 1). A vigorous pursuit would probably have ended the war; but the Austrians held back. Schwarzenberg believed peace to be already gained, and condemned all further action as useless waste of life. In spite of the protests of the Emperor Alexander, he allowed Napoleon to retire unmolested. Schwarzenberg's inaction was no mere error in military judgment. There was a direct conflict between the Czar and the Austrian Cabinet as to the end to be obtained by the war. Alexander already insisted on the dethronement of Napoleon; the Austrian Government would have been content to leave Napoleon in power if he would accept a peace giving France no worse a frontier than it had possessed in 1791. Castlereagh, who had come from England, and Hardenberg were as yet inclined to support Metternich's policy, although the whole Prussian army, the public opinion of Great Britain, and the counsels of Stein and all the bolder Prussian statesmen, were on the side of the Czar.  [188]

[Congress of Châtillon, Feb. 5-9.]

Already the influence of the peace-party was so far in the ascendant that negotiations had been opened with Napoleon. Representatives of all the Powers assembled at Châtillon, in Burgundy; and there, towards the end of January, Caulaincourt appeared on behalf of France. The first sitting took place on the 5th of February; on the following day Caulaincourt received full powers from Napoleon to conclude peace. The Allies laid down as the condition of peace the limitation of France to the frontiers of 1791. Had Caulaincourt dared to conclude peace instantly on these terms, Napoleon would have retained his throne; but he was aware that Napoleon had only granted him full powers in consequence of the disastrous battle of La Rothière, and he feared to be disavowed by his master as soon as the army had escaped from danger. Instead of simply accepting the Allies' offer, he raised questions as to the future of Italy and Germany. The moment was lost; on the 9th of February the Czar recalled his envoy from Châtillon, and the sittings of the Congress were broken off.

[Defeats of Blücher on the Marne Feb. 10-14.]

[Montereau, Feb 18.]

[Austrians fall back towards Langres.]

Schwarzenberg was now slowly and unwillingly moving forwards along the Seine towards Troyes. Blücher was permitted to return to the Marne, and to advance upon Paris by an independent line of march. He crossed the country between the Aube and the Marne, and joined some divisions which he had left behind him on the latter river. But his dispositions were outrageously careless: his troops were scattered over a space of sixty miles from Châlons westward, as if he had no enemy to guard against except the weak divisions commanded by Mortier and Marmont, which had uniformly fallen back before his advance. Suddenly Napoleon himself appeared at the centre of the long Prussian line at Champaubert. He had hastened northwards in pursuit of Blücher with 30,000 men, as soon as Schwarzenberg entered Troyes; and on February 10th a weak Russian corps that lay in the centre of Blücher's column was overwhelmed before it was known the Emperor had left the Seine. Then, turning leftwards, Napoleon overthrew the Prussian vanguard at Montmirail, and two days later attacked and defeated Blücher himself, who was bringing up the remainder of his troops in total ignorance of the enemy with whom he had to deal. In four days Blücher's army, which numbered 70,000 men, had thrice been defeated in detail by a force of 30,000. Blücher was compelled to fall back upon Châlons; Napoleon instantly returned to the support of Oudinot's division, which he had left in front of Schwarzenberg. In order to relieve Blücher, the Austrians had pushed forward on the Seine beyond Montereau. Within three days after the battle with Blücher, Napoleon was back upon the Seine, and attacking the heads of the Austrian column. On the 18th of February he gained so decisive a victory at Montereau that Schwarzenberg abandoned the advance, and fell back upon Troyes, sending word to Blücher to come southwards again and help him to fight a great battle. Blücher moved off with admirable energy, and came into the neighbourhood of Troyes within a week after his defeats upon the Marne. But the design of fighting a great battle was given up. The disinclination of the Austrians to vigorous action was too strong to be overcome; and it was finally determined that Schwarzenberg should fall back almost to the plateau of Langres, leaving Blücher to unite with the troops of Bülow which had conquered Holland, and to operate on the enemy's flank and rear.

[Congress of Châtillon resumed, Feb. 17-March 15.]

The effect of Napoleon's sudden victories on the Marne was instantly seen in the councils of the allied sovereigns. Alexander, who had withdrawn his envoy from Châtillon, could no longer hold out against negotiations with Napoleon. He restored the powers of his envoy, and the Congress re-assembled. But Napoleon already saw himself in imagination driving the invaders beyond the Rhine, and sent orders to Caulaincourt to insist upon the terms proposed at Frankfort, which left to France both the Rhenish Provinces and Belgium. At the same time he attempted to open a private negotiation with his father-in-law the Emperor of Austria, and to detach him from the cause of the Allies. The attempt failed; the demands now made by Caulaincourt overcame even the peaceful inclinations of the Austrian Minister; and on the 1st of March the Allies signed a new treaty at Chaumont, pledging themselves to conclude no peace with Napoleon that did not restore the frontier of 1791, and to maintain a defensive alliance against France for a period of twenty years.  [189] Caulaincourt continued for another fortnight at Châtillon, instructed by Napoleon to prolong the negotiations, but forbidden to accept the only conditions which the Allies were willing to grant.

[Napoleon follows Blücher to the north. Battle of Laon, March 10.]

Blücher was now on his way northwards to join the so-called army of Bernadotte upon the Aisne. Since the Battle of Leipzig, Bernadotte himself had taken no part in the movements of the army nominally under his command. The Netherlands had been conquered by Bülow and the Russian general Winzingerode, and these officers were now pushing southwards in order to take part with Blücher in a movement against Paris. Napoleon calculated that the fortress of Soissons would bar the way to the northern army, and enable him to attack and crush Blücher before he could effect a junction with his colleagues. He set out in pursuit of the Prussians, still hoping for a second series of victories like those he had won upon the Marne. But the cowardice of the commander of Soissons ruined his chances of success. The fortress surrendered to the Russians at the first summons. Blücher met the advanced guard of the northern army upon the Aisne on the 4th of March, and continued his march towards Laon for the purpose of uniting with its divisions which lay in the rear. The French followed, but the only advantage gained by Napoleon was a victory over a detached Russian corps at Craonne. Marmont was defeated with heavy loss by a sally of Blücher from his strong position on the hill of Laon (March 10); and the Emperor himself, unable to restore the fortune of the battle, fell back upon Soissons, and thence marched southward to throw himself again upon the line of the southern army.

[Napoleon marches to the rear of the Allies, March 23.]

[The Allies advance on Paris.]

Schwarzenberg had once more begun to move forward on the news of Blücher's victory at Laon. His troops were so widely dispersed that Napoleon might even now have cut the line in halves had he known Schwarzenberg's real position. But he made a détour in order to meet Oudinot's corps, and gave the Austrians time to concentrate at Arcis-sur-Aube. Here, on the 20th of March, Napoleon found himself in face of an army of 100,000 men. His own army was less than a third of that number; yet with unalterable contempt for the enemy he risked another battle. No decided issue was reached in the first day's fighting, and Napoleon remained in position, expecting that Schwarzenberg would retreat during the night. But on the morrow the Austrians were still fronting him. Schwarzenberg had at length learnt his own real superiority, and resolved to assist the enemy no longer by a wretched system of retreat. A single act of firmness on the part of the Austrian commander showed Napoleon that the war of battles was at an end. He abandoned all hope of resisting the invaders in front: it only remained for him to throw himself on to their rear, and, in company with the frontier-garrisons and the army of Lyons, to attack their communications with Germany. The plan was no unreasonable one, if Paris could either have sustained a siege or have fallen into the enemy's hands without terminating the war. But the Allies rightly judged that Napoleon's power would be extinct from the moment that Paris submitted. They received the intelligence of the Emperor's march to the east, and declined to follow him. The armies of Schwarzenberg and Blücher approached one another, and moved together on Paris. It was at Vitry, on March 27th, that Napoleon first discovered that the troops which had appeared to be following his eastward movement were but a detachment of cavalry, and that the allied armies were in full march upon the capital. He instantly called up every division within reach, and pushed forward by forced marches for the Seine, hoping to fall upon Schwarzenberg's rear before the allied vanguard could reach Paris. But at each hour of the march it became more evident that the enemy was far in advance. For two days Napoleon urged his men forward; at length, unable to bear the intolerable suspense, he quitted the army on the morning of the 30th, and drove forward at the utmost speed along the road through Fontainebleau to the capital. As day sank, he met reports of a battle already begun. When he reached the village of Fromenteau, fifteen miles from Paris, at ten o'clock at night, he heard that Paris had actually surrendered.

[Attack on Paris, March 30.]

[Capitulation of Marmont.]

[Allies enter Paris, March 31.]

The Allies had pressed forward without taking any notice of Napoleon's movements, and at early morning on the 30th they had opened the attack on the north-eastern heights of Paris. Marmont, with the fragments of a beaten army and some weak divisions of the National Guard, had but 35,000 men to oppose to three times that number of the enemy. The Government had taken no steps to arm the people, or to prolong resistance after the outside line of defence was lost, although the erection of barricades would have held the Allies in check until Napoleon arrived with his army. While Marmont fought in the outer suburbs, masses of the people were drawn up on Montmartre, expecting the Emperor's appearance, and the spectacle of a great and decisive battle. But the firing in the outskirts stopped soon after noon: it was announced that Marmont had capitulated. The report struck the people with stupor and fury. They had vainly been demanding arms since early morning; and even after the capitulation unsigned papers were handed about by men of the working classes, advocating further resistance.  [190] But the people no longer knew how to follow leaders of its own. Napoleon had trained France to look only to himself: his absence left the masses, who were still eager to fight for France, helpless in the presence of the conqueror: there were enemies enough of the Government among the richer classes to make the entry of the foreigner into Paris a scene of actual joy and exultation. To such an extent had the spirit of caste and the malignant delight in Napoleon's ruin overpowered the love of France among the party of the old noblesse, that upon the entry of the allied forces into Paris on the 31st of March hundreds of aristocratic women kissed the hands, or the very boots and horses, of the leaders of the train, and cheered the Cossacks who escorted a band of French prisoners, bleeding and exhausted, through the streets.

[Napoleon dethroned, April 2.]

Napoleon's reign was indeed at an end. Since the rupture of the Congress of Châtillon on the 18th of March, the Allies had determined to make his dethronement a condition of peace. As the end approached, it was seen that no successor was possible but the chief of the House of Bourbon, although Austria would perhaps have consented to the establishment of a Regency under the Empress Marie Louise, and the Czar had for a time entertained the project of placing Bernadotte at the head of the French State. Immediately after the entry into Paris it was determined to raise the exile Louis XVIII. to the throne. The politicians of the Empire who followed Talleyrand were not unwilling to unite with the conquerors, and with the small party of Royalist noblesse, in recalling the Bourbon dynasty. Alexander, who was the real master of the situation, rightly judged Talleyrand to be the man most capable of enlisting the public opinion of France on the side of the new order. He took up his abode at Talleyrand's house, and employed this dexterous statesman as the advocate both of the policy of the Allies, and of the principles of constitutional liberty, which at this time Alexander himself sincerely befriended. A Provisional Government was appointed under Talleyrand's leadership. On the 2nd of April the Senate proclaimed the dethronement of Napoleon. On the 6th it published a Constitution, and recalled the House of Bourbon.

Louis XVIII. was still in England: his brother, the Count of Artois, had joined the invaders in France and assumed the title of Lieutenant of the Kingdom; but the influence of Alexander was necessary to force this obstinate and unteachable man into anything like a constitutional position. The Provisional Government invited the Count to take up the administration until the King's arrival, in virtue of a decree of the Senate. D'Artois declined to recognise the Senate's competency, and claimed the Lieutenancy of the Kingdom as his brother's representative. The Senate refusing to admit the Count's divine right, some unmeaning words were exchanged when d'Artois entered Paris; and the Provisional Government, disregarding the claims of the Royal Lieutenant, continued in the full exercise of its powers. At length the Czar insisted that d'Artois should give way. The decree of the Senate was accordingly accepted by him at the Tuileries on the 14th of April; the Provisional Government retired, and a Council of State was formed, in which Talleyrand still continued to exercise the real powers of government. In the address made by d'Artois on this occasion, he stated that although the King had not empowered him to accept the Constitution made by the Senate on the 6th of April, he entertained no doubt that the King would accept the principles embodied in that Constitution, which were those of Representative Government, of the freedom of the press, and of the responsibility of ministers. A week after d'Artois' declaration, Louis XVIII. arrived in France.

[Louis XVIII. and the Czar.]

[Louis XVIII. enters Paris, May 3.]

Louis XVIII., though capable of adapting himself in practice to a constitutional system, had never permitted himself to question the divine right of the House of Bourbon to sovereign power. The exiles who surrounded him were slow to understand the needs of the time. They recommended the King to reject the Constitution. Louis made an ambiguous answer when the Legislative Body met him at Compiègne and invited an expression of the royal policy. It was again necessary for the Czar to interfere, and to explain to the King that France could no longer be an absolute monarchy. Louis, however, was a better arguer than the Count of Artois. He reasoned as a man whom the sovereigns of Europe had felt it their duty to restore without any request from himself. If the Senate of Napoleon, he urged, had the right to give France a Constitution, he himself ought never to have been brought from his peaceful English home. He was willing to grant a free Constitution to his people in exercise of his own royal rights, but he could not recognise one created by the servants of an usurper. Alexander was but half satisfied with the liberal professions of Louis: he did not, however, insist on his acceptance of the Constitution drawn up by the Senate, but he informed him that until the promises made by d'Artois were confirmed by a royal proclamation, there would be no entry into Paris. The King at length signed a proclamation written by Talleyrand, and made his festal entry into the capital on the 3rd of May.

[Feeling of Paris.]

The promises of Louis himself, the unbroken courtesy and friendliness shown by the Allies to Paris since their victory a month before, had almost extinguished the popular feeling of hostility towards a dynasty which owed its recall to the overthrow of French armies. The foreign leaders themselves had begun to excite a certain admiration and interest. Alexander was considered, and with good reason, as a generous enemy; the simplicity of the King of Prussia, his misfortunes, his well-remembered gallantry at the Battle of Jena, gained him general sympathy. It needed but little on the part of the returning Bourbons to convert the interest and curiosity of Paris into affection. The cortège which entered the capital with Louis XVIII. brought back, in a singular motley of obsolete and of foreign costumes, the bearers of many unforgotten names. The look of the King himself, as he drove through Paris, pleased the people. The childless father of the murdered Duke of Enghien gained the pitying attention of those few who knew the face of a man twenty-five years an exile. But there was one among the members of the returning families whom every heart in Paris went out to meet. The daughter of Louis XVI., who had shared the captivity of her parents and of her brother, the sole survivor of her deeply-wronged house, now returned as Duchess of Angoulême. The uniquely mournful history of her girlhood, and her subsequent marriage with her cousin, the son of the Count of Artois, made her the natural object of a warmer sympathy than could attach to either of the brothers of Louis XVI. But adversity had imprinted its lines too deeply upon the features and the disposition of this joyless woman for a moment's light to return. Her voice and her aspect repelled the affection which thousands were eager to offer to her. Before the close of the first days of the restored monarchy, it was felt that the Bourbons had brought back no single person among them who was capable of winning the French nation's love.

[Napoleon sent to Elba.]

[Napoleon.]

The recall of the ancient line had been allowed to appear to the world as the work of France itself; Napoleon's fate could only be fixed by his conquerors. After the fall of Paris, Napoleon remained at Fontainebleau awaiting events. The soldiers and the younger officers of his army were still ready to fight for him; the marshals, however, were utterly weary, and determined that France should no longer suffer for the sake of a single man. They informed Napoleon that he must abdicate. Yielding to their pressure, Napoleon, on the 3rd of April, drew up an act of abdication in favour of his infant son, and sent it by Caulaincourt to the allied sovereigns at Paris. The document was rejected by the Allies; Caulaincourt returned with the intelligence that Napoleon must renounce the throne for himself and all his family. For a moment the Emperor thought of renewing the war; but the marshals refused their aid more resolutely than before, and, on the 6th of April, Napoleon signed an unconditional surrender of the throne for himself and his heirs. He was permitted by the Allies to retain the unmeaning title of Emperor, and to carry with him a body-guard and a considerable revenue to the island of Elba, henceforward to be his principality and his prison. The choice of this island, within easy reach of France and Italy, and too extensive to be guarded without a large fleet, was due to Alexander's ill-judged generosity towards Napoleon, and to a promise made to Marmont that the liberty of the Emperor should be respected. Alexander was not left without warning of the probable effects of his leniency. Sir Charles Stewart, military representative of Great Britain at the allied head-quarters, urged both his own and the allied Governments to substitute some more distant island for Elba, if they desired to save Europe from a renewed Napoleonic war, and France from the misery of a second invasion. The Allies, though not without misgivings, adhered to their original plan, and left it to time to justify the predictions of their adviser.

[Treaty of Paris, May 30.]

It was well known what would be the terms of peace, now that Napoleon was removed from the throne. The Allies had no intention of depriving France of any of the territory that it had held before 1792: the conclusion of a definitive Treaty was only postponed until the Constitution, which Alexander required King Louis XVIII. to grant, had been drawn up by a royal commission and approved by the King. On the 27th of May the draft of this Constitution, known as the Charta, was laid before the King, and sanctioned by him; on the 30th, the Treaty of Paris was signed by the representatives of France and of all the great Powers.  [191] France, surrendering all its conquests, accepted the frontier of the 1st of January, 1792, with a slight addition of territory on the side of Savoy and at points on its northern and eastern border. It paid no indemnity. It was permitted to retain all the works of art accumulated by twenty years of rapine, except the trophies carried from the Brandenburg Gate of Berlin and the spoils of the Library of Vienna. It received back nearly all the colonies which had been taken from it by Great Britain. By the clauses of the Treaty disposing of the territory that had formed the Empire and the dependencies of Napoleon, Holland was restored to the House of Orange, with the provision that its territory should be largely increased; Switzerland was declared independent; it was stipulated that Italy, with the exception of the Austrian Provinces, should consist of independent States, and that Germany should remain distributed among a multitude of sovereigns, independent, but united by a Federal tie. The navigation of the Rhine was thrown open. By a special agreement with Great Britain the French Government undertook to unite its efforts to those of England in procuring the suppression of the Slave-trade by all the Powers, and pledged itself to abolish the Slave-trade among French subjects within five years at the latest. For the settlement of all European questions not included in the Treaty of Paris it was agreed that a Congress of the Powers should, within two months, assemble at Vienna. These were the public articles of the Treaty of Paris. Secret clauses provided that the Allies-that is, the Allies independently of France-should control the distributions of territory to be made at the Congress; that Austria should receive Venetia and all Northern Italy as far as the Ticino; that Genoa should be given to the King of Sardinia; and that the Southern Netherlands should be united into a single kingdom with Holland, and thus form a solid bulwark against France on the north. No mention was made of Naples, whose sovereign, Murat, had abandoned Napoleon and allied himself with Austria, but without fulfilling in good faith the engagements into which he had entered against his former master. A nominal friend of the Allies, he knew that he had played a double game, and that his sovereignty, though not yet threatened, was insecure.  [192]

[Territorial arrangements of 1814.]

Much yet remained to be settled by the Congress at Vienna, but in the Treaty of Paris two at least of the great Powers saw the objects attained for which they had straggled so persistently through all the earlier years of the war, and which at a later time had appeared to pass almost out of the range of possibility. England saw the Netherlands once more converted into a barrier against France, and Antwerp held by friendly hands. Austria reaped the full reward of its cool and well-balanced diplomacy during the crisis of 1813, in the annexation of an Italian territory that made it the real mistress of the Peninsula. Castlereagh and every other English politician felt that Europe had done itself small honour in handing Venice back to the Hapsburg; but this had been the condition exacted by Metternich at Prague before he consented to throw the sword of Austria into the trembling scale;  [193] and the Republican traditions both of Venice and of Genoa counted for little among the statesmen of 1814, in comparison with the divine right of a Duke of Modena or a Prince of Hesse Cassel.  [194] France itself, though stripped of the dominion won by twenty years of warfare, was permitted to retain, for the benefit of a restored line of kings, the whole of its ancient territory, and the spoil of all the galleries and museums of Western Europe. It would have been no unnatural wrong if the conquerors of 1814 had dealt with the soil of France as France had dealt with other lands; it would have been an act of bare justice to restore to its rightful owners the pillage that had been brought to Paris, and to recover from the French treasury a part of the enormous sums which Napoleon had extorted from conquered States. But the Courts were too well satisfied with their victory to enter into a strict account upon secondary matters; and a prudent regard on the part of the Allies to the prospects of the House of Bourbon saved France from experiencing what it had inflicted upon others.

[All the Powers except France gained territory by the war, 1792-1814.]

The policy which now restored to France the frontier of 1792 was viewed with a very different feeling in France and in all other countries. Europe looked with a kind of wonder upon its own generosity; France forgot the unparalleled provocations which it had offered to mankind, and only remembered that Belgium and the Rhenish Provinces had formed part of the Republic and the Empire for nearly twenty years. These early conquests of the Republic, which no one had attempted to wrest from France since 1795, had undoubtedly been the equivalent for which, in the days of the Directory, Austria had been permitted to extend itself in Italy, and Prussia in Germany. In the opinion of men who sincerely condemned Napoleon's distant conquests, the territory between France and the Rhine was no more than France might legitimately demand, as a counterpoise to the vast accessions falling to one or other of the Continental Powers out of the territory of Poland, Venice, and the body of suppressed States in Germany. Poland, excluding the districts taken from it before 1792, contained a population twice as great as that of Belgium and the Rhenish Provinces together: Venice carried with it, in addition to a commanding province on the Italian mainland, the Eastern Adriatic Coast as far as Ragusa. If it were true that the proportionate increase of power formed the only solid principle of European policy, France sustained a grievous injury in receiving back the limits of 1791, when every other State on the Continent was permitted to retain the territory, or an equivalent for the territory, which it had gained in the great changes that took place between 1791 and 1814. But in fact there had never been a time during the last hundred and fifty years when France, under an energetic Government, had not possessed a force threatening to all its neighbours. France, reduced to its ancient limits, was still the equal, and far more than the equal, of any of the Continental Powers, with all that they had gained during the Revolutionary War. It remained the first of European nations, though no longer, as in the eighteenth century, the one great nation of the western continent. Its efforts after universal empire had aroused other nations into life. Had the course of French conquest ceased before Napoleon grasped power, France would have retained its frontier of the Rhine, and long have exercised an unbounded influence over both Germany and Italy, through the incomparably juster and brighter social life which the Revolution, combined with all that France had inherited from the past, enabled it to display to those countries. Napoleon, in the attempt to impose his rule upon all Europe, created a power in Germany whose military future was to be not less solid than that of France itself, and left to Europe, in the accord of his enemies, a firmer security against French attack than any that the efforts of statesmen had ever framed.

[Permanent effect on Europe of period 1792-1814.]

[National sense excited in Germany and Italy.]

The league of the older monarchies had proved stronger in the end than the genius and the ambition of a single man. But if, in the service of Napoleon, France had exhausted its wealth, sunk its fleets, and sacrificed a million lives, only that it might lose all its earlier conquests, and resume limits which it had outgrown before Napoleon held his first command, it was not thus with the work which, for or against itself, France had effected in Europe during the movements of the last twenty years. In the course of the epoch now ending the whole of the Continent up to the frontiers of Austria and Russia had gained the two fruitful ideas of nationality and political freedom. There were now two nations in Europe where before there had been but aggregates of artificial States. Germany and Italy were no longer mere geographical expressions: in both countries, though in a very unequal degree, the newly-aroused sense of nationality had brought with it the claim for unity and independence. In Germany, Prussia had set a great example, and was hereafter to reap its reward; in Italy there had been no State and no statesman to take the lead either in throwing off Napoleon's rule, or in forcing him, as the price of support, to give to his Italian kingdom a really national government. Failing to act for itself, the population of all Italy, except Naples, was parcelled out between Austria and the ancient dynasties; but the old days of passive submission to the foreigner were gone for ever, and time was to show whether those were the dreamers who thought of a united Italy, or those who thought that Metternich's statesmanship had for ever settled the fate of Venice and of Milan.

[Desire for political liberty.]

The second legacy of the Revolutionary epoch, the idea of constitutional freedom, which in 1789 had been as much wanting in Spain, where national spirit was the strongest, as in those German States where it was the weakest, had been excited in Italy by the events of 1796 and 1798, in Spain by the disappearance of the Bourbon king and the self-directed struggle of the nation against the invader; in Prussia it had been introduced by the Government itself when Stein was at the head of the State. "It is impossible," wrote Lord Castlereagh in the spring of 1814, "not to perceive a great moral change coming on in Europe, and that the principles of freedom are in full operation."  [195] There was in fact scarcely a Court in Europe which was not now declaring its intention to frame a Constitution. The professions might be lightly made; the desire and the capacity for self-government might still be limited to a narrower class than the friends of liberty imagined; but the seed was sown, and a movement had begun which was to gather strength during the next thirty years of European history, while one revolution after another proved that Governments could no longer with safety disregard the rights of their subjects.

[Social changes.]

Lastly, in all the territory that had formed Napoleon's Empire and dependencies, and also in Prussia, legal changes had been made in the rights and relations of the different classes of society, so important as almost to create a new type of social life. Within the Empire itself the Code Napoléon, conferring upon the subjects of France the benefits which the French had already won for themselves, had superseded a society resting on class-privilege, on feudal service, and on the despotism of custom, by a society resting on equality before the law, on freedom of contract, and on the unshackled ownership and enjoyment of land, whether the holder possessed an acre or a league. The principles of the French Code, if not the Code itself, had been introduced into Napoleon's kingdom of Italy, into Naples, and into almost all the German dependencies of France. In Prussia the reforms of Stein and Hardenberg had been directed, though less boldly, towards the same end; and when, after 1814, the Rhenish Provinces were annexed to Prussia by the Congress of Vienna, the Government was wise enough and liberal enough to leave these districts in the enjoyment of the laws which France had given them, and not to risk a comparison between even the best Prussian legislation and the Code Napoleon. In other territory now severed from France and restored to German or Italian princes, attempts were not wanting to obliterate the new order and to re-introduce the burdens and confusions of the old regime. But these reactions, even where unopposed for a time, were too much in conflict with the spirit of the age to gain more than a temporary and precarious success. The people had begun to know good and evil: examples of a free social order were too close at hand to render it possible for any part of the western continent to relapse for any very long period into the condition of the eighteenth century.

[Limits.]

It was indeed within a distinct limit that the Revolutionary epoch effected its work of political and social change. Neither England nor Austria received the slightest impulse to progress. England, on the contrary, suspended almost all internal improvement during the course of the war; the domestic policy of the Austrian Court, so energetic in the reign immediately preceding the Revolution, became for the next twenty years, except where it was a policy of repression, a policy of pure vacancy and inaction. But in all other States of Western Europe the period which reached its close with Napoleon's fall left deep and lasting traces behind it. Like other great epochs of change, it bore its own peculiar character. It was not, like the Renaissance and the Reformation, a time when new worlds of faith and knowledge transformed the whole scope and conception of human life; it was not, like our own age, a time when scientific discovery and increased means of communication silently altered the physical conditions of existence; it was a time of changes directly political in their nature, and directly effected by the political agencies of legislation and of war. In the perspective of history the Napoleonic age will take its true place among other, and perhaps greater, epochs. Its elements of mere violence and disturbance will fill less space in the eyes of mankind; its permanent creations, more. As an epoch of purely political energy, concentrating the work of generations within the compass of twenty five years, it will perhaps scarcely find a parallel.

CHAPTER XII.

The Restoration of 1814-Norway-Naples-Westphalia-Spain-The Spanish Constitution overthrown: Victory of the Clergy-Restoration in France-The Charta-Encroachments of the Nobles and Clergy-Growing Hostility to the Bourbons-Congress of Vienna-Talleyrand and the Four Powers-The Polish Question-The Saxon Question-Theory of Legitimacy-Secret Alliance against Russia and Prussia-Compromise-The Rhenish Provinces-Napoleon leaves Elba and lands in France-His Declarations-Napoleon at Grenoble, at Lyon, at Paris-The Congress of Vienna unites Europe against France-Murat's Action in Italy-The Acte Additionnel-The Champ de Mai-Napoleon takes up the offensive-Battles of Ligny, Quatre Bras, Waterloo-Affairs at Paris-Napoleon sent to St. Helena-Wellington and Fouché-Arguments on the proposed Cession of French Territory-Treaty of Holy Alliance-Second Treaty of Paris-Conclusion of the Work of the Congress of Vienna- Federation of Germany-Estimate of the Congress of Vienna and of the Treaties of 1815-The Slave Trade.

Of all the events which, in the more recent history of mankind, have struck the minds of nations with awe, and appeared to reveal in its direct operation a power overruling the highest human effort, there is none equal in grandeur and terror to the annihilation of Napoleon's army in the invasion of Russia. It was natural that a generation which had seen State after State overthrown, and each new violation of right followed by an apparent consolidation of the conqueror's strength, should view in the catastrophe of 1812 the hand of Providence visibly outstretched for the deliverance of Europe.  [196] Since that time many years have passed. Perils which then seemed to envelop the future of mankind now appear in part illusory; sacrifices then counted cheap have proved of heavy cost. The history of the two last generations shows that not everything was lost to Europe in passing subjection to a usurper, nor everything gained by the victory of his opponents. It is now not easy to suppress the doubt whether the permanent interests of mankind would not have been best served by Napoleon's success in 1812. His empire had already attained dimensions that rendered its ultimate disruption certain: less depended upon the postponement or the acceleration of its downfall than on the order of things ready to take its place. The victory of Napoleon in 1812 would have been followed by the establishment of a Polish kingdom in the provinces taken from Russia. From no generosity in the conqueror, from no sympathy on his part with a fallen people, but from the necessities of his political situation, Poland must have been so organised as to render it the bulwark of French supremacy in the East. The serf would have been emancipated. The just hatred of the peasant to the noble, which made the partition of 1772 easy, and has proved fatal to every Polish uprising from that time to the present, would have been appeased by an agrarian reform executed with Napoleon's own unrivalled energy and intelligence, and ushered in with brighter hopes than have at any time in the history of Poland lit the dark shades of peasant-life. The motives which in 1807 had led Napoleon to stay his hand, and to content himself with half-measures of emancipation in the Duchy of Warsaw  [197], could have had no place after 1812, when Russia remained by his side, a mutilated but inexorable enemy, ever on the watch to turn to its own advantage the first murmurs of popular discontent beyond the border. Political independence, the heritage of the Polish noble, might have been withheld, but the blessing of landed independence would have been bestowed on the mass of the Polish people. In the course of some years this restored kingdom, though governed by a member of the house of Bonaparte, would probably have gained sufficient internal strength to survive the downfall of Napoleon's Empire or his own decease. England, Austria, and Turkey would have found it no impossible task to prevent its absorption by Alexander at the re-settlement of Europe, if indeed the collapse of Russia had not been followed by the overthrow of the Porte, and the establishment of a Greek, a Bulgarian, and a Roumanian Kingdom under the supremacy of France. By the side of the three absolute monarchs of Central and Eastern Europe there would have remained, upon Napoleon's downfall, at least one people in possession of the tradition of liberty: and from the example of Poland, raised from the deep but not incurable degradation of its social life, the rulers of Russia might have gained courage to emancipate the serf, without waiting for the lapse of another half-century and the occurrence of a second ruinous war. To compare a possible sequence of events with the real course of history, to estimate the good lost and evil got through events which at the time seemed to vindicate the moral governance of the world, is no idle exercise of the imagination. It may serve to give caution to the judgment: it may guard us against an arbitrary and fanciful interpretation of the actual. The generation which witnessed the fall of Napoleon is not the only one which has seen Providence in the fulfilment of its own desire, and in the storm-cloud of nature and history has traced with too sanguine gaze the sacred lineaments of human equity and love.

[Settlement of 1814.]

[Norway.]

[Naples.]

The Empire of Napoleon had indeed passed away. The conquests won by the first soldiers of the Republic were lost to France along with all the latest spoils of its Emperor; but the restoration which was effected in 1814 was no restoration of the political order which had existed on the Continent before the outbreak of the Revolutionary War. The Powers which had overthrown Napoleon had been partakers, each in its own season, in the system of aggrandisement which had obliterated the old frontiers of Europe. Russia had gained Finland, Bessarabia, and the greater part of Poland; Austria had won Venice, Dalmatia, and Salzburg; Prussia had received between the years 1792 and 1806 an extension of territory in Poland and Northern Germany that more than doubled its area. It was now no part of the policy of the victorious Courts to reinstate the governments which they had themselves dispossessed: the settlement of 1814, in so far as it deserved the name of a restoration, was confined to the territory taken from Napoleon and from princes of his house. Here, though the claims of Republics and Ecclesiastical Princes were forgotten, the titles of the old dynasties were freely recognised. In France itself, in the Spanish Peninsula, in Holland, Westphalia, Piedmont, and Tuscany, the banished houses resumed their sovereignty. It cost the Allies nothing to restore these countries to their hereditary rulers, and it enabled them to describe the work of 1814 in general terms as the restoration of lawful government and national independence. But the claims of legitimacy, as well as of national right, were, as a matter of fact, only remembered where there existed no motive to disregard them; where they conflicted with arrangements of policy, they received small consideration. Norway, which formed part of the Danish monarchy, had been promised by Alexander to Bernadotte, Crown Prince of Sweden, in 1812, in return for his support against Napoleon, and the bargain had been ratified by the Allies. As soon as Napoleon was overthrown, Bernadotte claimed his reward. It was in vain that the Norwegians, abandoned by their king, declared themselves independent, and protested against being handed over like a flock of sheep by the liberators of Europe. The Allies held to their contract; a British fleet was sent to assist Bernadotte in overpowering his new subjects, and after a brief resistance the Norwegians found themselves compelled to submit to their fate (April-Aug., 1814). [198] At the other extremity of Europe a second of Napoleon's generals still held his throne among the restored legitimate monarchs. Murat, King of Naples, had forsaken Napoleon in time to make peace and alliance with Austria. Great Britain, though entering into a military convention, had not been a party to this treaty; and it had declared that its own subsequent support of Murat would depend upon the condition that he should honourably exert himself in Italy against Napoleon's forces. This condition Murat had not fulfilled. The British Government was, however, but gradually supplied with proofs of his treachery; nor was Lord Liverpool, the Prime Minister, inclined to raise new difficulties at Vienna by pressing the claim of Ferdinand of Sicily to his territories on the mainland.  [199] Talleyrand, on behalf of the restored Bourbons of Paris, intended to throw all his strength into a diplomatic attack upon Murat before the end of the Congress; but for the present Murat's chances seemed to be superior to those of his rival. Southern Italy thus continued in the hands of a soldier of fortune, who, unlike Bernadotte, was secretly the friend of Napoleon, and ready to support him in any attempt to regain his throne.

[Restoration in Westphalia.]

The engagement of the Allies towards Bernadotte, added to the stipulations of the Peace of Paris, left little to be decided by the Congress of Vienna beyond the fate of Poland, Saxony, and Naples, and the form of political union to be established in Germany. It had been agreed that the Congress should assemble within two months after the signature of the Peace of Paris: this interval, however, proved to be insufficient, and the autumn had set in before the first diplomatists arrived at Vienna, and began the conferences which preceded the formal opening of the Congress. In the meantime a singular spectacle was offered to Europe by the Courts whose restoration was the subject of so much official thanksgiving. Before King Louis XVIII. returned to Paris, the exiled dynasties had regained their thrones in Northern Germany and in Spain. The process of reaction had begun in Hanover and in Hesse as soon as the battle of Leipzig had dissolved the Kingdom of Westphalia and driven Napoleon across the Rhine. Hanover indeed did not enjoy the bodily presence of its Sovereign: its character was oligarchical, and the reaction here was more the affair of the privileged classes than of the Government. In Hesse a prince returned who was the very embodiment of divine right, a prince who had sturdily fought against French demagogues in 1792, and over whose stubborn, despotic nature the revolutions of a whole generation and the loss of his own dominions since the battle of Jena had passed without leaving a trace. The Elector was seventy years old when, at the end of the year 1813, his faithful subjects dragged his carriage in triumph into the streets of Cassel. On the day after his arrival he gave orders that the Hessian soldiery who had been sent on furlough after the battle of Jena should present themselves, every man in the garrison-town where he had stood on the 1st of November, 1806. A few weeks later all the reforms of the last seven years were swept away together. The Code Napoleon ceased to be the law of the land; the old oppressive distinctions of caste, with the special courts for the privileged orders, came again into force, in defiance of the spirit of the age. The feudal burdens of the peasantry were revived, the purchasers of State-lands compelled to relinquish the land without receiving back any of their purchase-money. The decimal coinage was driven out of the country. The old system of taxation, with its iniquitous exemptions, was renewed. All promotions, all grants of rank made by Jerome's Government were annulled: every officer, every public servant resumed the station which he had occupied on the 1st of November, 1806. The very pigtails and powder of the common soldier under the old regime were revived. [200]

[Restoration in Spain.]

The Hessians and their neighbours in North-Western Germany had from of old been treated with very little ceremony by their rulers; and if they welcomed back a family which had been accustomed to hire them out at so much a head to fight against the Hindoos or by the side of the North American Indians, it only proved that they preferred their native taskmasters to Jerome Bonaparte and his French crew of revellers and usurers. The next scene in the European reaction was a far more mournful one. Ferdinand of Spain had no sooner re-crossed the Pyrenees in the spring of 1814, than, convinced of his power by the transports of popular enthusiasm that attended his progress through Northern Spain, he determined to overthrow the Constitution of 1812, and to re-establish the absolute monarchy which had existed before the war. The courtiers and ecclesiastics who gathered round the King dispelled any scruples that he might have felt in lifting his hand against a settlement accepted by the nation. They represented to him that the Cortes of 1812-which, whatever their faults, had been recognised as the legitimate Government of Spain by both England and Russia-consisted of a handful of desperate men, collected from the streets of Cadiz, who had taken upon themselves to insult the Crown, to rob the Church, and to imperil the existence of the Catholic Faith. On the entry of the King into Valencia, the cathedral clergy expressed the wishes of their order in the address of homage which they offered to Ferdinand. "We beg your Majesty," their spokesman concluded, "to take the most vigorous measures for the restoration of the Inquisition, and of the ecclesiastical system that existed in Spain before your Majesty's departure." "These," replied the King, "are my own wishes, and I will not rest until they are fulfilled."  [201]

[Spanish Constitution overthrown.]

The victory of the clergy was soon declared. On the 11th of May the King issued a manifesto at Valencia, proclaiming the Constitution of 1812 and every decree of the Cortes null and void, and denouncing the penalties of high treason against everyone who should defend the Constitution by act, word, or writing. A variety of promises, made only to be broken, accompanied this assertion of the rights of the Crown. The King pledged himself to summon new Cortes as soon as public order should be restored, to submit the expenditure to the control of the nation, and to maintain inviolate the security of person and property. It was a significant comment upon Ferdinand's professions of Liberalism that on the very day on which the proclamation was issued the censorship of the Press was restored. But the King had not miscalculated his power over the Spanish people. The same storm of wild, unreasoning loyalty which had followed Ferdinand's reappearance in Spain followed the overthrow of the Constitution. The mass of the Spaniards were ignorant of the very meaning of political liberty: they adored the King as a savage adores his fetish: their passions were at the call of a priesthood as brutish and unscrupulous as that which in 1798 had excited the Lazzaroni of Naples against the Republicans of Southern Italy. No sooner had Ferdinand set the example, by arresting thirty of the most distinguished of the Liberals, than tumults broke out in every part of the country against Constitutionalist magistrates and citizens. Mobs, headed by priests bearing the standard of the Inquisition, destroyed the tablets erected in honour of the Constitution of 1812, and burned Liberal writings in bonfires in the market-places. The prisons were filled with men who, but a short time before, had been the objects of popular adulation.

[The clergy in power.]

Whatever pledges of allegiance had been given to the Constitution of 1812, it was clear that this Constitution had no real hold on the nation, and that Ferdinand fulfilled the wish of the majority of Spaniards in overthrowing it. A wise and energetic sovereign would perhaps have allowed himself to use this outburst of religious fanaticism for the purpose of substituting some better order for the imprudent arrangements of 1812. Ferdinand, an ignorant, hypocritical buffoon, with no more notion of political justice or generosity than the beasts of the field, could only substitute for the fallen Cortes a government by palace-favourites and confessors. It was in vain, that the representatives of Great Britain urged the King to fulfil his constitutional promises, and to liberate the persons who had unjustly been thrown into prison.  [202] The clergy were masters of Spain and of the King: their influence daily outweighed even that of Ferdinand's own Ministers, when, under the pressure of financial necessity, the Ministers began to offer some resistance to the exorbitant demands of the priesthood. On the 23rd of May the King signed an edict restoring all monasteries throughout Spain, and reinstating them in their lands. On the 24th of June the clergy were declared exempt from taxation. On the 21st of July the Church won its crowning triumph in the re-establishment of the Inquisition. In the meantime the army was left without pay, in some places actually without food. The country was at the mercy of bands of guerillas, who, since the disappearance of the enemy, had turned into common brigands, and preyed upon their own countrymen. Commerce was extinct; agriculture abandoned; innumerable villages were lying in ruins; the population was barbarised by the savage warfare with which for years past it had avenged its own sufferings upon the invader. Of all the countries of Europe, Spain was the one in which the events of the Revolutionary epoch seemed to have left an effect most nearly approaching to unmixed evil.

[Restoration in France.]

In comparison with the reaction in the Spanish Peninsula the reaction in France was sober and dignified. Louis XVIII. was at least a scholar and a man of the world. In the old days, among companions whose names were now almost forgotten, he had revelled in Voltaire and dallied with the fashionable Liberalism of the time. In his exile he had played the king with some dignity; he was even believed to have learnt some political wisdom by his six years' residence in England. If he had not character, [203] he had at least some tact and some sense of humour; and if not a profound philosopher, he was at least an accomplished epicurean. He hated the zealotry of his brother, the Count of Artois. He was more inclined to quiz the emigrants than to sacrifice anything on their behalf; and the whole bent of his mind made him but an insincere ally of the priesthood, who indeed could hardly expect to enjoy such an orgy in France as their brethren were celebrating in Spain. The King, however, was unable to impart his own indifference to the emigrants who returned with him, nor had he imagination enough to identify himself, as King of France, with the military glories of the nation and with the democratic army that had won them. Louis held high notions of the royal prerogative: this would not in itself have prevented him from being a successful ruler, if he had been capable of governing in the interest of the nation at large. There were few Republicans remaining in France; the centralised institutions of the Empire remained in full vigour; and although the last months of Napoleon's rule had excited among the educated classes a strong spirit of constitutional opposition, an able and patriotic Bourbon accepting his new position, and wielding power for the benefit of the people and not of a class, might perhaps have exercised an authority not much inferior to that possessed by the Crown before 1789. But Louis, though rational, was inexperienced and supine. He was ready enough to admit into his Ministry and to retain in administrative posts throughout the country men who had served under Napoleon; but when the emigrants and the nobles, led by the Count of Artois, pushed themselves to the front of the public service, and treated the restoration of the Bourbons as the victory of their own order, the King offered but a faint resistance, and allowed the narrowest class-interests to discredit a monarchy whose own better traditions identified it not with an aristocracy but with the State.

[The Charta.]

The Constitution promulgated by King Louis XVIII. on the 4th of June, 1814, and known as the Charta,  [204] was well received by the French nation. Though far less liberal than the Constitution accepted by Louis XVI. in 1791, it gave to the French a measure of representative government to which they had been strangers under Napoleon. It created two legislative chambers, the Upper House consisting of peers who were nominated by the Crown at its pleasure, whether for life-peerages or hereditary dignity; the Lower House formed by national election, but by election restricted by so high a property-qualification  [205] that not one person in two hundred possessed a vote. The Crown reserved to itself the sole power of proposing laws. In spite of this serious limitation of the competence of the two houses, the Lower Chamber possessed, in its right of refusing taxes and of discussing and rejecting all measures laid before it, a reality of power such as no representative body had possessed in France since the beginning of the Consulate. The Napoleonic nobility was placed on an equality with the old noblesse of France, though neither enjoyed, as nobles, anything more than a titular distinction.  [206] Purchasers of landed property sold by the State since the beginning of the Revolution were guaranteed in their possessions. The principles of religious freedom, of equality before the law, and of the admissibility of all classes to public employment, which had taken such deep root during the Republic and the Empire, were declared to form part of the public law of France; and by the side of these deeply-cherished rights the Charta of King Louis XVIII. placed, though in a qualified form, the long-forgotten principle of the freedom of the Press.

[Encroachments of Nobles.]

Under such a Constitution there was little room for the old noblesse to arrogate to itself any legal superiority over the mass of the French nation. What was wanting in law might, however, in the opinion of the Count of Artois and his friends, be effected by administration. Of all the institutions of France the most thoroughly national and the most thoroughly democratic was the army; it was accordingly against the army that the noblesse directed its first efforts. Financial difficulties made a large reduction in the forces necessary. Fourteen thousand officers and sergeants were accordingly dismissed on half-pay; but no sooner had this measure of economy been effected than a multitude of emigrants who had served against the Republic in the army of the Prince of Condé or in La Vendée were rewarded with all degrees of military rank. Naval officers who had quitted the service of France and entered that of its enemies were reinstated with the rank which they had held in foreign navies.  [207] The tricolor, under which every battle of France had been fought from Jemappes to Montmartre, was superseded by the white flag of the House of Bourbon, under which no living soldier had marched to victory. General Dupont, known only by his capitulation at Baylen in 1808, was appointed Minister of War. The Imperial Guard was removed from service at the Palace, and the so-called Military Household of the old Bourbon monarchy revived, with the privileges and the insignia belonging to the period before 1775. Young nobles who had never seen a shot fired crowded into this favoured corps, where the musketeer and the trooper held the rank and the pay of a lieutenant in the army. While in every village of France some battered soldier of Napoleon cursed the Government that had driven him from his comrades, the Court revived at Paris all the details of military ceremonial that could be gathered from old almanacks, from the records of court-tailors, and from the memories of decayed gallants. As if to convince the public that nothing had happened during the last twenty-two years, the aged Marquis de Chansenets, who had been Governor of the Tuileries on the 10th of August, 1792, and had then escaped by hiding among the bodies of the dead,  [208] resumed his place at the head of the officers of the Palace.

[Encroachments of the clergy.]

[Growing hostility to the Bourbons.]

These were but petty triumphs for the emigrants and nobles, but they were sufficient to make the restored monarchy unpopular. Equally injurious was their behaviour in insulting the families of Napoleon's generals, in persecuting men who had taken part in the great movement of 1789, and in intimidating the peasant-owners of land that had been confiscated and sold by the State. Nor were the priesthood backward in discrediting the Government of Louis XVIII. in the service of their own order. It might be vain to think of recovering the Church-lands, or of introducing the Inquisition into France, but the Court might at least be brought to invest itself with the odour of sanctity, and the parish-priest might be made as formidable a person within his own village as the mayor or the agent of the police-minister. Louis XVIII. was himself sceptical and self-indulgent. This, however, did not prevent him from publishing a letter to the Bishops placing his kingdom under the especial protection of the Virgin Mary, and from escorting the image of the patron-saint through the streets of Paris in a procession in which Marshal Soult and other regenerate Jacobins of the Court braved the ridicule of the populace by acting as candle-bearers. Another sign of the King's submission to the clergy was the publication of an edict which forbade buying and selling on Sundays and festivals.

Whatever the benefits of a freely-observed day of rest, this enactment, which was not submitted to the Chambers, passed for an arrogant piece of interference on the part of the clergy with national habits; and while it caused no inconvenience to the rich, it inflicted substantial loss upon a numerous and voluble class of petty traders. The wrongs done to the French nation by the priests and emigrants who rose to power in 1814 were indeed the merest trifle in comparison with the wrongs which it had uncomplainingly borne at the hands of Napoleon. But the glory of the Empire, the strength and genius of its absolute rule, were gone. In its place there was a family which had been dissociated from France during twenty years, which had returned only to ally itself with an unpopular and dreaded caste, and to prove that even the unexpected warmth with which it had been welcomed home could not prevent it from becoming, at the end of a few months, utterly alien and uninteresting. The indifference of the nation would not have endangered the Bourbon monarchy if the army had been won over by the King. But here the Court had excited the bitterest enmity. The accord which for a moment had seemed possible even to Republicans of the type of Carnot had vanished at a touch.  [209] Rumours of military conspiracies grew stronger with every month. Wellington, now British Ambassador at Paris, warned his Government of the changed feeling of the capital, of the gatherings of disbanded officers, of possible attacks upon the Tuileries. "The truth is," he wrote, "that the King of France without the army is no King." Wellington saw the more immediate danger:  [210] he failed to see the depth and universality of the movement passing over France, which before the end of the year 1814 had destroyed the hold of the Bourbon monarchy except in those provinces where it had always found support, and prepared the nation at large to welcome back the ruler who so lately seemed to have fallen for ever.

[Congress of Vienna, Sept., 1814.]

Paris and Madrid divided for some months after the conclusion of peace the attention of the political world. At the end of September the centre of European interest passed to Vienna. The great council of the Powers, so long delayed, was at length assembled. The Czar of Russia, the Kings of Prussia, Denmark, Bavaria, and Würtemberg, and nearly all the statesmen of eminence in Europe, gathered round the Emperor Francis and his Minister, Metternich, to whom by common consent the presidency of the Congress was offered. Lord Castlereagh represented England, and Talleyrand France. Rasumoffsky and other Russian diplomatists acted under the immediate directions of their master, who on some occasions even entered into personal correspondence with the Ministers of the other Powers. Hardenberg stood in a somewhat freer relation to King Frederick William; Stein was present, but without official place. The subordinate envoys and attaches of the greater Courts, added to a host of petty princes and the representatives who came from the minor Powers, or from communities which had ceased to possess any political existence at all, crowded Vienna. In order to relieve the antagonisms which had already come too clearly into view, Metternich determined to entertain his visitors in the most magnificent fashion; and although the Austrian State was bankrupt, and in some districts the people were severely suffering, a sum of about £10,000 a day was for some time devoted to this purpose. The splendour and the gaieties of Metternich were emulated by his guests; and the guardians of Europe enjoyed or endured for months together a succession of fêtes, banquets, dances, and excursions, varied, through the zeal of Talleyrand to ingratiate himself with his new master, by a Mass of great solemnity on the anniversary of the execution of Louis XVI.  [211] One incident lights the faded and insipid record of vanished pageants and defunct gallantries. Beethoven was in Vienna. The Government placed the great Assembly-rooms at his disposal, and enabled the composer to gratify a harmless humour by sending invitations in his own name to each of the Sovereigns and grandees then in Vienna. Much personal homage, some substantial kindness from these gaudy creatures of the hour, made the period of the Congress a bright page in that wayward and afflicted life whose poverty has enriched mankind with such immortal gifts.

[Talleyrand and the four Powers.]

The Congress had need of its distractions, for the difficulties which faced it were so great that, even after the arrival of the Sovereigns, it was found necessary to postpone the opening of the regular sittings until November. By the secret articles of the Peace of Paris, the Allies had reserved to themselves the disposal of all vacant territory, although their conclusions required to be formally sanctioned by the Congress at large. The Ministers of Austria, England, Prussia, and Russia accordingly determined at the outset to decide upon all territorial questions among themselves, and only after their decisions were completely formed to submit them to France and the other Powers.  [212] Talleyrand, on hearing of this arrangement, protested that France itself was now one of the Allies, and demanded that the whole body of European States should at once meet in open Congress. The four Courts held to their determination, and began their preliminary sittings without Talleyrand. But the French statesman had, under the form of a paradox, really stated the true political situation. The greater Powers were so deeply divided in their aims that their old bond of common interest, the interest of union against France, was now less powerful than the impulse that made them seek the support of France against one another. Two men had come to the Congress with a definite aim: Alexander had resolved to gain the Duchy of Warsaw, and to form it, with or without some part of Russian Poland, into a Polish kingdom, attached to his own crown: Talleyrand had determined, either on the question of Poland, or on the question of Saxony, which arose out of it, to break allied Europe into halves, and to range France by the side of two of the great Powers against the two others. The course of events favoured for a while the design of the Minister: Talleyrand himself prosecuted his plan with an ability which, but for the untimely return of Napoleon from Elba, would have left France, without a war, the arbiter and the leading Power of Europe.

[Polish question.]

Since the Russian victories of 1812, the Emperor Alexander had made no secret of his intention to restore a Polish Kingdom and a Polish nationality.  [213] Like many other designs of this prince, the project combined a keen desire for personal glorification with a real generosity of feeling. Alexander was thoroughly sincere in his wish not only to make the Poles again a people, but to give them a Parliament and a free Constitution. The King of Poland, however, was to be no independent prince, but Alexander himself: although the Duchy of Warsaw, the chief if not the sole component of the proposed new kingdom, had belonged to Austria and Prussia after the last partition of Poland, and extended into the heart of the Prussian monarchy. Alexander insisted on his anxiety to atone for the crime of Catherine in dismembering Poland: the atonement, however, was to be made at the sole cost of those whom Catherine had allowed to share the booty. Among the other Governments, the Ministry of Great Britain would gladly have seen a Polish State established in a really independent form;  [214] failing this, it desired that the Duchy of Warsaw should be divided, as formerly, between Austria and Prussia. Metternich was anxious that the fortress of Cracow, at any rate, should not fall into the hands of the Czar. Stein and Hardenberg, and even Alexander's own Russian counsellors, earnestly opposed the Czar's project, not only on account of the claims of Prussia on Warsaw, but from dread of the agitation likely to be produced by a Polish Parliament among all Poles outside the new State. King Frederick William, however, was unaccustomed to dispute the wishes of his ally; and the Czar's offer of Saxony in substitution for Warsaw gave to the Prussian Ministers, who were more in earnest than their master, at least the prospect of receiving a valuable equivalent for what they might surrender.

[Saxon question.]

By the Treaty of Kalisch, made when Prussia united its arms with those of Russia against Napoleon (Feb. 27th, 1813), the Czar had undertaken to restore the Prussian monarchy to an extent equal to that which it had possessed in 1805. It was known before the opening of the Congress that the Czar proposed to do this by handing over to King Frederick William the whole of Saxony, whose Sovereign, unlike his colleagues in the Rhenish Confederacy, had supported Napoleon up to his final overthrow at Leipzig. Since that time the King of Saxony had been held a prisoner, and his dominions had been occupied by the Allies. The Saxon question had thus already gained the attention of all the European Governments, and each of the Ministers now at Vienna brought with him some more or less distinct view upon the subject. Castlereagh, who was instructed to foster the union of Prussia and Austria against Alexander's threatening ambition, was willing that Prussia should annex Saxony if in return it would assist him in keeping Russia out of Warsaw:  [215] Metternich disliked the annexation, but offered no serious objection, provided that in Western Germany Prussia would keep to the north of the Main: Talleyrand alone made the defence of the King of Saxony the very centre of his policy, and subordinated all other aims to this. His instructions, like those of Castlereagh, gave priority to the Polish question;  [216] but Talleyrand saw that Saxony, not Poland, was the lever by which he could throw half of Europe on to the side of France; and before the four Allied Courts had come to any single conclusion, the French statesman had succeeded, on what at first passed for a subordinate point, in breaking up their concert.

[Talleyrand's action on Saxony.]

For a while the Ministers of Austria, Prussia, and England appeared to be acting in harmony; and throughout the month of October all three endeavoured to shake the purpose of Alexander regarding Warsaw.  [217] Talleyrand, however, foresaw that the efforts of Prussia in this direction would not last very long, and he wrote to Louis XVIII. asking for his permission to make a definite offer of armed assistance to Austria in case of need. Events took the turn which Talleyrand expected. Early in November the King of Prussia completely yielded to Alexander, and ordered Hardenberg to withdraw his opposition to the Russian project. Metternich thus found himself abandoned on the Polish question by Prussia; and at the same moment the answer of King Louis XVIII. arrived, and enabled Talleyrand to assure the Austrian Minister that, if resistance to Russia and Prussia should become necessary, he might count on the support of a French army. Metternich now completely changed his position on the Saxon question, and wrote to Hardenberg (Dec. 10) stating that, inasmuch as Prussia had chosen to sacrifice Warsaw, the Emperor Francis absolutely forbade the annexation of more than a fifth part of the kingdom of Saxony. Castlereagh, disgusted with the obstinacy of Russia and the subserviency of King Frederick William, forgave Talleyrand for not supporting him earlier, and cordially entered into this new plan for thwarting the Northern Powers. The leading member of the late Rhenish Confederacy, the King of Bavaria, threw himself with eagerness into the struggle against Prussia and against German unity. In proportion as Stein and the patriots of 1813 urged the claims of German nationality under Prussian leadership against the forfeited rights of a Court which had always served on Napoleon's side, the politicians of the Rhenish Confederacy declaimed against the ambition and the Jacobinism of Prussia, and called upon Europe to defend the united principles of hereditary right and of national independence in the person of the King of Saxony.

[Theory of Legitimacy.]

Talleyrand's object was attained. He had isolated Russia and Prussia, and had drawn to his own side not only England and Austria but the whole body of the minor German States. Nothing was wanting but a phrase, or an idea, which should consecrate the new league in the opinion of Europe as a league of principle, and bind the Allies, in matters still remaining open, to the support of the interests of the House of Bourbon. Talleyrand had made his theory ready. In notes to Castlereagh and Metternich,[218] he declared that the whole drama of the last twenty years had been one great struggle between revolution and established right, a struggle at first between Republicanism and Monarchy, afterwards between usurping dynasties and legitimate dynasties. The overthrow of Napoleon had been the victory of the principle of legitimacy; the task of England and Austria was now to extend the work of restitution to all Europe, and to defend the principle against new threatened aggressions. In the note to Castlereagh, Talleyrand added a practical corollary. "To finish the revolution, the principle of legitimacy must triumph without exception. The kingdom of Saxony must be preserved; the kingdom of Naples must return to its legitimate king."

[Alliance against Russia and Prussia, Jan. 3, 1815.]

As an historical summary of the Napoleonic wars, Talleyrand's doctrine was baseless. No one but Pitt had cared about the fate of the Bourbons; no one would have hesitated to make peace with Napoleon, if Napoleon would have accepted terms of peace. The manifesto was not, however, intended to meet a scientific criticism. In the English Foreign Office it was correctly described as a piece of drollery; and Metternich was too familiar with the language of principles himself to attach much meaning to it in the mouth of anyone else. Talleyrand, however, kept a grave countenance. With inimitable composure the old Minister of the Directory wrote to Louis XVIII. lamenting that Castlereagh did not appear to care much about the principle of legitimacy, and in fact did not quite comprehend it;  [219] and he added his fear that this moral dimness on the part of the English Minister arose from the dealing of his countrymen with Tippoo Sahib. But for Europe at large,-for the English Liberal party, who looked upon the Saxons and the Prussians as two distinct nations, and for the Tories, who forgot that Napoleon had made the Elector of Saxony a king; for the Emperor of Austria, who had no wish to see the Prussian frontier brought nearer to Prague; above all, for the minor German courts who dreaded every approach towards German unity,-Talleyrand's watchword was the best that could have been invented. His counsel prospered. On the 3rd of January, 1815, after a rash threat of war uttered by Hardenberg, a secret treaty  [220] was signed by the representatives of France, England, and Austria, pledging these Powers to take the field, if necessary, against Russia and Prussia in defence of the principles of the Peace of Paris. The plan of the campaign was drawn up, the number of the forces fixed. Bavaria had already armed; Piedmont, Hanover, and even the Ottoman Porte, were named as future members of the alliance.

[Compromise on Polish and Saxon questions.]

[Prussia gains Rhenish Provinces.]

It would perhaps be unfair to the French Minister to believe that he actually desired to kindle a war on this gigantic scale. Talleyrand had not, like Napoleon, a love for war for its own sake. His object was rather to raise France from its position as a conquered and isolated Power; to surround it with allies; to make the House of Bourbon the representatives of a policy interesting to a great part of Europe; and, having thus undone the worst results of Napoleon's rule, to trust to some future complication for the recovery of Belgium and the frontier of the Rhine. Nor was Talleyrand's German policy adopted solely as the instrument of a passing intrigue. He appears to have had a true sense of the capacity of Prussia to transform Germany into a great military nation; and the policy of alliance with Austria and protection of the minor States which he pursued in 1814 was that which he had advocated throughout his career. The conclusion of the secret treaty of January 3rd marked the definite success of his plans. France was forthwith admitted into the council hitherto known as that of the Four Courts, and from this time its influence visibly affected the action of Russia and Prussia, reports of the secret treaty having reached the Czar immediately after its signature.  [221] The spirit of compromise now began to animate the Congress. Alexander had already won a virtual decision in his favour on the Polish question, but he abated something of his claims, and while gaining the lion's share of the Duchy of Warsaw, he ultimately consented that Cracow, which threatened the Austrian frontier, should be formed into an independent Republic, and that Prussia should receive the fortresses of Dantzic and Thorn on the Vistula, with the district lying between Thorn and the border of Silesia.[222] This was little for Alexander to abandon; on the Saxon question the allies of Talleyrand gained most that they demanded. The King of Saxony was restored to his throne, and permitted to retain Dresden and about half of his dominions. Prussia received the remainder. In lieu of a further expansion in Saxony, Prussia was awarded territory on the left bank of the Rhine, which, with its recovered Westphalian provinces, restored the monarchy to an area and population equal to that which it had possessed in 1805. But the dominion given to Prussia beyond the Rhine, though considered at the time to be a poor equivalent for the second half of Saxony, was in reality a gift of far greater value. It made Prussia, in defence of its own soil, the guardian and bulwark of Germany against France. It brought an element into the life of the State in striking contrast with the aristocratic and Protestant type predominant in the older Prussian provinces,-a Catholic population, liberal in its political opinions, and habituated by twenty years' union with France to the democratic tendencies of French social life. It gave to Prussia something more in common with Bavaria and the South, and qualified it, as it had not been qualified before, for its future task of uniting Germany under its own leadership.

[Napoleon leaves Elba, Feb. 26.]

[Lands in France, March 1.]

The Polish and Saxon difficulties, which had threatened the peace of Europe, were virtually settled before the end of the month of January. Early in February Lord Castlereagh left Vienna, to give an account of his labours and to justify his policy before the English House of Commons. His place at the Congress was taken by the Duke of Wellington. There remained the question of Naples, the formation of a Federal Constitution for Germany, and several matters of minor political importance, none of which endangered the good understanding of the Powers. Suddenly the action of the Congress was interrupted by the most startling intelligence. On the night of March 6th Metternich was roused from sleep to receive a despatch informing him that Napoleon had quitted Elba. The news had taken eight days to reach Vienna. Napoleon had set sail on the 26th of February. In the silence of his exile he had watched the progress of events in France: he had convinced himself of the strength of the popular reaction against the priests and emigrants; and the latest intelligence which he had received from Vienna led him to believe that the Congress itself was on the point of breaking up. There was at least some chance of success in an attempt to regain his throne; and, the decision once formed, Napoleon executed it with characteristic audacity and despatch. Talleyrand, on hearing that Napoleon had left Elba, declared that he would only cross into Italy and there raise the standard of Italian independence: instead of doing this, Napoleon made straight for France, with the whole of his guard, eleven hundred in number, embarked on a little flotilla of seven ships. The voyage lasted three days: no French or English vessels capable of offering resistance met the squadron. On the 1st of March Napoleon landed at the bay of Jouan, three miles to the west of Antibes. A detachment of his guards called upon the commandant of Antibes to deliver up the town to the Emperor; the commandant refused, and the troops bivouacked that evening, with Napoleon among them, in the olive-woods by the shore of the Mediterranean.

[Moves on Grenoble.]

[Troops at La Mure.]

Before daybreak began the march that was to end in Paris. Instead of following the coast road of Provence, which would have brought him to Toulon and Marseilles, where most of the population were fiercely Royalist,  [223] and where Massena and other great officers might have offered resistance, Napoleon struck northwards into the mountains, intending to descend upon Lyons by way of Grenoble. There were few troops in this district, and no generals capable of influencing them. The peasantry of Dauphiné were in great part holders of land that had been taken from the Church and the nobles: they were exasperated against the Bourbons, and, like the peasantry of France generally, they identified the glory of the country which they loved with the name and the person of Napoleon. As the little band penetrated into the mountains the villagers thronged around them, and by offering their carts and horses enabled Napoleon to march continuously over steep and snowy roads at the rate of forty miles a day. No troops appeared to dispute these mountain passages: it was not until the close of the fifth day's march that Napoleon's mounted guard, pressing on in front of the marching column, encountered, in the village of La Mure, twenty miles south of Grenoble, a regiment of infantry wearing the white cockade of the House of Bourbon. The two bodies of troops mingled and conversed in the street: the officer commanding the royal infantry fearing the effect on his men, led them back on the road towards Grenoble. Napoleon's lancers also retired, and the night passed without further communication. At noon on the following day the lancers, again advancing towards Grenoble, found the infantry drawn up to defend the road. They called out that Napoleon was at hand, and begged the infantry not to fire. Presently Napoleon's column came in sight; one of his aides-de-camp rode to the front of the royal troops, addressed them, and pointed out Napoleon. The regiment was already wavering, the officer commanding had already given the order of retreat, when the men saw their Emperor advancing towards them. They saw his face, they heard his voice: in another moment the ranks were broken, and the soldiers were pressing with shouts and tears round the leader whom nature had created with such transcendent capacity for evil, and endowed with such surpassing power of attracting love.

[Enters Grenoble, March 7.]

[Declaration of his purpose.]

Everything was decided by this first encounter. "In six days," said Napoleon, "we shall be in the Tuileries." The next pledge of victory came swiftly. Colonel Labédoyère, commander of the 7th Regiment of the Line, had openly declared for Napoleon in Grenoble, and appeared on the road at the head of his men a few hours after the meeting at La Mure. Napoleon reached Grenoble the same evening. The town had been in tumult all day. The Préfet fled: the general in command sent part of his troops away, and closed the gates. On Napoleon's approach the population thronged the ramparts with torches; the gates were burst open; Napoleon was borne through the town in triumph by a wild and intermingled crowd of soldiers and workpeople. The whole mass of the poorer classes of the town welcomed him with enthusiasm: the middle classes, though hostile to the Church and the Bourbons, saw too clearly the dangers to France involved in Napoleon's return to feel the same joy.  [224] They remained in the background, neither welcoming Napoleon nor interfering with the welcome offered him by others. Thus the night passed. On the morning of the next day Napoleon received the magistrates and principal inhabitants of the town, and addressed them in terms which formed the substance of every subsequent declaration of his policy. "He had come," he said, "to save France from the outrages of the returning nobles; to secure to the peasant the possession of his land; to uphold the rights won in 1789 against a minority which sought to re-establish the privileges of caste and the feudal burdens of the last century. France had made trial of the Bourbons: it had done well to do so; but the experiment had failed. The Bourbon monarchy had proved incapable of detaching itself from its worst supports, the priests and nobles: only the dynasty which owed its throne to the Revolution could maintain the social work of the Revolution. As for himself, he had learnt wisdom by misfortune. He renounced conquest. He should give France peace without and liberty within. He accepted the Treaty of Paris and the frontiers of 1792. Freed from the necessities which had forced him in earlier days to found a military Empire, he recognised and bowed to the desire of the French nation for constitutional government. He should henceforth govern only as a constitutional sovereign, and seek only to leave a constitutional crown to his son."

[Feeling of the various classes.]

[Napoleon enters Lyons, March 10.]

This language was excellently chosen. It satisfied the peasants and the workmen, who wished to see the nobles crushed, and it showed at least a comprehension of the feelings uppermost in the minds of the wealthier and more educated middle classes, the longing for peace, and the aspiration towards political liberty. It was also calculated to temper the unwelcome impression that an exiled ruler was being forced upon France by the soldiery. The military movement was indeed overwhelmingly decisive, yet the popular movement was scarcely less so. The Royalists were furious, but impotent to act; thoughtful men in all classes held back, with sad apprehensions of returning war and calamity;  [225] but from the time when Napoleon left Grenoble, the nation at large was on his side. There was nowhere an effective centre of resistance. The Préfets and other civil officers appointed under the Empire still for the most part held their posts; they knew themselves to be threatened by the Bourbonist reaction, but they had not yet been displaced; their professions of loyalty to Louis XVIII. were forced, their instincts of obedience to their old master, even if they wished to have done with him, profound. From this class, whose cowardice and servility find too many parallels in history,  [226] Napoleon had little to fear. Among the marshals and higher officers charged with the defence of the monarchy, those who sincerely desired to serve the Bourbons found themselves powerless in the midst of their troops. Macdonald, who commanded at Lyons, had to fly from his men, in order to escape being made a prisoner. The Count of Artois, who had come to join him, discovered that the only service he could render to the cause of his family was to take himself out of sight. Napoleon entered Lyons on the 10th of March, and now formally resumed his rank and functions as Emperor. His first edicts renewed that appeal to the ideas and passions of the Revolution which had been the key-note of every one of his public utterances since leaving Elba. Treating the episode of Bourbon restoration as null and void, the edicts of Lyons expelled from France every emigrant who had returned without the permission of the Republic or the Emperor; they drove from the army the whole mass of officers intruded by the Government of Louis XVIII.; they invalidated every appointment and every dismissal made in the magistracy since the 1st of April, 1814; and, reverting to the law of the Constituent Assembly of 1789, abolished all nobility except that which had been conferred by the Emperor himself.

[Marshal Ney.]

[The Chambers in Paris.]

[Napoleon enters Paris, March 20.]

From this time all was over. Marshal Ney, who had set out from Paris protesting that Napoleon deserved to be confined in an iron cage,  [227] found, when at some distance from Lyons, that the nation and army were on the side of the Emperor, and proclaimed his own adherence to him in an address to his troops. The two Chambers of Legislature, which had been prorogued, were summoned by King Louis XVIII. as soon as the news of Napoleon's landing reached the capital. The Chambers met on the 13th of March. The constitutionalist party, though they had opposed various measures of King Louis' Government as reactionary, were sincerely loyal to the Charta, and hastened, in the cause of constitutional liberty, to offer to the King their cordial support in resisting Bonaparte's military despotism. The King came down to the Legislative Chamber, and, in a scene concerted with his brother, the Count of Artois, made, with great dramatic effect, a declaration of fidelity to the Constitution. Lafayette and the chiefs of the Parliamentary Liberals hoped to raise a sufficient force from the National Guard of Paris to hold Napoleon in check. The project, however, came to nought. The National Guard, which represented the middle classes of Paris, was decidedly in favour of the Charta and Constitutional Government; but it had no leaders, no fighting-organisation, and no military spirit. The regular troops who were sent out against Napoleon mounted the tricolor as soon as they were out of sight of Paris, and joined their comrades. The courtiers passed from threats to consternation and helplessness. On the night of March 19th King Louis fled from the Tuileries. Napoleon entered the capital the next evening, welcomed with acclamations by the soldiers and populace, but not with that general rejoicing which had met him at Lyons, and at many of the smaller towns through which he had passed.

[Congress of Vienna outlaws Napoleon.]

[Napoleon's preparations for defence.]

France was won: Europe remained behind. On the 13th of March the Ministers of all the Great Powers, assembled at Vienna, published a manifesto denouncing Napoleon Bonaparte as the common enemy of mankind, and declaring him an outlaw. The whole political structure which had been reared with so much skill by Talleyrand vanished away. France was again alone, with all Europe combined against it. Affairs reverted to the position in which they had stood in the month of March, 1814, when the Treaty of Chaumont was signed, which bound the Powers to sustain their armed concert against France, if necessary, for a period of twenty years. That treaty was now formally renewed.  [228] The four great Powers undertook to employ their whole available resources against Bonaparte until he should be absolutely unable to create disturbance, and each pledged itself to keep permanently in the field a force of at least a hundred and fifty thousand men. The presence of the Duke of Wellington at Vienna enabled the Allies to decide without delay upon the general plan for their invasion of France. It was resolved to group the allied troops in three masses; one, composed of the English and the Prussians under Wellington and Blücher, to enter France by the Netherlands; the two others, commanded by the Czar and Prince Schwarzenberg, to advance from the middle and upper Rhine. Nowhere was there the least sign of political indecision. The couriers sent by Napoleon with messages of amity to the various Courts were turned back at the frontiers with their despatches undelivered. It was in vain for the Emperor to attempt to keep up any illusion that peace was possible. After a brief interval he himself acquainted France with the true resolution of his enemies. The most strenuous efforts were made for defence. The old soldiers were called from their homes. Factories of arms and ammunition began their hurried work in the principal towns. The Emperor organised with an energy and a command of detail never surpassed at any period of his life; the nature of the situation lent a new character to his genius, and evoked in the organisation of systematic defence all that imagination and resource which had dazzled the world in his schemes of invasion and surprise. Nor, as hitherto, was the nation to be the mere spectator of his exploits. The population of France, its National Guard, its levée en masse, as well as its armies and its Emperor, was to drive the foreigner from French soil. Every operation of defensive warfare, from the accumulation of artillery round the capital to the gathering of forest-guards and free-shooters in the thickets of the Vosges and the Ardennes, occupied in its turn the thoughts of Napoleon.  [229] Had France shared his resolution or his madness, had the Allies found at the outset no chief superior to their Austrian leader in 1814, the war on which they were now about to enter would have been one of immense difficulty and risk, its ultimate issue perhaps doubtful.

[Campaign and fall of Murat, April, 1815]

Before Napoleon or his adversaries were ready to move, hostilities broke out in Italy. Murat, King of Naples, had during the winter of 1814 been represented at Vienna by an envoy: he was aware of the efforts made by Talleyrand to expel him from his throne, and knew that the Government of Great Britain, convinced of his own treachery during the pretended combination with the Allies in 1814, now inclined to act with France.  [230] The instinct of self-preservation led him to risk everything in raising the standard of Italian independence, rather than await the loss of his kingdom; and the return of Napoleon precipitated his fall. At the moment when Napoleon was about to leave Elba, Murat, who knew his intention, asked the permission of Austria to move a body of troops through Northern Italy for the alleged purpose of attacking the French Bourbons, who were preparing to restore his rival, Ferdinand. Austria declared that it should treat the entry either of French or of Neapolitan troops into Northern Italy as an act of war. Murat, as soon as Napoleon's landing in France became known, protested to the Allies that he intended to remain faithful to them, but he also sent assurances of friendship to Napoleon, and forthwith invaded the Papal States. He acted without waiting for Napoleon's instructions, and probably with the intention of winning all Italy for himself even if Napoleon should victoriously re-establish his Empire. On the 10th of April, Austria declared war against him. Murat pressed forward and entered Bologna, now openly proclaiming the unity and independence of Italy. The feeling of the towns and of the educated classes generally seemed to be in his favour, but no national rising took place. After some indecisive encounters with the Austrians, Murat retreated. As he fell back towards the Neapolitan frontier, his troops melted away. The enterprise ended in swift and total ruin; and on the 22nd of May an English and Austrian force took possession of the city of Naples in the name of King Ferdinand. Murat, leaving his family behind him, fled to France, and sought in vain to gain a place by the side of Napoleon in his last great struggle, and to retrieve as a soldier the honour which he had lost as a king.  [231]

[The Acte Additionnel, April 23, 1815.]

In the midst of his preparations for war with all Europe, Napoleon found it necessary to give some satisfaction to that desire for liberty which was again so strong in France. He would gladly have deferred all political change until victory over the foreigner had restored his own undisputed ascendency over men's minds; he was resolved at any rate not to be harassed by a Constituent Assembly, like that of 1789, at the moment of his greatest peril; and the action of King Louis XVIII. in granting liberty by Charta gave him a precedent for creating a Constitution by an Edict supplementary to the existing laws of the Empire. Among the Liberal politicians who had declared for King Louis XVIII. while Napoleon was approaching Paris, one of the most eminent was Benjamin Constant, who had published an article attacking the Emperor with great severity on the very day when he entered the capital. Napoleon now invited Constant to the Tuileries, assured him that he no longer either desired or considered it possible to maintain an absolute rule in France, and requested Constant himself to undertake the task of drawing up a Constitution. Constant, believing the Emperor to be in some degree sincere, accepted the proposals made to him, and, at the cost of some personal consistency, entered upon the work, in which Napoleon by no means allowed him entire freedom.  [232] The result of Constant's labours was the Decree known as the Acte Additionnel of 1815. The leading provisions of this Act resembled those of the Charta: both professed to establish a representative Government and the responsibility of Ministers; both contained the usual phrases guaranteeing freedom of religion and security of person and property. The principal differences were that the Chamber of Peers was now made wholly hereditary, and that the Emperor absolutely refused to admit the clause of the Charta abolishing confiscation as a penalty for political offences. On the other hand, Constant definitely extinguished the censorship of the Press, and provided some real guarantee for the free expression of opinion by enacting that Press-offences should be judged only in the ordinary Jury-courts. Constant was sanguine enough to believe that the document which he had composed would reduce Napoleon to the condition of a constitutional king. As a Liberal statesman, he pressed the Emperor to submit the scheme to a Representative Assembly, where it could be examined and amended. This Napoleon refused to do, preferring to resort to the fiction of a Plébiscite for the purpose of procuring some kind of national sanction for his Edict. The Act was published on the 23rd of April, 1815. Voting lists were then opened in all the Departments, and the population of France, most of whom were unable to read or write, were invited to answer Yes or No to the question whether they approved of Napoleon's plan for giving his subjects Parliamentary government.

[The Chambers summoned for June.]

There would have been no difficulty in obtaining some millions of votes for any absurdity that the Emperor might be pleased to lay before the French people; but among the educated minority who had political theories of their own, the publication of this reform by Edict produced the worst possible impression. No stronger evidence, it was said, could have been given of the Emperor's insincerity than the dictatorial form in which he affected to bestow liberty upon France. Scarcely a voice was raised in favour of the new Constitution. The measure had in fact failed of its effect. Napoleon's object was to excite an enthusiasm that should lead the entire nation, the educated classes as well as the peasantry, to rally round him in a struggle with the foreigner for life or death: he found, on the contrary, that he had actually injured his cause. The hostility of public opinion was so serious that Napoleon judged it wise to make advances to the Liberal party, and sent his brother Joseph to Lafayette, to ascertain on what terms he might gain his support.  [233] Lafayette, strongly condemning the form of the Acte Additionnel, stated that the Emperor could only restore public confidence by immediately convoking the Chambers. This was exactly what Napoleon desired to avoid, until he had defeated the English and Prussians; nor in fact had the vote of the nation accepting the new Constitution yet been given. But the urgency of the need overcame the Emperor's inclinations and the forms of law. Lafayette's demand was granted: orders were issued for an immediate election, and the meeting of the Chambers fixed for the beginning of June, a few days earlier than the probable departure of the Emperor to open hostilities on the northern frontier.

[Elections.]

Lafayette's counsel had been given in sincerity, but Napoleon gained little by following it. The nation at large had nothing of the faith in the elections which was felt by Lafayette and his friends. In some places not a single person appeared at the poll: in most, the candidates were elected by a few scores of voters. The Royalists absented themselves on principle: the population generally thought only of the coming war, and let the professed politicians conduct the business of the day by themselves. Among the deputies chosen there were several who had sat in the earlier Assemblies of the Revolution; and, mingled with placemen and soldiers of the Empire, a considerable body of men whose known object was to reduce Napoleon's power. One interest alone was unrepresented-that of the Bourbon family, which so lately seemed to have been called to the task of uniting the old and the new France around itself.

[Champ de Mai.]

Napoleon, troubling himself little about the elections, laboured incessantly at his preparations for war, and by the end of May two hundred thousand men were ready to take the field. The delay of the Allies, though necessary, enabled their adversary to take up the offensive. It was the intention of the Emperor to leave a comparatively small force to watch the eastern frontier, and himself, at the head of a hundred and twenty-five thousand men, to fall upon Wellington and Blücher in the Netherlands, and crush them before they could unite their forces. With this object the greater part of the army was gradually massed on the northern roads at points between Paris, Lille, and Maubeuge. Two acts of State remained to be performed by the Emperor before he quitted the capital; the inauguration of the new Constitution and the opening of the Chambers of Legislature. The first, which had been fixed for the 26th of May, and announced as a revival of the old Frankish Champ de Mai, was postponed till the beginning of the following month. On the 1st of June the solemnity was performed with extraordinary pomp and splendour, on that same Champ de Mars where, twenty-five years before, the grandest and most affecting of all the festivals of the Revolution, the Act of Federation, had been celebrated by King Louis XVI. and his people. Deputations from each of the constituencies of France, from the army, and from every public body, surrounded the Emperor in a great amphitheatre enclosed at the southern end of the plain: outside there were ranged twenty thousand soldiers of the Guard and other regiments; and behind them spread the dense crowd of Paris. When the total of the votes given in the Plébiscite had been summed up and declared, the Emperor took the oath to the Constitution, and delivered one of his masterpieces of political rhetoric. The great officers of State took the oath in their turn: mass was celebrated, and Napoleon, leaving the enclosed space, then presented their standards to the soldiery in the Champ de Mars, addressing some brief, soul-stirring word to each regiment as it passed. The spectacle was magnificent, but except among the soldiers themselves a sense of sadness and disappointment passed over the whole assembly. The speech of the Emperor showed that he was still the despot at heart: the applause was forced: all was felt to be ridiculous, all unreal.  [234]

[Plan of Napoleon.]

The opening of the Legislative Chambers took place a few days later, and on the night of the 11th of June Napoleon started for the northern frontier. The situation of the forces opposed to him in this his last campaign strikingly resembled that which had given him his first Italian victory in 1796. Then the Austrians and Sardinians, resting on opposite bases, covered the approaches to the Sardinian capital, and invited the assailant to break through their centre and drive the two defeated wings along diverging and severed paths of retreat. Now the English and the Prussians covered Brussels, the English resting westward on Ostend, the Prussians eastward on Cologne, and barely joining hands in the middle of a series of posts nearly eighty miles long. The Emperor followed the strategy of 1796. He determined to enter Belgium by the central road of Charleroi, and to throw his main force upon Blücher, whose retreat, if once he should be severed from his colleague, would carry him eastwards towards Liège, and place him outside the area of hostilities round Brussels. Blücher driven eastwards, Napoleon believed that he might not only push the English commander out of Brussels, but possibly, by a movement westwards, intercept him from the sea and cut off his communication with Great Britain.  [235]

[Situation of the armies.]

On the night of the 13th of June, the French army, numbering a hundred and twenty-nine thousand men, had completed its concentration, and lay gathered round Beaumont and Philippeville. Wellington was at Brussels; his troops, which consisted of thirty-five thousand English and about sixty thousand Dutch, Germans, and Belgians, [236] guarded the country west of the Charleroi road as far as Oudenarde on the Scheldt. Blücher's headquarters were at Namur; he had a hundred and twenty thousand Prussians under his command, who were posted between Charleroi, Namur, and Liège. Both the English and Prussian generals were aware that very large French forces had been brought close to the frontier, but Wellington imagined Napoleon to be still in Paris, and believed that the war would be opened by a forward movement of Prince Schwarzenberg into Alsace. It was also his fixed conviction that if Napoleon entered Belgium he would throw himself not upon the Allied centre, but upon the extreme right of the English towards the sea.  [237] In the course of the 14th, the Prussian outposts reported that the French were massed round Beaumont: later in the same day there were clear signs of an advance upon Charleroi. Early next morning the attack on Charleroi began. The Prussians were driven out of it, and retreated in the direction of Ligny, whither Blücher now brought up all the forces within his reach. It was unknown to Wellington until the afternoon of the 15th that the French had made any movement whatever: on receiving the news of their advance, he ordered a concentrating movement of all his forces eastward, in order to cover the road to Brussels and to co-operate with the Prussian general. A small division of the British army took post at Quatre Bras that night, and on the morning of the 16th Wellington himself rode to Ligny, and promised his assistance to Blücher, whose troops were already drawn up and awaiting the attack of the French.

[Ligny, June 16.]

But the march of the invader was too rapid for the English to reach the field of battle. Already, on returning to Quatre Bras in the afternoon, Wellington found his own troops hotly engaged. Napoleon had sent Ney along the road to Brussels to hold the English in check and, if possible, to enter the capital, while he himself, with seventy thousand men, attacked Blücher. The Prussian general had succeeded in bringing up a force superior in number to his assailants; but the French army, which consisted in a great part of veterans recalled to the ranks, was of finer quality than any that Napoleon had led since the campaign of Moscow, and it was in vain that Blücher and his soldiers met them with all the gallantry and even more than the fury of 1813. There was murderous hand-to-hand fighting in the villages where the Prussians had taken up their position: now the defenders, now the assailants gave way: but at last the Prussians, with a loss of thirteen thousand men, withdrew from the combat, and left the battle-field in possession of the enemy. If the conquerors had followed up the pursuit that night, the cause of the Allies would have been ruined. The effort of battle had, however, been too great, or the estimate which Napoleon made of his adversary's rallying power was too low. He seems to have assumed that Blücher must necessarily retreat eastwards towards Namur; while in reality the Prussian was straining every nerve to escape northwards, and to restore his severed communication with his ally.

[Quatre Bras, June 16.]

At Quatre Bras the issue of the day was unfavourable to the French. Ney missed his opportunity of seizing this important point before it was occupied by the British in any force; and when the battle began the British infantry-squares unflinchingly bore the attack of Ney's cavalry, and drove them back again and again with their volleys, until successive reinforcements had made the numbers on both sides even. At the close of the day the French marshal, baffled and disheartened, drew back his troops to their original position. The army-corps of General d'Erlon, which Napoleon had placed between himself and Ney in order that it might act wherever there was the greatest need, was first withdrawn from Ney to assist at Ligny, and then, as it was entering into action at Ligny, recalled to Quatre Bras, where it arrived only after the battle was over. Its presence in either field would probably have altered the issue of the campaign.

[Prussian movement.]

Blücher, on the night of the 16th, lay disabled and almost senseless; his lieutenant, Gneisenau, not only saved the army, but repaired, and more than repaired, all its losses by a memorable movement northwards that brought the Prussians again into communication with the British. Napoleon, after an unexplained inaction during the night of the 16th and the morning of the 17th, committed the pursuit of the Prussians to Marshal Grouchy, ordering him never to let the enemy out of his sight; but Blücher and Gneisenau had already made their escape, and had concentrated so large a body in the neighbourhood of Wavre, that Grouchy could not now have prevented a force superior to his own from uniting with the English, even if he had known the exact movements of each of the three armies, and, with a true presentiment of his master's danger, had attempted to rejoin him on the morrow.

Wellington, who had both anticipated that Blücher would be beaten at Ligny, and assured himself that the Prussian would make good his retreat northwards, moved on the 17th from Quatre Bras to Waterloo, now followed by Napoleon and the mass of the French army. At Waterloo he drew up for battle, trusting to the promise of the gallant Prussian that he would advance in that direction on the following day. Blücher, in so doing, exposed himself to the risk of having his communications severed and half his army captured, if Napoleon should either change the direction of his main attack and bend eastwards, or should crush Wellington before the arrival of the Prussians, and seize the road from Brussels to Louvain with a victorious force. Such considerations would have driven a commander like Schwarzenberg back to Liège, but they were thrown to the winds by Blücher and Gneisenau. In just reliance on his colleague's energy, Wellington, with thirty thousand English and forty thousand Dutch, Germans, and Belgians, awaited the attack of Napoleon, at the head of seventy-four thousand veteran soldiers. The English position extended two miles along the brow of a gentle slope of cornfields, and crossed at right angles the great road from Charleroi to Brussels; the château of Hugomont, some way down the slope on the right, and the farmhouse of La Haye Sainte, on the high-road in front of the left centre, served as fortified outposts. The French formed on the opposite and corresponding slope; the country was so open that, but for the heavy rain on the evening of the 17th, artillery could have moved over almost any part of the field with perfect freedom.

[Waterloo, June 18.]

At eleven o'clock on Sunday, the 18th of June, the battle began. Napoleon, unconscious of the gathering of the Prussians on his right, and unacquainted with the obstinacy of English troops, believed the victory already thrown into his hands by Wellington's hardihood. His plan was to burst through the left of the English line near La Haye Sainte, and thus to drive Wellington westwards and place the whole French army between its two defeated enemies. The first movement was an assault on the buildings of Hugomont, made for the purpose of diverting Wellington from the true point of attack. The English commander sent detachments to this outpost sufficient to defend it, but no more. After two hours' indecisive fighting and a heavy cannonade, Ney ordered D'Erlon's corps forward to the great onslaught on the centre and left. As the French column pressed up the slope, General Picton charged at the head of a brigade. The English leader was among the first to fall, but his men drove the enemy back, and at the same time the Scots Greys, sweeping down from the left, cut right through both the French infantry and their cavalry supports, and, charging far up the opposite slope, reached and disabled forty of Ney's guns, before they were in their turn overpowered and driven back by the French dragoons. The English lost heavily, but the onslaught of the enemy had totally failed, and thousands of prisoners remained behind. There was a pause in the infantry combat; and again the artillery of Napoleon battered the English centre, while Ney marshalled fresh troops for a new and greater effort. About two o'clock the attack was renewed on the left. La Haye Sainte was carried, and vast masses of cavalry pressed up the English slope, and rode over the plateau to the very front of the English line. Wellington sent no cavalry to meet them, but trusted, and trusted justly, to the patience and endurance of the infantry themselves, who, hour after hour, held their ground, unmoved by the rush of the enemy's horse and the terrible spectacle of havoc and death in their own ranks; for all through the afternoon the artillery of Napoleon poured its fire wherever the line was left open, or the assault of the French cavalry rolled back.

At last the approach of the Prussians visibly told. Napoleon had seen their vanguard early in the day, and had detached Count Lobau with seven thousand men to hold them in check; but the little Prussian corps gradually swelled to an army, and as the day wore on it was found necessary to reinforce Count Lobau with some of the finest divisions of the French infantry. Still reports came in of new Prussian columns approaching. At six o'clock Napoleon prepared to throw his utmost strength into one grand final attack upon the British, and to sweep them away before the battle became general with their allies. Two columns of the Imperial Guard, supported by every available regiment, moved from the right and left towards the English centre. The column on the right, unchecked by the storm of Wellington's cannon-shot from front and flank, pushed to the very ridge of the British slope, and came within forty yards of the cross-road where the English Guard lay hidden. Then Wellington gave the order to fire. The French recoiled; the English advanced at the charge, and drove the enemy down the hill, returning themselves for a while to their own position. The left column of the French Guard attacked with equal bravery, and met with the same fate. Then, while the French were seeking to re-form at the bottom of the hill, Wellington commanded a general advance. The whole line of the British infantry and cavalry swept down into the valley; before them the baffled and sorely-stricken host of the enemy broke into a confused mass; only the battalions of the old Guard, which had halted in the rear of the attacking columns, remained firm together. Blücher, from the east, dealt the death-blow, and, pressing on to the road by which the French were escaping, turned the defeat into utter ruin and dispersion. The pursuit, which Wellington's troops were too exhausted to attempt, was carried on throughout the night by the Prussian cavalry with memorable ardour and terrible success. Before the morning the French army was no more than a rabble of fugitives.

[Napoleon at Paris.]

[Allies enter Paris, July 7.]

Napoleon fled to Philippeville, and made some ineffectual attempts both there and at Laon to fix a rallying point for his vanished forces. From Laon he hastened to Paris, which he reached at sunrise on the 21st. His bulletin describing the defeat of Waterloo was read to the Chambers on the same morning. The Lower House immediately declared against the Emperor, and demanded his abdication. Unless Napoleon seized the dictatorship his cause was lost. Carnot and Lucien Bonaparte urged him to dismiss the Chambers and to stake all on his own strong will; but they found no support among the Emperor's counsellors. On the next day Napoleon abdicated in favour of his son. But it was in vain that he attempted to impose an absent successor upon France, and to maintain his own Ministers in power. It was equally in vain that Carnot, filled with the memories of 1793, called upon the Assembly to continue the war and to provide for the defence of Paris. A Provisional Government entered upon office. Days were spent in inaction and debate while the Allies advanced through France. On the 28th of June, the Prussians appeared on the north of the capital; and, as the English followed, they moved to the south of the Seine, out of the range of the fortifications with which Napoleon had covered the side of St. Denis and Montmartre. Davoust, with almost all the generals in Paris, declared defence to be impossible. On the 3rd of July, a capitulation was signed. The remnants of the French army were required to withdraw beyond the Loire. The Provisional Government dissolved itself; the Allied troops entered the capital and on the following day the Members of the Chamber of Deputies, on arriving at their Hall of Assembly, found the gates closed, and a detachment of soldiers in possession. France was not, even as a matter of form, consulted as to its future government. Louis XVIII. was summarily restored to his throne. Napoleon, who had gone to Rochefort with the intention of sailing to the United States, lingered at Rochefort until escape was no longer possible, and then embarked on the British ship Bellerophon, commending himself, as a second Themistocles, to the generosity of the Prince Regent of England. He who had declared that the lives of a million men were nothing to him  [238] trusted to the folly or the impotence of the English nation to provide him with some agreeable asylum until he could again break loose and deluge Europe with blood. But the lesson of 1814 had been learnt. Some island in the ocean far beyond the equator formed the only prison for a man whom no European sovereign could venture to guard, and whom no fortress-walls could have withdrawn from the attention of mankind. Napoleon was conveyed to St. Helena. There, until at the end of six years death removed him, he experienced some trifling share of the human misery that he had despised.

[Wellington and Fouché.]

Victory had come so swiftly that the Allied Governments were unprepared with terms of peace. The Czar and the Emperor of Austria were still at Heidelberg when the battle of Waterloo was fought; they had advanced no further than Nancy when the news reached them that Paris had surrendered. Both now hastened to the capital, where Wellington was already exercising the authority to which his extraordinary successes as well as his great political superiority over all the representatives of the Allies then present, entitled him. Before the entry of the English and Prussian troops into Paris he had persuaded Louis XVIII. to sever himself from the party of reaction by calling to office the regicide Fouché, head of the existing Provisional Government. Fouché had been guilty of the most atrocious crimes at Lyons in 1793; he had done some of the worst work of each succeeding government in France; and, after returning to his old place as Napoleon's Minister of Police during the Hundred Days, he had intrigued as early as possible for the restoration of Louis XVIII., if indeed he had not held treasonable communication with the enemy during the campaign. His sole claim to power was that every gendarme and every informer in France had at some time acted as his agent, and that, as a regicide in office, he might possibly reconcile Jacobins and Bonapartists to the second return of the Bourbon family. Such was the man whom, in association with Talleyrand, the Duke of Wellington found himself compelled to propose as Minister to Louis XVIII. The appointment, it was said, was humiliating, but it was necessary; and with the approval of the Count of Artois the King invited this blood-stained eavesdropper to an interview and placed him in office. Need subdued the scruples of the courtiers: it could not subdue the resentment of that grief-hardened daughter of Louis XVI. whom Napoleon termed the only man of her family. The Duchess of Angoulême might have forgiven the Jacobin Fouché the massacres at Lyons: she refused to speak to a Minister whom she termed one of the murderers of her father.

[Disagreement on terms of peace.]

Fouché had entered into a private negotiation with Wellington while the English were on the outskirts of Paris, and while the authorised envoys of the Assembly were engaged elsewhere. Wellington's motive for recommending him to the King was the indifference or hostility felt by some of the Allies to Louis XVIII. personally, which led the Duke to believe that if Louis did not regain his throne before the arrival of the sovereigns he might never regain it at all.  [239] Fouché was the one man who could at that moment throw open the road to the Tuileries. If his overtures were rejected, he might either permit Carnot to offer some desperate resistance outside Paris, or might retire himself with the army and the Assembly beyond the Loire, and there set up a Republican Government. With Fouché and Talleyrand united in office under Louis XVIII., there was no fear either of a continuance of the war or of the suggestion of a change of dynasty on the part of any of the Allies. By means of the Duke's independent action Louis XVIII. was already in possession when the Czar arrived at Paris, and nothing now prevented the definite conclusion of peace but the disagreement of the Allies themselves as to the terms to be exacted. Prussia, which had suffered so bitterly from Napoleon, demanded that Europe should not a second time deceive itself with the hollow guarantee of a Bourbon restoration, but should gain a real security for peace by detaching Alsace and Lorraine, as well as a line of northern fortresses, from the French monarchy. Lord Liverpool, Prime Minister of England, stated it to be the prevailing opinion in this country that France might fairly be stripped of the principal conquests made by Louis XIV.; but he added that if Napoleon, who was then at large, should become a prisoner, England would waive a permanent cession of territory, on condition that France should be occupied by foreign armies until it had, at its own cost, restored the barrier-fortresses of the Netherlands.  [240] Metternich for a while held much the same language as the Prussian Minister: Alexander alone declared from the first against any reduction of the territory of France, and appealed to the declarations of the Powers that the sole object of the war was the destruction of Napoleon and the maintenance of the order established by the Peace of Paris.

[Arguments for and against cessions.]

[Prussia isolated.]

[Second Treaty of Paris, Nov. 20.]

The arguments for and against the severance of the border-provinces from France were drawn at great length by diplomatists, but all that was essential in them was capable of being very briefly put. On the one side, it was urged by Stein and Hardenberg that the restoration of the Bourbons in 1814 with an undiminished territory had not prevented France from placing itself at the end of a few months under the rule of the military despot whose life was one series of attacks on his neighbours: that the expectation of long-continued peace, under whatever dynasty, was a vain one so long as the French possessed a chain of fortresses enabling them at any moment to throw large armies into Germany or the Netherlands: and finally, that inasmuch as Germany, and not England or Russia, was exposed to these irruptions, Germany had the first right to have its interests consulted in providing for the public security. On the other side, it was argued by the Emperor Alexander, and with far greater force by the Duke of Wellington,  [241] that the position of the Bourbons would be absolutely hopeless if their restoration, besides being the work of foreign armies, was accompanied by the loss of French provinces: that the French nation, although it had submitted to Napoleon, had not as a matter of fact offered the resistance to the Allies which it was perfectly capable of offering: and that the danger of any new aggressive or revolutionary movement might be effectually averted by keeping part of France occupied by the Allied forces until the nation had settled down into tranquillity under an efficient government. Notes embodying these arguments were exchanged between the Ministers of the great Powers during the months of July and August. The British Cabinet, which had at first inclined to the Prussian view, accepted the calm judgment of Wellington, and transferred itself to the side of the Czar. Metternich went with the majority. Hardenberg, thus left alone, abandoned point after point in his demands, and consented at last that France should cede little more than the border-strips which had been added by the Peace of 1814 to its frontier of 1791. Chambéry and the rest of French Savoy, Landau and Saarlouis on the German side, Philippeville and some other posts on the Belgian frontier, were fixed upon as the territory to be surrendered. The resolution of the Allied Governments was made known to Louis XVIII. towards the end of September. Negotiation on details dragged on for two months more, while France itself underwent a change of Ministry; and the definitive Treaty of Peace, known as the second Treaty of Paris, was not signed until November the 20th. France escaped without substantial loss of territory; it was, however, compelled to pay indemnities amounting in all to about £40,000,000; to consent to the occupation of its northern provinces by an Allied force of 150,000 men for a period not exceeding five years; and to defray the cost of this occupation out of its own revenues. The works of art taken from other nations, which the Allies had allowed France to retain in 1814, had already been restored to their rightful owners. No act of the conquerors in 1815 excited more bitter or more unreasonable complaint.

[Treaty of Holy Alliance, Sept. 26.]

It was in the interval between the entry of the Allies into Paris and the definitive conclusion of peace that a treaty was signed which has gained a celebrity in singular contrast with its real insignificance, the Treaty of Holy Alliance. Since the terrible events of 1812 the Czar's mind had taken a strongly religious tinge. His private life continued loose as before; his devotion was both very well satisfied with itself and a prey to mysticism and imposture in others; but, if alloyed with many weaknesses, it was at least sincere, and, like Alexander's other feelings, it naturally sought expression in forms which seemed theatrical to stronger natures. Alexander had rendered many public acts of homage to religion in the intervals of diplomatic and military success in the year 1814; and after the second capture of Paris he drew up a profession of religious and political faith, embodying, as he thought, those high principles by which the Sovereigns of Europe, delivered from the iniquities of Napoleon, were henceforth to maintain the reign of peace and righteousness on earth.[242] This document, which resembled the pledge of a religious brotherhood, formed the draft of the Treaty of the Holy Alliance. The engagement, as one binding on the conscience, was for the consideration of the Sovereigns alone, not of their Ministers; and in presenting it to the Emperor Francis and King Frederick William, the Czar is said to have acted with an air of great mystery. The King of Prussia, a pious man, signed the treaty in seriousness; the Emperor of Austria, who possessed a matter-of-fact humour, said that if the paper related to doctrines of religion, he must refer it to his confessor, if to secrets of State, to Prince Metternich. What the confessor may have thought of the Czar's political evangel is not known: the opinion delivered by the Minister was not a sympathetic one. "It is verbiage," said Metternich; and his master, though unwillingly, signed the treaty. With England the case was still worse. As the Prince Regent was not in Paris, Alexander had to confide the articles of the Holy Alliance to Lord Castlereagh. Of all things in the world the most incomprehensible to Castlereagh was religious enthusiasm. "The fact is," he wrote home to the English Premier, "that the Emperor's mind is not completely sound."  [243] Apart, however, from the Czar's sanity or insanity, it was impossible for the Prince Regent, or for any person except the responsible Minister, to sign a treaty, whether it meant anything or nothing, in the name of Great Britain. Castlereagh was in great perplexity. On the one hand, he feared to wound a powerful ally; on the other, he dared not violate the forms of the Constitution. A compromise was invented. The Treaty of the Holy Alliance was not graced with the name of the Prince Regent, but the Czar received a letter declaring that his principles had the personal approval of this great authority on religion and morality. The Kings of Naples and Sardinia were the next to subscribe, and in due time the names of the witty glutton, Louis XVIII., and of the abject Ferdinand of Spain were added. Two potentates alone received no invitation from the Czar to enter the League: the Pope, because he possessed too much authority within the Christian Church, and the Sultan, because he possessed none at all.

[Treaty between the Four Powers, Nov. 20.]

Such was the history of the Treaty of Holy Alliance, of which, it may be safely said, no single person connected with it, except the Czar and the King of Prussia, thought without a smile. The common belief that this Treaty formed the basis of a great monarchical combination against Liberal principles is erroneous; for, in the first place, no such combination existed before the year 1818; and, in the second place, the Czar, who was the author of the Treaty, was at this time the zealous friend of Liberalism both in his own and in other countries. The concert of the Powers was indeed provided for by articles signed on the same day as the Peace of Paris; but this concert, which, unlike the Holy Alliance, included England, was directed towards the perpetual exclusion of Napoleon from power, and the maintenance of the established Government in France. The Allies pledged themselves to act in union if revolution or usurpation should again convulse France and endanger the repose of other States, and undertook to resist with their whole force any attack that might be made upon the army of occupation. The federative unity which for a moment Europe seemed to have gained from the struggle against Napoleon, and the belief existing in some quarters in its long continuance, were strikingly shown in the last article of this Quadruple Treaty, which provided that, after the holding of a Congress at the end of three or more years, the Sovereigns or Ministers of all the four great Powers should renew their meetings at fixed intervals, for the purpose of consulting upon their common interests, and considering the measures best fitted to secure the repose and prosperity of nations, and the continuance of the peace of Europe.  [244]

[German Federation.]

Thus terminated, certainly without any undue severity, yet not without some loss to the conquered nation, the work of 1815 in France. In the meantime the Congress of Vienna, though interrupted by the renewal of war, had resumed and completed its labours. One subject of the first importance remained unsettled when Napoleon returned, the federal organisation of Germany. This work had been referred by the Powers in the autumn of 1814 to a purely German committee, composed of the representatives of Austria and Prussia and of three of the Minor States; but the first meetings of the committee only showed how difficult was the problem, and how little the inclination in most quarters to solve it. The objects with which statesmen like Stein demanded an effective federation were thoroughly plain and practical. They sought, in the first place, that Germany should be rendered capable of defending itself against the foreigner; and in the second place, that the subjects of the minor princes, who had been made absolute rulers by Napoleon, should now be guaranteed against despotic oppression. To secure Germany from being again conquered by France, it was necessary that the members of the League, great and small, should abandon something of their separate sovereignty, and create a central authority with the sole right of making war and alliances. To protect the subjects of the minor princes from the abuse of power, it was necessary that certain definite civil rights and a measure of representative government should be assured by Federal Law to the inhabitants of every German State, and enforced by the central authority on the appeal of subjects against their Sovereigns. There was a moment when some such form of German union had seemed to be close at hand, the moment when Prussia began its final struggle with Napoleon, and the commander of the Czar's army threatened the German vassals of France with the loss of their thrones (Feb., 1813). But even then no statesman had satisfied himself how Prussia and Austria were to unite in submission to a Federal Government; and from the time when Austria made terms with the vassal princes little hope of establishing a really effective authority at the centre of Germany remained. Stein, at the Congress of Vienna, once more proposed to restore the title and the long-vanished powers of the Emperor; but he found no inclination on the part of Metternich to promote his schemes for German unity, while some of the minor princes flatly refused to abandon any fraction of their sovereignty over their own subjects. The difficulties in the way of establishing a Federal State were great, perhaps insuperable; the statesmen anxious for it few in number; the interests opposed to it all but universal. Stein saw that the work was intended to be unsubstantial, and withdrew himself from it before its completion. The Act of Federation,  [245] which was signed on the 8th of June, created a Federal Diet, forbade the members of the League to enter into alliances against the common interest, and declared that in each State, Constitutions should be established. But it left the various Sovereigns virtually independent of the League; it gave the nomination of members of the Diet to the Governments absolutely, without a vestige of popular election; and it contained no provision for enforcing in any individual State, whose ruler might choose to disregard it, the principle of constitutional rule. Whether the Federation would in any degree have protected Germany in case of attack by France or Russia is matter for conjecture, since a long period of peace followed the year 1815; but so far was it from securing liberty to the Minor States, that in the hands of Metternich the Diet, impotent for every other purpose, became an instrument for the persecution of liberal opinion and for the suppression of the freedom of the press.

[Final Act of the Congress, June 10.]

German affairs, as usual, were the last to be settled at the Congress; when these were at length disposed of, the Congress embodied the entire mass of its resolutions in one great Final Act  [246] of a hundred and twenty-one articles, which was signed a few days before the battle of Waterloo was fought. This Act, together with the second Treaty of Paris, formed the public law with which Europe emerged from the warfare of a quarter of a century, and entered upon a period which proved, even more than it was expected to prove, one of long-lasting peace. Standing on the boundary-line between two ages, the legislation of Vienna forms a landmark in history. The provisions of the Congress have sometimes been criticised as if that body had been an assemblage of philosophers, bent only on advancing the course of human progress, and endowed with the power of subduing the selfish impulses of every Government in Europe. As a matter of fact the Congress was an arena where national and dynastic interests struggled for satisfaction by every means short of actual war. To inquire whether the Congress accomplished all that it was possible to accomplish for Europe is to inquire whether Governments at that moment forgot all their own ambitions and opportunities, and thought only of the welfare of mankind. Russia would not have given up Poland without war; Austria would not have given up Lombardy and Venice without war. The only measures of 1814-15 in which the common interest was really the dominant motive were those adopted either with the view of strengthening the States immediately exposed to attack by France, or in the hope of sparing France itself the occasion for new conflicts. The union of Holland and Belgium, and the annexation of the Genoese Republic to Sardinia, were the means adopted for the former end; for the latter, the relinquishment of all claims to Alsace and Lorraine. These were the measures in which the statesmen of 1814-15 acted with their hands free, and by these their foresight may fairly be judged. Of the union of Belgium to Holland it is not too much to say that, although planned by Pitt, and treasured by every succeeding Ministry as one of his wisest schemes, it was wholly useless and inexpedient. The tranquillity of Western Europe was preserved during fifteen years, not by yoking together discordant nationalities, but by the general desire to avoid war; and as soon as France seriously demanded the liberation of Belgium from Holland, it had to be granted. Nor can it be believed that the addition of the hostile and discontented population of Genoa to the kingdom of Piedmont would have saved that monarchy from invasion if war had again arisen. The annexation of Genoa was indeed fruitful of results, but not of results which Pitt and his successors had anticipated. It was intended to strengthen the House of Savoy for the purpose of resistance to France:  [247] it did strengthen the House of Savoy, but as the champion of Italy against Austria. It was intended to withdraw the busy trading city Genoa from the influences of French democracy: in reality it brought a strong element of innovation into the Piedmontese State itself, giving, on the one hand, a bolder and more national spirit to its Government, and, on the other hand, elevating to the ideal of a united Italy those who, like the Genoese Mazzini, were now no longer born to be the citizens of a free Republic. In sacrificing the ancient liberty of Genoa, the Congress itself unwittingly began the series of changes which was to refute the famous saying of Metternich, that Italy was but a geographical expression.

[Alsace and Lorraine.]

But if the policy of 1814-15 in the affairs of Belgium and Piedmont only proves how little an average collection of statesmen can see into the future, the policy which, in spite of Waterloo, left France in possession of an undiminished territory, does no discredit to the foresight, as it certainly does the highest honour to the justice and forbearance of Wellington, whose counsels then turned the scale. The wisdom of the resolution has indeed been frequently impugned. German statesmen held then, and have held ever since, that the opportunity of disarming France once for all of its weapons of attack was wantonly thrown away. Hardenberg, when his arguments for annexation of the frontier-fortresses were set aside, predicted that streams of blood would hereafter flow for the conquest of Alsace and Lorraine,  [248] and his prediction has been fulfilled. Yet no one perhaps would have been more astonished than Hardenberg himself, could he have known that fifty-five years of peace between France and Prussia would precede the next great struggle. When the same period of peace shall have followed the acquisition of Metz and Strasburg by Prussia, it will be time to condemn the settlement of 1815 as containing the germ of future wars; till then, the effects of that settlement in maintaining peace are entitled to recognition. It is impossible to deny that the Allies, in leaving to France the whole of its territory in 1815, avoided inflicting the most galling of all tokens of defeat upon a spirited and still most powerful nation. The loss of Belgium and the frontier of the Rhine was keenly enough felt for thirty years to come, and made no insignificant part of the French people ready at any moment to rush into war; how much greater the power of the war-cry, how hopeless the task of restraint, if to the other motives for war there had been added the liberation of two of the most valued provinces of France. Without this the danger was great enough. Thrice at least in the next thirty years the balance seemed to be turning against the continuance of peace. An offensive alliance between France and Russia was within view when the Bourbon monarchy fell; the first years of Louis Philippe all but saw the revolutionary party plunge France into war for Belgium and for Italy; ten years later the dismissal of a Ministry alone prevented the outbreak of hostilities on the distant affairs of Syria. Had Alsace and Lorraine at this time been in the hands of disunited Germany, it is hard to believe that the Bourbon dynasty would not have averted, or sought to avert, its fall by a popular war, or that the victory of Louis Philippe over the war-party, difficult even when there was no French soil to reconquer, would have been possible. The time indeed came when a new Bonaparte turned to enterprises of aggression the resources which Europe had left unimpaired to his country; but to assume that the cessions proposed in 1815 would have made France unable to move, with or without allies, half a century afterwards, is to make a confident guess in a doubtful matter; and, with Germany in the condition in which it remained after 1815, it is at least as likely that the annexation of Alsace and Lorraine would have led to the early reconquest of the Rhenish provinces by France, or to a war between Austria and Prussia, as that it would have prolonged the period of European peace beyond that distant limit which it actually reached.

[English efforts at the Congress to abolish the slave-trade.]

Among the subjects which were pressed upon the Congress of Vienna there was one in which the pursuit of national interests and calculations of policy bore no part, the abolition of the African slave-trade. The British people, who, after twenty years of combat in the cause of Europe, had earned so good a right to ask something of their allies, probably attached a deeper importance to this question than to any in the whole range of European affairs, with the single exception of the personal overthrow of Napoleon. Since the triumph of Wiberforce's cause in the Parliament of 1807, and the extinction of English slave-traffic, the anger with which the nation viewed this detestable cruelty, too long tolerated by itself, had become more and more vehement and widespread. By the year 1814 the utterances of public opinion were so loud and urgent that the Government, though free from enthusiasm itself, was forced to place the international prohibition of the slave-trade in the front rank of its demands. There were politicians on the Continent credulous enough to believe that this outcry of the heart and the conscience of the nation was but a piece of commercial hypocrisy. Talleyrand, with far different insight, but not with more sympathy, spoke of the state of the English people as one of frenzy.  [249] Something had already been effected at foreign courts. Sweden had been led to prohibit slave-traffic in 1813, Holland in the following year. Portugal had been restrained by treaty from trading north of the line. France had pledged itself in the first Treaty of Paris to abolish the commerce within five years. Spain alone remained unfettered, and it was indeed intolerable that the English slavers should have been forced to abandon their execrable gains only that they should fall into the hands of the subjects of King Ferdinand. It might be true that the Spanish colonies required a larger supply of slaves than they possessed; but Spain had at any rate not the excuse that it was asked to surrender an old and profitable branch of commerce. It was solely through the abolition of the English slave-trade that Spain possessed any slave-trade whatever. Before the year 1807 no Spanish ship had been seen on the coast of Africa for a century, except one in 1798 fitted out by Godoy.  [250] As for the French trade, that had been extinguished by the capture of Senegal and Goree; and along the two thousand miles of coast from Cape Blanco to Cape Formosa a legitimate commerce with the natives was gradually springing up in place of the desolating traffic in flesh and blood. It was hoped by the English people that Castlereagh would succeed in obtaining a universal and immediate prohibition of the slave-trade by all the Powers assembled at Vienna. The Minister was not wanting in perseverance, but he failed to achieve this result. France, while claiming a short delay elsewhere, professed itself willing, like Portugal, to abolish at once the traffic north of the line; but the Government on which England had perhaps the greatest claim, that of Spain, absolutely refused to accept this restriction, or to bind itself to a final prohibition before the end of eight years. Castlereagh then proposed that a Council of Ambassadors at London and Paris should be charged with the international duty of expediting the close of the slave-trade; the measure which he had in view being the punishment of slave-dealing States by a general exclusion of their exports. Against this Spain and Portugal made a formal protest, treating the threat as almost equivalent to one of war. The project dropped, and the Minister of England had to content himself with obtaining from the Congress a solemn condemnation of the slave-trade, as contrary to the principles of civilisation and human right (Feb., 1815).

The work was carried a step further by Napoleon's return from Elba. Napoleon understood the impatience of the English people, and believed that he could make no higher bid for its friendship than by abandoning the reserves made by Talleyrand at the Congress, and abolishing the French slave-trade at once and for all. This was accomplished; and the Bourbon ally of England, on his second restoration could not undo what had been done by the usurper. Spain and Portugal alone continued to pursue-the former country without restriction, the latter on the south of the line-a commerce branded by the united voice of Europe as infamous. The Governments of these countries alleged in their justification that Great Britain itself had resisted the passing of the prohibitory law until its colonies were far better supplied with slaves than those of its rivals now were. This was true, but it was not the whole truth. The whole truth was not known, the sincerity of English feeling was not appreciated, until, twenty years later, the nation devoted a part of its wealth to release the slave from servitude, and the English race from the reproach of slave holding. Judged by the West Indian Emancipation of 1833, the Spanish appeal to English history sounds almost ludicrous. But the remembrance of the long years throughout which the advocates of justice encountered opposition in England should temper the severity of our condemnation of the countries which still defended a bad interest. The light broke late upon ourselves: the darkness that still lingered elsewhere had too long been our own.

CHAPTER XIII.

Concert of Europe after 1815-Spirit of the Foreign Policy of Alexander, of Metternich, and of the English Ministry-Metternich's action in Italy, England's in Sicily and Spain-The Reaction in France-Richelieu and the New Chamber-Execution of Ney-Imprisonments and persecutions-Conduct of the Ultra-Royalists in Parliament-Contests on the Electoral Bill and the Budget-The Chamber prorogued-Affair of Grenoble-Dissolution of the Chamber-Electoral Law and Financial Settlement of 1817-Character of the first years of peace in Europe generally-Promise of a Constitution in Prussia-Hardenberg opposed by the partisans of autocracy and privilege-Schmalz's Pamphlet-Delay of Constitutional Reform in Germany at large-The Wartburg Festival-Progress of Reaction-The Czar now inclines to repression-Congress of Aix-la-Chapelle-Evacuation of France-Growing influence of Metternich in Europe-His action on Prussia-Murder of Kotzebue-The Carlsbad Conference and measures of repression in Germany-Richelieu and Decazes-Murder of the Duke of Berry-Progress of the reaction in France-General causes of the victory of reaction in Europe.

[Concert of Europe regarding France.]

For nearly twenty years the career of Bonaparte had given to European history the unity of interest which belongs to a single life. This unity does not immediately disappear on the disappearance of his mighty figure. The Powers of Europe had been too closely involved in the common struggle, their interests were too deeply concerned in the maintenance of the newly-established order, for the thoughts of Governments to be withdrawn from foreign affairs, and the currents of national policy to fall at once apart into separate channels. The Allied forces continued to occupy France with Wellington as commander-in-chief; the defence of the Bourbon monarchy had been declared the cause of Europe at large; the conditions under which the numbers of the army of occupation might be reduced, or the period of occupation shortened, remained to be fixed by the Allies themselves. France thus formed the object of a common European deliberation; nor was the concert of the Powers without its peculiar organ. An International Council was created at Paris, consisting of the Ambassadors of the four great Courts. The forms of a coalition were, for the first time, preserved after the conclusion of peace. Communications were addressed to the Government of Louis XVIII., in the name of all the Powers together. The Council of Ambassadors met at regular intervals, and not only transacted business relating to the army of occupation and the payment of indemnities, but discussed the domestic policy of the French Government, and the situation of parties or the signs of political opinion in the Assembly and the nation.

[Action of the Powers outside France.]

In thus watching over the restored Bourbon monarchy, the Courts of Europe were doing no more than they had bound themselves to do by treaty. Paris, however, was not the only field for a busy diplomacy. In most of the minor capitals of Europe each of the Great Powers had its own supposed interests to pursue, or its own principles of government to inculcate. An age of transition seemed to have begun. Constitutions had been promised in many States, and created in some; in Spain and in Sicily they had reached the third stage, that of suppression. It was not likely that the statesmen who had succeeded to Napoleon's power in Europe should hold themselves entirely aloof from the affairs of their weaker neighbours, least of all when a neighbouring agitation might endanger themselves. In one respect the intentions of the British, the Austrian, and the Russian Governments were identical, and continued to be so, namely, in the determination to countenance no revolutionary movement. Revolution, owing to the experience of 1793, had come to be regarded as synonymous with aggressive warfare. Jacobins, anarchists, disturbers of the public peace, were only different names for one and the same class of international criminals, who were indeed indigenous to France, but might equally endanger the peace of mankind in other countries. Against these fomenters of mischief all the Courts were at one.

[Alexander.]

Here, however, agreement ceased. It was admitted that between revolutionary disturbance and the enjoyment of constitutional liberty a wide interval existed, and the statesmen of the leading Powers held by no means the same views as to the true relation between nations and their rulers. The most liberal in theory among the Sovereigns of 1815 was the Emperor Alexander. Already, in the summer of 1815, he had declared the Duchy of Warsaw to be restored to independence and nationality, under the title of the Kingdom of Poland; and before the end of the year he had granted it a Constitution, which created certain representative assemblies, and provided the new kingdom with an army and an administration of its own, into which no person not a Pole could enter. The promised introduction of Parliamentary life into Poland was but the first of a series of reforms dimly planned by Alexander, which was to culminate in the bestowal of a Constitution upon Russia itself, and the emancipation of the serf.  [251] Animated by hopes like these for his own people, hopes which, while they lasted, were not merely sincere but ardent, Alexander was also friendly to the cause of constitutional government in other countries. Ambition mingled with disinterested impulses in the foreign policy of the Czar. It was impossible that Alexander should forget the league into which England and Austria had so lately entered against him. He was anxious to keep France on his side; he was not inclined to forego the satisfaction of weakening Austria by supporting national hopes in Italy;  [252] and he hoped to create some counterpoise to England's maritime power by allying Russia with a strengthened and better-administered Spain. Agents of the Czar abounded in Italy and in Germany, but in no capital was the Ambassador of Russia more active than in Madrid. General Tatistcheff, who was appointed to this post in 1814, became the terror of all his colleagues and of the Cabinet of London from his extraordinary activity in intrigue; but in relation to the internal affairs of Spain his influence was beneficial; and it was frequently directed towards the support of reforming Ministers, whom King Ferdinand, if free from foreign pressure, would speedily have sacrificed to the pleasure of his favourites and confessors.

[Metternich.]

[Metternich's policy in Germany.]

[In Italy.]

In the eyes of Prince Metternich, the all-powerful Minister of Austria, Alexander was little better than a Jacobin. The Austrian State, though its frontiers had been five times changed since 1792, had continued in a remarkable degree free from the impulse to internal change. The Emperor Francis was the personification of resistance to progress; the Minister owed his unrivalled position not more to his own skilful statesmanship in the great crisis of 1813 than to a genuine accord with the feelings of his master. If Francis was not a man of intellect, Metternich was certainly a man of character; and for a considerable period they succeeded in impressing the stamp of their own strongly-marked Austrian policy upon Europe. The force of their influence sprang from no remote source; it was due mainly to a steady intolerance of all principles not their own. Metternich described his system with equal simplicity and precision as an attempt neither to innovate nor to go back to the past, but to keep things as they were. In the old Austrian dominions this was not difficult to do, for things had no tendency to move and remained fixed of themselves;  [253] but on the outside, both on the north and on the south, ideas were at work which, according to Metternich, ought never to have entered the world, but, having unfortunately gained admittance, made it the task of Governments to resist their influence by all available means. Stein and the leaders of the Prussian War of Liberation had agitated Germany with hopes of national unity, of Parliaments, and of the impulsion of the executive powers of State by public opinion. Against these northern innovators, Metternich had already won an important victory in the formation of the Federal Constitution. The weakness and timidity of the King of Prussia made it probable that, although he was now promising his subjects a Constitution, he might at no distant date be led to unite with other German Governments in a system of repression, and in placing Liberalism under the ban of the Diet. In Italy, according to the conservative statesman, the same dangers existed and the same remedies were required. Austria, through the acquisition of Venice, now possessed four times as large a territory beyond the Alps as it had possessed before 1792; but the population was no longer the quiescent and contented folk that it had been in the days of Maria Theresa. Napoleon's kingdom and army of Italy had taught the people warfare, and given them political aims and a more masculine spirit. Metternich's own generals had promised the Italians independence when they entered the country in 1814; Murat's raid a year later had actually been undertaken in the name of Italian unity. These were disagreeable incidents, and signs were not wanting of the existence of a revolutionary spirit in the Italian provinces of Austria, especially among the officers who had served under Napoleon. Metternich was perfectly clear as to the duties of his Government. The Italians might have a Viceroy to keep Court at Milan, a body of native officials to conduct their minor affairs, and a mock Congregation or Council, without any rights, powers, or functions whatever; if this did not satisfy them, they were a rebellious people, and government must be conducted by means of spies, police, and the dungeons of the Spielberg.[254]

[Scheme of an Austrian Protectorate over Italy.]

On this system, backed by great military force, there was nothing to fear from the malcontents of Lombardy and Venice: it remained for Metternich to extend the same security to the rest of the peninsula, and by a series of treaties to effect the double end of exterminating constitutional government and of establishing an Austrian Protectorate over the entire country, from the Alps to the Sicilian Straits. The design was so ambitious that Metternich had not dared to disclose it at the Congress of Vienna; it was in fact a direct violation of the Treaty of Paris, and of the resolution of the Congress, that Italy, outside the possessions of Austria, should consist of independent States. The first Sovereign over whom the net was cast was Ferdinand of Naples. On the 15th of June, 1815, immediately after the overthrow of Murat, King Ferdinand signed a Treaty of Alliance with Austria, which contained a secret clause, pledging the King to introduce no change into his recovered kingdom inconsistent with its own old monarchical principles, or with the principles which had been adopted by the Emperor of Austria for the government of his Italian provinces.  [255] Ferdinand, two years before, had been compelled by Great Britain to grant Sicily a Constitution, and was at this very moment promising one to Naples. The Sicilian Constitution was now tacitly condemned; the Neapolitans were duped. By a further secret clause, the two contracting Sovereigns undertook to communicate to one another everything that should come to their knowledge affecting the security and tranquillity of the Italian peninsula; in other words, the spies and the police of Ferdinand were now added to Metternich's staff in Lombardy. Tuscany, Modena, and Parma entered into much the same condition of vassalage; but the scheme for a universal federation of Italy under Austria's leadership failed through the resistance of Piedmont and of the Pope. Pius VII. resented the attempts of Austria, begun in 1797 and repeated at the Congress of Vienna, to deprive the Holy See of Bologna and Ravenna. The King of Sardinia, though pressed by England to accept Metternich's offer of alliance, maintained with great decision the independence of his country, and found in the support of the Czar a more potent argument than any that he could have drawn from treaties.  [256]

[Spirit of England's foreign policy.]

The part played by the British Government at this epoch has been severely judged not only by the later opinion of England itself, but by the historical writers of almost every nation in Europe. It is perhaps fortunate for the fame of Pitt that he did not live to witness the accomplishment of the work in which he had laboured for thirteen years. The glory of a just and courageous struggle against Napoleon's tyranny remains with Pitt; the opprobrium of a settlement hostile to liberty has fallen on his successors. Yet there is no good ground for believing that Pitt would have attached a higher value to the rights or inclinations of individual communities than his successors did in re-adjusting the balance of power; on the contrary, he himself first proposed to destroy the Republic of Genoa, and to place Catholic Belgium under the Protestant Crown of Holland; nor was any principle dearer to him than that of aggrandising the House of Austria as a counterpoise to the power of France.  [257] The Ministry of 1815 was indeed but too faithfully walking in the path into which Pitt had been driven by the King and the nation in 1793. Resistance to France had become the one absorbing care, the beginning and end of English statesmanship. Government at home had sunk to a narrow and unfeeling opposition to the attempts made from time to time to humanise the mass of the people, to reform an atrocious criminal law, to mitigate the civil wrongs inflicted in the name and the interest of a State-religion. No one in the Cabinet doubted that authority, as such, must be wiser than inexperienced popular desire, least of all the statesman who now, in conjunction with the Duke of Wellington, controlled the policy of Great Britain upon the Continent. Lord Castlereagh had no sympathy with cruelty or oppression in Continental rulers; he had just as little belief in the value of free institutions to their subjects.  [258] The nature of his influence, which has been drawn sometimes in too dark colours, may be fairly gathered from the course of action which he followed in regard to Sicily and to Spain.

[In Sicily.]

In Sicily the representative of Great Britain, Lord William Bentinck, had forced King Ferdinand, who could not have maintained himself for an hour without the arms and money of England, to establish in 1813 a Parliament framed on the model of our own. The Parliament had not proved a wise or a capable body, but its faults were certainly not equal to those of King Ferdinand, and its re-construction under England's auspices would have been an affair of no great difficulty. Ferdinand, however, had always detested free institutions, and as soon as he regained the throne of Naples he determined to have done with the Sicilian Parliament. A correspondence on the intended change took place between Lord Castlereagh and A'Court, the Ambassador who had now succeeded Lord William Bentinck.  [259] That the British Government, which had protected the Sicilian Crown against Napoleon at the height of his power, could have protected the Sicilian Constitution against King Ferdinand's edicts without detaching a single man-of-war's boat, is not open to doubt. Castlereagh, however, who for years past had been paying, stimulating, or rebuking every Government in Europe, and who had actually sent the British fleet to make the Norwegians submit to Bernadotte, now suddenly adopted the principle of non-intervention, and declared that, so long as Ferdinand did not persecute the Sicilians who at the invitation of England had taken part in political life, or reduce the privileges of Sicily below those which had existed prior to 1813, Great Britain would not interfere with his action. These stipulations were inserted in order to satisfy the House of Commons, and to avert the charge that England had not only abandoned the Sicilian Constitution, but consented to a change which left the Sicilians in a worse condition than if England had never intervened in their affairs. Lord Castlereagh shut his eyes to the confession involved, that he was leaving the Sicilians to a ruler who, but for such restraint, might be expected to destroy every vestige of public right, and to take the same bloody and unscrupulous revenge upon his subjects which he had taken when Nelson restored him to power in 1799.

[Action of England in Spain.]

The action of the British Government in Spain showed an equal readiness to commit the future to the wisdom of Courts. Lord Castlereagh was made acquainted with the Spanish Ferdinand's design of abolishing the Constitution on his return in the year 1814. "So far," he replied, "as the mere existence of the Constitution is at stake, it is impossible to believe that any change tranquilly effected can well be worse."  [260] In this case the interposition of England would perhaps not have availed against a reactionary clergy and nation: Castlereagh, was, moreover, deceived by Ferdinand's professions that he had no desire to restore absolute government. He credited the King with the same kind of moderation which had led Louis XVIII. to accept the Charta in France, and looked forward to the maintenance of a constitutional régime, though under conditions more favourable to the executive power and to the influence of the great landed proprietors and clergy.[261] Events soon proved what value was to be attached to the word of the King; the flood of reaction and vengeance broke over the country; and from this time the British Government, half confessing and half excusing Ferdinand's misdeeds, exerted itself to check the outrages of despotism, and to mitigate the lot of those who were now its victims. In the interest of the restored monarchies themselves, as much as from a regard to the public opinion of Great Britain, the Ambassadors of England urged moderation upon all the Bourbon Courts. This, however, was also done by Metternich, who neither took pleasure in cruelty, nor desired to see new revolutions produced by the extravagances of priests and emigrants. It was not altogether without cause that the belief arose that there was little to choose, in reference to the constitutional liberties of other States, between the sentiments of Austria and those of the Ministers of free England. A difference, however, did exist. Metternich actually prohibited the Sovereigns over whom his influence extended from granting their subjects liberty: England, believing the Sovereigns to be more liberal than they were, did not interfere to preserve constitutions from destruction.

[Outrages of the Royalists in the south of France, June-August.]

Such was the general character of the influence now exercised by the three leading Powers of Europe. Prussia, which had neither a fleet like England, an Italian connection like Austria, nor an ambitious Sovereign like Russia, concerned itself little with distant States, and limited its direct action to the affairs of France, in which it possessed a substantial interest, inasmuch as the indemnities due from Louis XVIII. had yet to be paid. The possibility of recovering these sums depended upon the maintenance of peace and order in France; and from the first it was recognised by every Government in Europe that the principal danger to peace and order arose from the conduct of the Count of Artois and his friends, the party of reaction. The counterrevolutionary movement began in mere riot and outrage. No sooner had the news of the battle of Waterloo reached the south of France than the Royalist mob of Marseilles drove the garrison out of the town, and attacked the quarter inhabited by the Mameluke families whom Napoleon had brought from Egypt. Thirteen of these unfortunate persons, and about as many Bonapartist citizens, were murdered.  [262] A few weeks later Nismes was given over to anarchy and pillage. Religious fanaticism here stimulated the passion of political revenge. The middle class in Nismes itself and a portion of the surrounding population were Protestant, and had hailed Napoleon's return from Elba as a deliverance from the ascendancy of priests, and from the threatened revival of the persecutions which they had suffered under the old Bourbon monarchy. The Catholics, who were much more numerous, included the lowest class in the town, the larger landed proprietors of the district, and above half of the peasantry. Bands of volunteers had been formed by the Duke of Angoulême at the beginning of the Hundred Days, in the hope of sustaining a civil war against Napoleon. After capitulating to the Emperor's generals, some companies had been attacked by villagers and hunted down like wild beasts. The bands now reassembled and entered Nismes. The garrison, after firing upon them, were forced to give up their arms, and in this defenceless state a considerable number of the soldiers were shot down (July 17). On the next day the leaders of the armed mob began to use their victory. For several weeks murder and outrage, deliberately planned and publicly announced, kept not only Nismes itself, but a wide extent of the surrounding country in constant terror. The Government acted slowly and feebly; the local authorities were intimidated; and, in spite of the remonstrances of Wellington and the Russian Ambassador, security was not restored until the Allies took the matter into their own hands, and a detachment of Austrian troops occupied the Department of the Gard. Other districts in the south of France witnessed the same outbreaks of Royalist ferocity. Avignon was disgraced by the murder of Marshal Brune, conqueror of the Russians and English in the Dutch campaign of 1799, an honest soldier, who after suffering Napoleon's neglect in the time of prosperity, had undertaken the heavy task of governing Marseilles during the Hundred Days. At Toulouse, General Ramel, himself a Royalist, was mortally wounded by a band of assassins, and savagely mutilated while lying disabled and expiring.

[Elections of 1815.]

Crimes like these were the counterpart of the September massacres of 1792; and the terrorism exercised by the Royalists in 1815 has been compared, as a whole, with the Republican Reign of Terror twenty-two years earlier. But the comparison does little credit to the historical sense of those who suggested it. The barbarities of 1815 were strictly local: shocking as they were, they scarcely amounted in all to an average day's work of Carrier or Fouché in 1794; and the action of the established Government, though culpably weak, was not itself criminal. A second and more dangerous stage of reaction began, however, when the work of popular vengeance closed. Elections for a new Chamber of Deputies were held at the end of August. The Liberals and the adherents of Napoleon, paralysed by the disasters of France and the invaders' presence, gave up all as lost: the Ministers of Louis XVIII. abstained from the usual electoral manoeuvres, Talleyrand through carelessness, Fouché from a desire to see parties evenly balanced: the ultra-Royalists alone had extended their organisation over France, and threw themselves into the contest with the utmost passion and energy. Numerically weak, they had the immense forces of the local administration on their side. The Préfets had gone over heart and soul to the cause of the Count of Artois, who indeed represented to them that he was acting under the King's own directions. The result was that an Assembly was elected to which France has seen only one parallel since, namely in the Parliament of 1871, elected when invaders again occupied the country, and the despotism of a second Bonaparte had ended in the same immeasurable calamity. The bulk of the candidates returned were country gentlemen whose names had never been heard of in public life since 1789, men who had resigned themselves to inaction and obscurity under the Republic and the Empire, and whose one political idea was to reverse the injuries done by the Revolution to their caste and to their Church. They were Royalists because a Bourbon monarchy alone could satisfy their claims: they called themselves ultra-Royalists, but they were so only in the sense that they required the monarchy to recognise no ally but themselves. They had already shown before Napoleon's return that their real chief was the Count of Artois, not the King; in what form their ultra-Royalism would exhibit itself in case the King should not submit to be their instrument remained to be proved.

[Fall of Talleyrand and Fouché.]

[Richelieu's Ministry, Sept., 1815.]

The first result of the elections was the downfall of Talleyrand's Liberal Ministry. The Count of Artois and the courtiers, who had been glad enough to secure Fouché's services while their own triumph was doubtful, now joined in the outcry of the country gentlemen again this monster of iniquity. Talleyrand promptly disencumbered himself of his old friend, and prepared to meet the new Parliament as an ultra-Royalist; but in the eyes of the victorious party Talleyrand himself, the married priest and the reputed accomplice in the murder of the Duke of Enghien, was little better than his regicide colleague; and before the Assembly met he was forced to retire from power.

[Richelieu's Ministry, Sept. 1815.]

His successor, the Duc de Richelieu, was recommended to Louis XVIII. by the Czar. Richelieu had quitted France early in the Revolution, and, unlike most of the emigrants, had played a distinguished part in the country which gave him refuge. Winning his first laurels in the siege of Ismail under Suvaroff, he had subsequently been made Governor of the Euxine provinces of Russia, and the flourishing town of Odessa had sprung up under his rule. His reputation as an administrator was high; his personal character singularly noble and disinterested. Though the English Government looked at first with apprehension upon a Minister so closely connected with the Czar of Russia, Richelieu's honesty and truthfulness soon gained him the respect of every foreign Court. His relation to Alexander proved of great service to France in lightening the burden of the army of occupation; his equity, his acquaintance with the real ends of monarchical government, made him, though no lover of liberty, a valuable Minister in face of an Assembly which represented nothing but the passions and the ideas of a reactionary class. But Richelieu had been too long absent from France to grasp the details of administration with a steady hand. The men, the parties of 1815, were new to him: it is said that he was not acquainted by sight with most of his colleagues when he appointed them to their posts. The Ministry in consequence was not at unity within itself. Some of its members, like Decazes, were more liberal than their chief; others, like Clarke and Vaublanc, old servants of Napoleon now turned ultra-Royalists, were eager to make themselves the instruments of the Count of Artois, and to carry into the work of government the enthusiasm of revenge which had already found voice in the elections.

[Violence of the Chamber of 1815.]

The session opened on the 7th of October. Twenty-nine of the peers, who had joined Napoleon during the Hundred Days, were excluded from the House, and replaced by adherents of the Bourbons; nevertheless the peers as a body opposed themselves to extreme reaction, and, in spite of Chateaubriand's sanguinary harangues, supported the moderate policy of Richelieu against the majority of the Lower House. The first demand of the Chamber of Deputies was for retribution upon traitors;[263] their first conflict with the Government of Louis XVIII. arose upon the measures which were brought forward by the Ministry for the preservation of public security and the punishment of seditious acts. The Ministers were attacked, not because their measures were too severe, but because they were not severe enough. While taking power to imprison all suspected persons without trial, or to expel them from their homes, Decazes, the Police-Minister, proposed to punish incitements to sedition by fines and terms of imprisonment varying according to the gravity of the offence. So mild a penalty excited the wrath of men whose fathers and brothers had perished on the guillotine. Some cried out for death, others for banishment to Cayenne. When it was pointed out that the infliction of capital punishment for the mere attempt at sedition would place this on a level with armed rebellion, it was answered that a distinction might be maintained by adding in the latter case the ancient punishment of parricide, the amputation of the hand. Extravagances like this belonged rather to the individuals than to a party; but the vehemence of the Chamber forced the Government to submit to a revision of its measure. Transportation to Cayenne, but not death, was ultimately included among the penalties for seditious acts. The Minister of Justice, M. Barbé-Marbois, who had himself been transported to Cayenne by the Jacobins in 1797, was able to satisfy the Chamber from his own experience that they were not erring on the side of mercy.  [264]

[Ney executed, Dec. 7.]

It was in the midst of these heated debates that Marshal Ney was brought to trial for high treason. A so-called Edict of Amnesty had been published by the King on the 24th of July, containing the names of nineteen persons who were to be tried by courts-martial on capital charges, and of thirty-eight others who were to be either exiled or brought to justice, as the Chamber might determine. Ney was included in the first category. Opportunities for escape had been given to him by the Government, as indeed they had to almost every other person on the list. King Louis XVIII. well understood that his Government was not likely to be permanently strengthened by the execution of some of the most distinguished men in France; the emigrants, however, and especially the Duchess of Angoulême, were merciless, and the English Government acted a deplorable part. "One can never feel that the King is secure on his throne," wrote Lord Liverpool, "until he has dared to spill traitors' blood." It is not that many examples would be necessary; but the daring to make a few will alone manifest any strength in the Government.  [265] Labédoyère had already been executed. On the 9th of November Ney was brought before a court-martial, at which Castlereagh and his wife had the bad taste to be present. The court-martial, headed by Ney's old comrade Jourdan, declared itself incompetent to judge a peer of France accused of high treason,  [266] Ney was accordingly tried before the House of Peers. The verdict was a foregone conclusion, and indeed the legal guilt of the Marshal could hardly be denied. Had the men who sat in judgment upon him been a body of Vendean peasants who had braved fire and sword for the Bourbon cause, the sentence of death might have been pronounced with pure, though stern lips: it remains a deep disgrace to France that among the peers who voted not only for Ney's condemnation but for his death, there were some who had themselves accepted office and pay from Napoleon during the Hundred Days. A word from Wellington would still have saved the Marshal's life, but in interceding for Ney the Duke would have placed himself in direct opposition to the action of his own Government. When the Premier had dug the grave, it was not for Wellington to rescue the prisoner. It is permissible to hope that he, who had so vehemently reproached Blücher for his intention to put Napoleon to death if he should fall into his hands, would have asked clemency for Ney had he considered himself at liberty to obey the promptings of his own nature. The responsibility for Marshal Ney's death rests, more than upon any other individual, upon Lord Liverpool.

On the 7th of December the sentence was executed. Ney was shot at early morning in an unfrequented spot, and the Government congratulated itself that it had escaped the dangers of a popular demonstration and heard the last of a disagreeable business. Never was there a greater mistake. No crime committed in the Reign of Terror attached a deeper popular opprobrium to its authors than the execution of Ney did to the Bourbon family. The victim, a brave but rough half-German soldier,[267] rose in popular legend almost to the height of the Emperor himself. His heroism in the retreat from Moscow became, and with justice, a more glorious memory than Davoust's victory at Jena or Moreau's at Hohenlinden. Side by side with the thought that the Bourbons had been brought back by foreign arms, the remembrance sank deep into the heart of the French people that this family had put to death "the bravest of the brave." It would have been no common good fortune for Louis XVIII. to have pardoned or visited with light punishment a great soldier whose political feebleness had led him to an act of treason, condoned by the nation at large. Exile would not have made the transgressor a martyr. But the common sense of mankind condemns Ney's execution: the public opinion of France has never forgiven it.

[Amnesty Bill, Dec 8.]

On the day after the great example was made, Richelieu brought forward the Amnesty Bill of the Government in the House of Representatives. The King, while claiming full right of pardon, desired that the Chamber should be associated with him in its exercise, and submitted a project of law securing from prosecution all persons not included in the list published on July 24th. Measures of a very different character had already been introduced under the same title into the Chamber. Though the initiative in legislation belonged by virtue of the Charta to the Crown, resolutions might be moved by members in the shape of petition or address, and under this form the leaders of the majority had drawn up schemes for the wholesale proscription of Napoleon's adherents. It was proposed by M. la Bourdonnaye to bring to trial all the great civil and military officers who, during the Hundred Days, had constituted the Government of the usurper; all generals, préfets, and commanders of garrisons, who had obeyed Napoleon before a certain day, to be named by the Assembly; and all voters for the death of Louis XVI. who had recognised Napoleon by signing the Acte Additionnel. The language in which these prosecutions were urged was the echo of that which had justified the bloodshed of 1793; its violence was due partly to the fancy that Napoleon's return was no sudden and unexpected act, but the work of a set of conspirators in high places, who were still plotting the overthrow of the monarchy.[268]

[Persecution of suspected persons over all France.]

It was in vain that Richelieu intervened with the expression of the King's own wishes, and recalled the example of forgiveness shown in the testament of Louis XVI. The committee which was appointed to report on the projects of amnesty brought up a scheme little different from that of La Bourdonnaye, and added to it the iniquitous proposal that civil actions should be brought against all condemned persons for the damages sustained by the State through Napoleon's return. This was to make a mock of the clause in the Charta which abolished confiscation. The report of the committee caused the utmost dismay both in France itself and among the representatives of foreign Powers at Paris. The conflict between the men of reaction and the Government had openly broken out; Richelieu's Ministry, the guarantee of peace, seemed to be on the point of falling. On the 2nd of January, 1816, the Chamber proceeded to discuss the Bill of the Government and the amendments of the committee. The debate lasted four days; it was only by the repeated use of the King's own name that the Ministers succeeded in gaining a majority of nine votes against the two principal categories of exception appended to the amnesty by their opponents. The proposal to restore confiscation under the form of civil actions was rejected by a much greater majority, but on the vote affecting the regicides the Government was defeated. This indeed was considered of no great moment. Richelieu, content with having averted measures which would have exposed several hundred persons to death, exile, or pecuniary ruin, consented to banish from France the regicides who had acknowledged Napoleon, along with the thirty-eight persons named in the second list of July 24th. Among other well-known men, Carnot, who had rendered such great services to his country, went to die in exile. Of the seventeen companions of Ney and Labédoyère in the first list of July 24th, most had escaped from France; one alone suffered death.  [269] But the persons originally excluded from the amnesty and the regicides exiled by the Assembly formed but a small part of those on whom the vengeance of the Royalists fell; for it was provided that the amnesty-law should apply to no one against whom proceedings had been taken before the formal promulgation of the law. The prisons were already crowded with accused persons, who thus remained exposed to punishment; and after the law had actually passed the Chamber, telegraph-signals were sent over the country by Clarke, the Minister of War, ordering the immediate accusation of several others. One distinguished soldier at least, General Travot, was sentenced to death on proceedings thus instituted between the passing and the promulgation of the law of amnesty.[270] Executions, however, were not numerous except in the south of France, but an enormous number of persons were imprisoned or driven from their homes, some by judgment of the law-courts, some by the exercise of the powers conferred on the administration by the law of Public Security.  [271] The central government indeed had less part in this species of persecution than the Préfets and other local authorities, though within their own departments Clarke and Vaublanc set an example which others were not slow to follow. Royalist committees were formed all over the country, and assumed the same kind of irregular control over the officials of their districts as had been practised by the Jacobin committees of 1793. Thousands of persons employed in all grades of the public service, in schools and colleges as well as in the civil administration, in the law-courts as well as in the army and navy, were dismissed from their posts. The new-comers were professed agents of the reaction; those who were permitted to retain their offices strove to outdo their colleagues in their renegade zeal for the new order. It was seen again, as it had been seen under the Republic and under the Empire, that if virtue has limits, servility has none. The same men who had hunted down the peasant for sheltering his children from Napoleon's conscription now hunted down those who were stigmatised as Bonapartists. The clergy threw in their lot with the victorious party, and denounced to the magistrates their parishioners who treated them with disrespect.  [272] Darker pages exist in French history than the reaction of 1815, none more contemptible. It is the deepest condemnation of the violence of the Republic and the despotism of the Empire that the generation formed by it should have produced the class who could exhibit, and the public who could tolerate, the prodigies of baseness which attended the second Bourbon restoration.

[The reactionists adopt Parliamentary theory.]

Within the Chamber of Deputies the Ultra-Royalist majority had gained Parliamentary experience in the debates on the Amnesty Bill and the Law of Public Security: their own policy now took a definite shape, and to outbursts of passion there succeeded the attempt to realise ideas. Hatred of the Revolution and all its works was still the dominant impulse of the Assembly; but whatever may have been the earlier desire of the Ultra-Royalist noblesse, it was no longer their intention to restore the political system that existed before 1789. They would in that case have desired to restore absolute monarchy, and to surrender the power which seemed at length to have fallen into the hands of their own class. With Artois on the throne this might have been possible, for Artois, though heir to the crown, was still what he had been in his youth, the chief of a party: with Louis XVIII. and Richelieu at the head of the State, the Ultra-Royalists became the adversaries of royal prerogative and the champions of the rights of Parliament. Before the Revolution the noblesse had possessed privileges; it had not possessed political power. The Constitution of 1814 had unexpectedly given it, under representative forms, the influence denied to it under the old monarchy. New political vistas opened; and the men who had hitherto made St. Louis and Henry IV. the subject of their declamations, now sought to extend the rights of Parliament to the utmost, and to perpetuate in succeeding assemblies the rule of the present majority. An electoral law favourable to the great landed proprietors was the first necessity. This indeed was but a means to an end; another and a greater end might be attained directly, the restoration of a landed Church, and of the civil and social ascendancy of the clergy.

[Ecclesiastical schemes of the reaction.]

It had been admitted by King Louis XVIII. that the clause in the Charta relating to elections required modification, and on this point the Ultra-Royalists in the Chamber were content to wait for the proposals of the Government. In their ecclesiastical policy they did not maintain the same reserve. Resolutions in favour of the State-Church were discussed in the form of petitions to be presented to the Crown. It was proposed to make the clergy, as they had been before the Revolution, the sole keepers of registers of birth and marriage; to double the annual payment made to them by the State; to permit property of all kinds to be acquired by the Church by gift or will; to restore all Church lands not yet sold by the State; and, finally, to abolish the University of France, and to place all schools and colleges throughout the country under the control of the Bishops. One central postulate not only passed the Chamber, but was accepted by the Government and became law. Divorce was absolutely abolished; and for two generations after 1816 no possible aggravation of wrong sufficed in France to release either husband or wife from the mockery of a marriage-tie. The power to accept donations or legacies was granted to the clergy, subject, however, in every case to the approval of the Crown. The allowance made to them out of the revenues of the State was increased by the amount of certain pensions as they should fall in, a concession which fell very far short of the demands of the Chamber. In all, the advantages won for the Church were scarcely proportioned to the zeal displayed in its cause. The most important question, the disposal of the unsold Church lands, remained to be determined when the Chamber should enter upon the discussion of the Budget.

[Electoral Bill, Dec. 18, 1815.]

The Electoral Bill of the Government, from which the Ultra-Royalists expected so much, was introduced at the end of the year 1815. It showed in a singular manner the confusion of ideas existing within the Ministry as to the nature of the Parliamentary liberty now supposed to belong to France. The ex-préfet Vaublanc, to whom the framing of the measure was entrusted, though he imagined himself purged from the traditions of Napoleonism, could conceive of no relation between the executive and the legislative power but that which exists between a substance and its shadow. It never entered his mind that the representative institutions granted by the Charta were intended to bring an independent force to bear upon the Government, or that the nation should be treated as more than a fringe round the compact and lasting body of the administration. The language in which Vaublanc introduced his measure was grotesquely candid. Montesquieu, he said, had pointed out that powers must be subordinate; therefore the electoral power must be controlled by the King's Government.  [273] By the side of the electors in the Canton and the Department there was accordingly placed, in the Ministerial scheme, an array of officials numerous enough to carry the elections, if indeed they did not actually outnumber the private voters. The franchise was confined to the sixty richest persons in each Canton: these, with the officials of the district, were to elect the voters of the Department, who, with a similar contingent of officials, were to choose the Deputies. Re-affirming the principle laid down in the Constitution of 1795 and repeated in the Charta, Vaublanc proposed that a fifth part of the Assembly should retire each year.

[Counter-project of Villèle.]

If the Minister had intended to give the Ultra-Royalists the best possible means of exalting the peculiar policy of their class into something like a real defence of liberty, he could not have framed a more fitting measure. The creation of constituent bodies out of mayors, crown-advocates, and justices of the peace, was described, and with truth, as a mere Napoleonic juggle. The limitation of the franchise to a fixed number of rich persons was condemned as illiberal and contrary to the spirit of the Charta: the system of yearly renovation by fifths, which threatened to curtail the reign of the present majority, was attributed to the dread of any complete expression of public opinion. It was evident that the Bill of the Government would either be rejected or altered in such a manner as to give it a totally different character. In the Committee of the Chamber which undertook the task of drawing up amendments, the influence was first felt of a man who was soon to become the chief and guiding spirit of the Ultra-Royalist party. M. de Villèle, spokesman of the Committee, had in his youth been an officer in the navy of Louis XVI. On the dethronement of the King he had quitted the service, and settled in the Isle of Bourbon, where he gained some wealth and an acquaintance with details of business and finance rare among the French landed gentry. Returning to France under the Empire, he took up his abode near Toulouse, his native place, and was made Mayor of that city on Napoleon's second downfall. Villèle's politics gained a strong and original colour from his personal experience and the character of the province in which he lived. The south was the only part of France known to him. There the reactionary movement of 1815 had been a really popular one, and the chief difficulty of the Government, at the end of the Hundred Days, had been to protect the Bonapartists from violence. Villèle believed that throughout France the wealthier men among the peasantry were as ready to follow the priests and nobles as they were in Provence and La Vendée. His conception of the government of the future was the rule of a landed aristocracy, resting, in its struggle against monarchical centralisation and against the Liberalism of the middle class, on the conservative and religious instincts of the peasantry. Instead of excluding popular forces, Villèle welcomed them as allies. He proposed to lower the franchise to one-sixth of the sum named in the Charta, and, while retaining a system of double-election, to give a vote in the primary assemblies to every Frenchman paying annual taxes to the amount of fifty francs. In constituencies so large as to include all the more substantial peasantry, while sufficiently limited to exclude the ill-paid populace in towns, Villèle believed that the Church and the noblesse would on the whole control the elections. In the interest of the present majority he rejected the system of renovation by fifths proposed by the Government, and demanded that the present Chamber should continue unchanged until its dissolution, and the succeeding Chamber be elected entire.

[Result of debates on Electoral Bill.]

Villèle's scheme, if carried, would in all probability have failed at the first trial. The districts in which the reaction of 1815 was popular were not so large as he supposed: in the greater part of France the peasantry would not have obeyed the nobles except under intimidation. This was suspected by the majority, in spite of the confident language in which they spoke of the will of the nation as identical with their own. Villèle's boldness alarmed them: they anticipated that these great constituencies of peasants, if really left masters of the elections, would be more likely to return a body of Jacobins and Bonapartists than one of hereditary landlords. It was not necessary, however, to sacrifice the well-sounding principle of a low franchise, for the democratic vote at the first stage of the elections might effectively be neutralised by putting the second stage into the hands of the chief proprietors. The Assembly had in fact only to imitate the example of the Government, and to appoint a body of persons who should vote, as of right, by the side of the electors chosen in the primary assemblies. The Government in its own interest had designated a troop of officials as electors: the Assembly, on the contrary, resolved that in the Electoral College of each Department, numbering in all about 150 persons, the fifty principal landowners of the Department should be entitled to vote, whether they had been nominated by the primary constituencies or not. Modified by this proviso, the project of Villèle passed the Assembly. The Government saw that under the disguise of a series of amendments a measure directly antagonistic to their own had been carried. The franchise had been altered; the real control of the elections placed in the hands of the very party which was now in open opposition to the King and his Ministers. No compromise was possible between the law proposed by the Government and that passed by the Assembly. The Government appealed to the Chamber of Peers. The Peers threw out the amendments of the Lower House. A provisional measure was then introduced by Richelieu for the sake of providing France with at least some temporary rule for the conduct of elections. It failed; and the constitutional legislation of the country came to a dead-lock, while the Government and the Assembly stood face to face, and it became evident that one or the other must fall. The Ministers of the Great Powers at Paris, who watched over the restored dynasty, debated whether or not they should recommend the King to resort to the extreme measure of a dissolution.

[Contest on the Budget.]

[The Chambers prorogued, April 29.]

The Electoral Bill was not the only object of conflict between Richelieu's Ministry and the Chamber, nor indeed the principal one. The Budget excited fiercer passions, and raised greater issues. It was for no mere scheme of finance that the Government had to fight, but against a violation of public faith which would have left France insolvent and creditless in the face of the Powers who still held its territory in pledge. The debt incurred by the nation since 1813 was still unfunded. That part of it which had been raised before the summer of 1814 had been secured by law upon the unsold forests formerly belonging to the Church, and upon the Communal lands which Napoleon had made the property of the State: the remainder, which included the loans made during the Hundred Days, had no specified security. It was now proposed by the Government to place the whole of the unfunded debt upon the same level, and to provide for its payment by selling the so-called Church forests. The project excited the bitterest opposition on the side of the Count of Artois and his friends. If there was one object which the clerical and reactionary party pursued with religious fervour, it was the restoration of the Church lands: if there was one class which they had no scruple in impoverishing, it was the class that had lent money to Napoleon. Instead of paying the debts of the State, the Committee of the Chamber proposed to repeal the law of September, 1814, which pledged the Church forests, and to compel both the earlier and the later holders of the unfunded debt to accept stock in satisfaction of their claims, though the stock was worth less than two-thirds of its nominal value. The resolution was in fact one for the repudiation of a third part of the unfunded debt. Richelieu, seeing in what fashion his measure was about to be transformed, determined upon withdrawing it altogether: the majority in the Chamber, intent on executing its own policy and that of the Count of Artois, refused to recognise the withdrawal. Such a step was at once an insult and a usurpation of power. So great was the scandal and alarm caused by the scenes in the Chamber, that the Duke of Wellington, at the instance of the Ambassadors, presented a note to King Louis XVIII. requiring him in plain terms to put a stop to the machinations of his brother.  [274] The interference of the foreigner provoked the Ultra-Royalists, and failed to excite energetic action on the part of King Louis, who dreaded the sour countenance of the Duchess of Angoulême more than he did Wellington's reproofs. In the end the question of a settlement of the unfunded debt was allowed to remain open. The Government was unable to carry the sale of the Church forests, the Chamber did not succeed in its project of confiscation. The Budget for the year, greatly altered in the interest of the landed proprietors, was at length brought into shape. A resolution of the Lower House restoring the unsold forests to the Church was ignored by the Crown; and the Government, having obtained the means of carrying on the public services, gladly abstained from further legislation, and on the 29th of April ended the turmoil which surrounded it by proroguing the Chambers.

[Rising at Grenoble, May 6th. Executions.]

It was hoped that with the close of the Session the system of imprisonment and surveillance which prevailed in the Departments would be brought to an end. Vaublanc, the Minister of coercion, was removed from office. But the troubles of France were not yet over. On the 6th of May, a rising of peasants took place at Grenoble. According to the report of General Donnadieu, commander of the garrison, which brought the news to the Government, the revolt had only been put down after the most desperate fighting. "The corpses of the King's enemies," said the General in his despatch, "cover all the roads for a league round Grenoble."  [275] It was soon known that twenty-four prisoners had been condemned to death by court-martial, and sixteen of these actually executed: the court-martial recommended the other eight to the clemency of the Government. But the despatches of Donnadieu had thrown the Cabinet into a panic. Decazes, the most liberal of the Ministers, himself signed the hasty order requiring the remaining prisoners to be put to death. They perished; and when it was too late the Government learnt that Donnadieu's narrative was a mass of the grossest exaggerations, and that the affair which he had represented as an insurrection of the whole Department was conducted by about 300 peasants, half of whom were unarmed. The violence and illegality with which the General proceeded to establish a régime of military law soon brought him into collision with the Government. He became the hero of the Ultra-Royalists; but the Ministry, which was unwilling to make a public confession that it had needlessly put eight persons to death, had to bear the odium of an act of cruelty for which Donnadieu was really responsible. The part into which Decazes had been entrapped probably strengthened the determination of this Minister, who was now gaining great influence over the King, to strike with energy against the Ultra-Royalist faction. From this time he steadily led the King towards the only measure which could free the country from the rule of the Count of Artois and the reactionists-the dissolution of Parliament.

[Decazes.]

[Dissolution of the Chamber, Sept. 5, 1816.]

Louis XVIII. depended much on the society of some personal favourite. Decazes was young and an agreeable companion; his business as Police-Minister gave him the opportunity of amusing the King with anecdotes and gossip much more congenial to the old man's taste than discussions on finance or constitutional law. Louis came to regard Decazes almost as a son, and gratified his own studious inclination by teaching him English. The Minister's enemies said that he won the King's heart by taking private lessons from some obscure Briton, and attributing his extraordinary progress to the skill of his royal master. But Decazes had a more effective retort than witticism. He opened the letters of the Ultra-Royalists and laid them before the King. Louis found that these loyal subjects jested upon his infirmities, called him a dupe in the hands of Jacobins, and grumbled at him for so long delaying the happy hour when Artois should ascend the throne. Humorous as Louis was, he was not altogether pleased to read that he "ought either to open his eyes or to close them for ever." At the same time the reports of Decazes' local agents proved that the Ultra-Royalist party were in reality weak in numbers and unpopular throughout the greater part of the country. The project of a dissolution was laid before the Ministers and some of the King's confidants. Though the Ambassadors were not consulted on the measure, it was certain that they would not resist it. No word of the Ministerial plot reached the rival camp of Artois. The King gained courage, and on the 5th of September signed the Ordonnance which appealed from the Parliament to the nation, and, to the anger and consternation of the Ultra-Royalists, made an end of the intractable Chamber a few weeks before the time which had been fixed for its re-assembling.

[Electoral law, 1817.]

France was well rid of a body of men who had been elected at a moment of despair, and who would either have prolonged the occupation of the country by foreign armies, or have plunged the nation into civil war. The elections which followed were favourable to the Government. The questions fruitlessly agitated in the Assembly of 1815 were settled to the satisfaction of the public in the new Parliament. An electoral law was passed, which, while it retained the high franchise fixed by the Charta, and the rule of renewing the Chamber by fifths, gave life and value to the representative system by making the elections direct. Though the constituent body of all France scarcely numbered under this arrangement a hundred thousand persons, it was extensive enough to contain a majority hostile to the reactionary policy of the Church and the noblesse. The men who had made wealth by banking, commerce, or manufactures, the so-called higher bourgeoisie, greatly exceeded in number the larger landed proprietors; and although they were not usually democratic in their opinions, they were liberal, and keenly attached to the modern as against the old institutions of France, inasmuch as their industrial interests and their own personal importance depended upon the maintenance of the victory won in 1789 against aristocratic privilege and monopoly. So strong was the hostility between the civic middle class and the landed noblesse, that the Ultra-Royalists in the Chamber sought, as they had done in the year before, to extend the franchise to the peasantry, in the hope of overpowering wealth with numbers. The electoral law, however, passed both Houses in the form in which it had been drawn up by the Government. Though deemed narrow and oligarchical by the next generation, it was considered, and with justice, as a great victory won by liberalism at the time. The middle class of Great Britain had to wait for fifteen years before it obtained anything like the weight in the representation given to the middle class of France by the law of 1817.

[Establishment of financial credit.]

Not many of the persons who had been imprisoned under the provisional acts of the last year now remained in confinement. It was considered necessary to prolong the Laws of Public Security, and they were re-enacted, but under a much softened form. It remained for the new Chamber to restore the financial credit of the country by making some equitable arrangement for securing the capital and paying the interest of the unfunded debt. Projects of repudiation now gained no hearing. Richelieu consented to make an annual allowance to the Church, equivalent to the rental of the Church forests; but the forests themselves were made security for the debt, and the power of sale was granted to the Government. Pending such repayment of the capital, the holders of unfunded debt received stock, calculated at its real, not at its titular, value. The effect of this measure was at once evident. The Government was enabled to enter into negotiations for a loan, which promised it the means of paying the indemnities due to the foreign Powers. On this payment depended the possibility of withdrawing the army of occupation. Though Wellington at first offered some resistance, thirty thousand men were removed in the spring of 1817; and the Czar allowed Richelieu to hope that, if no further difficulties should arise, the complete evacuation of French territory might take place in the following year.

[Character of the years 1816-18.]

Thus the dangers with which reactionary passion had threatened France appeared to be passing away. The partial renovation of the Chamber which took place in the autumn of 1817 still further strengthened the Ministry of Richelieu and weakened the Ultra-Royalist opposition. A few more months passed, and before the third anniversary of Waterloo, the Czar was ready to advise the entire withdrawal of foreign armies from France. An invitation was issued to the Powers to meet in Conference at Aix-la-Chapelle. There was no longer any doubt that the five years' occupation, contemplated when the second Treaty of Paris was made, would be abandoned. The good will of Alexander, the friendliness of his Ambassador, Pozzo di Borgo, who, as a native of Corsica, had himself been a French subject, and who now aspired to become Minister of France, were powerful influences in favour of Louis XVIII. and his kingdom; much, however, of the speedy restoration of confidence was due to the temperate rule of Richelieu. The nation itself, far from suffering from Napoleon's fall, regained something of the spontaneous energy so rich in 1789, so wanting at a later period. The cloud of military disaster lifted; new mental and political life began; and under the dynasty forced back by foreign arms France awoke to an activity unknown to it while its chief gave laws to Europe. Parliamentary debate offered the means of legal opposition to those who bore no friendship to the Court: conspiracy, though it alarmed at the moment, had become the resort only of the obscure and the powerless. Groups of able men were gathering around recognised leaders, or uniting in defence of a common political creed. The Press, dumb under Napoleon except for purposes of sycophancy, gradually became a power in the land. Even the dishonest eloquence of Chateaubriand, enforcing the principles of legal and constitutional liberty on behalf of a party which would fain have used every weapon of despotism in its own interest, proved that the leaden weight that had so long crushed thought and expression existed no more.

[Prussia after 1815.]

[Edict promising a Constitution, May 22, 1815.]

But if the years between 1815 and 1819 were in France years of hope and progress, it was not so with Europe generally. In England they were years of almost unparalleled suffering and discontent; in Italy the rule of Austria grew more and more anti-national; in Prussia, though a vigorous local and financial administration hastened the recovery of the impoverished land, the hopes of liberty declined beneath the reviving energy of the nobles and the resistance of the friends of absolutism. When Stein had summoned the Prussian people to take up arms for their Fatherland, he had believed that neither Frederick William nor Alexander would allow Prussia to remain without free institutions after the battle was won. The keener spirits in the War of Liberation had scarcely distinguished between the cause of national independence and that of internal liberty. They returned from the battle-fields of Saxony and France, knowing that the Prussian nation had unsparingly offered up life and wealth at the call of patriotism, and believing that a patriot-king would rejoice to crown his triumph by inaugurating German freedom. For a while the hope seemed near fulfilment. On the 22nd of May, 1815, Frederick William published an ordinance, declaring that a Representation of the People should be established.  [276] For this end the King stated that the existing Provincial Estates should be re-organised, and new ones founded where none existed, and that out of the Provincial Estates the Assembly of Representatives of the country should be chosen. It was added that a commission would be appointed, to organise under Hardenberg's presidency the system of representation, and to draw up a written Constitution. The right of discussing all legislative measures affecting person or property was promised to the Assembly. Though foreign affairs seemed to be directly excluded from parliamentary debate, and the language of the Edict suggested that the representative body would only have a consultative voice, without the power either of originating or of rejecting laws, these reservations only showed the caution natural on the part of a Government divesting itself for the first time of absolute power. Guarded as it was, the scheme laid down by the King would hardly have displeased the men who had done the most to make constitutional rule in Prussia possible.

[Resistance of feudal and autocratic parties.]

But the promise of Frederick William was destined to remain unfulfilled. It was no good omen for Prussia that Stein, who had rendered such glorious services to his country and to all Europe, was suffered to retire from public life. The old court-party at Berlin, politicians who had been forced to make way for more popular men, landowners who had never pardoned the liberation of the serf, all the interests of absolutism and class-privilege which had disappeared for a moment in the great struggle for national existence, gradually re-asserted their influence over the King, and undermined the authority of Hardenberg, himself sinking into old age amid circumstances of private life that left to old age little of its honour. To decide even in principle upon the basis to be given to the new Prussian Constitution would have taxed all the foresight and all the constructive skill of the most experienced statesman; for by the side of the ancient dominion of the Hohenzollerns there were now the Rhenish and the Saxon Provinces, alien in spirit and of doubtful loyalty, in addition to Polish territory and smaller German districts acquired at intervals between 1792 and 1815. Hardenberg was right in endeavouring to link the Constitution with something that had come down from the past; but the decision that the General Assembly should be formed out of the Provincial Estates was probably an injudicious one; for these Estates, in their present form, were mainly corporations of nobles, and the spirit which animated them was at once the spirit of class-privilege and of an intensely strong localism. Hardenberg had not only occasioned an unnecessary delay by basing the representative system upon a reform of the Provincial Estates, but had exposed himself to sharp attacks from these very bodies, to whom nothing was more odious than the absorption of their own dignity by a General Assembly. It became evident that the process of forming a Constitution would be a tedious one; and in the meantime the opponents of the popular movement opened their attack upon the men and the ideas whose influence in the war of Liberation appeared to have made so great a break between the German present and the past.

[Schmalz's pamphlet, 1815.]

The first public utterance of the reaction was a pamphlet issued in July, 1815, by Schmalz, a jurist of some eminence, and brother-in-law of Scharnhorst, the re-organiser of the army. Schmalz, contradicting a statement which attributed to him a highly honourable part in the patriotic movement of 1808, attacked the Tugendbund, and other political associations dating from that epoch, in language of extreme violence. In the stiff and peremptory manner of the old Prussian bureaucracy, he denied that popular enthusiasm had anything whatever to do with the victory of 1813,  [277] attributing the recovery of the nation firstly to its submission to the French alliance in 1812, and secondly to the quiet sense of duty with which, when the time came, it took up arms in obedience to the King. Then, passing on to the present aims of the political societies, he accused them of intending to overthrow all established governments, and to force unity upon Germany by means of revolution, murder, and pillage. Stein was not mentioned by name, but the warning was given to men of eminence who encouraged Jacobinical societies, that in such combinations the giants end by serving the dwarfs. Schmalz's pamphlet, which was written with a strength and terseness of style very unusual in Germany, made a deep impression, and excited great indignation in Liberal circles. It was answered, among other writers, by Niebuhr; and the controversy thickened until King Frederick William, in the interest of public tranquillity, ordered that no more should be said on either side. It was in accordance with Prussian feeling that the King should thus interfere to stop the quarrels of his subjects. There would have been nothing unseemly in an act of impartial repression. But the King made it impossible to regard his act as of this character. Without consulting Hardenberg, he conferred a decoration upon the author of the controversy. Far-sighted men saw the true bearing of the act. They warned Hardenberg that, if he passed over this slight, he would soon have to pass over others more serious, and urged him to insist upon the removal of the counsellors on whose advice the King had acted.  [278] But the Minister disliked painful measures. He probably believed that no influence could ever supplant his own with the King, and looked too lightly upon the growth of a body of opponents, who, whether in open or in concealed hostility to himself, were bent upon hindering the fulfilment of the constitutional reforms which he had at heart.

[The promised Constitutions delayed in Germany.]

In the Edict of the 22nd of May, 1815, the King had ordered that the work of framing a Constitution should be begun in the following September. Delays, however, arose; and when the commission was at length appointed, its leading members were directed to travel over the country in order to collect opinions upon the form of representation required. Two years passed before even this preliminary operation began. In the meantime very little progress had been made towards the establishment of constitutional government in Germany at large. One prince alone, the Grand Duke of Weimar, already eminent in Europe from his connection with Goethe and Schiller, loyally accepted the idea of a free State, and brought representative institutions into actual working. In Hesse, the Elector summoned the Estates, only to dismiss them with contumely when they resisted his extortions. In most of the minor States contests or negotiations took place between the Sovereigns and the ancient Orders, which led to little or no result. The Federal Diet, which ought to have applied itself to the determination of certain principles of public right common to all Germany, remained inactive. Though hope had not yet fallen, a sense of discontent arose, especially among the literary class which had shown such enthusiasm in the War of Liberation. It was characteristic of Germany that the demand for free government came not from a group of soldiers, as in Spain, not from merchants and men of business, as in England, but from professors and students, and from journalists, who were but professors in another form. The middle class generally were indifferent: the higher nobility, and the knights who had lost their semi-independence in 1803, sought for the restoration of privileges which were really incompatible with any State-government whatever. The advocacy of constitutional rule and of German unity was left, in default of Prussian initiative, to the ardent spirits of the Universities and the Press, who naturally exhibited in the treatment of political problems more fluency than knowledge, and more zeal than discretion. Jena, in the dominion of the Duke of Weimar, became, on account of the freedom of printing which existed there, the centre of the new Liberal journalism. Its University took the lead in the Teutonising movement which had been inaugurated by Fichte twelve years before in the days of Germany's humiliation, and which had now received so vigorous an impulse from the victory won over the foreigner.

[The Wartburg Festival, Oct., 1817.]

On the 18th of October, 1817, the students of Jena, with deputations from all the Protestant Universities of Germany, held a festival at Eisenach, to celebrate the double anniversary of the Reformation and of the battle of Leipzig. Five hundred young patriots, among them scholars who had been decorated for bravery at Waterloo, bound their brows with oak-leaves, and assembled within the venerable hall of Luther's Wartburg Castle; sang, prayed, preached, and were preached to; dined; drank to German liberty, the jewel of life, to Dr. Martin Luther, the man of God, and to the Grand Duke of Saxe-Weimar; then descended to Eisenach, fraternised with the Landsturm in the market-place, and attended divine service in the parish church without mishap. In the evening they edified the townspeople with gymnastics, which were now the recognised symbol of German vigour, and lighted a great bonfire on the hill opposite the castle. Throughout the official part of the ceremony a reverential spirit prevailed; a few rash words were, however, uttered against promise-breaking kings, and some of the hardier spirits took advantage of the bonfire to consign to the flames, in imitation of Luther's dealing with the Pope's Bull, a quantity of what they deemed un-German and illiberal writings. Among these was Schmalz's pamphlet. They also burnt a soldier's strait-jacket, a pigtail, and a corporal's cane, emblems of the military brutalism of past times which were now being revived in Westphalia.  [279] Insignificant as the whole affair was, it excited a singular alarm not only in Germany but at foreign Courts. Richelieu wrote from Paris to inquire whether revolution was breaking out. The King of Prussia sent Hardenberg to Weimar to make investigations on the spot. Metternich, who saw conspiracy and revolution everywhere and in everything, congratulated himself that his less sagacious neighbours were at length awakening to their danger. The first result of the Wartburg scandal was that the Duke of Weimar had to curtail the liberties of his subjects. Its further effects became only too evident as time went on. It left behind it throughout Germany the impression that there were forces of disorder at work in the Press and in the Universities which must be crushed at all cost by the firm hand of Government; and it deepened the anxiety with which King Frederick William was already regarding the promises of liberty which he had made to the Prussian people two years before.

[Alexander in 1818.]

Twelve months passed between the Wartburg festival and the beginning of the Conferences at Aix-la-Chapelle. In the interval a more important person than the King of Prussia went over to the side of reaction. Up to the summer of 1818, the Czar appeared to have abated nothing of his zeal for constitutional government. In the spring of that year, he summoned the Polish Diet; addressed them in a speech so enthusiastic as to alarm not only the Court of Vienna but all his own counsellors; and stated in the clearest possible language his intention of extending the benefits of a representative system to the whole Russian Empire.  [280] At the close of the brief session he thanked the Polish Deputies for their boldness in throwing out a measure proposed by himself. Alexander's popular rhetoric at Warsaw might perhaps be not incompatible with a settled purpose to permit no encroachment on authority either there or elsewhere; but the change in his tone was so great when he appeared at Aix-la-Chapelle a few months afterwards, that some strange and sudden cause has been thought necessary to explain it. It is said that during the Czar's residence at Moscow, in June, 1818, the revelation was made to him of the existence of a mass of secret societies in the army, whose aim was the overthrow of his own Government. Alexander's father had died by the hands of murderers: his own temperament, sanguine and emotional, would make the effects of such a discovery, in the midst of all his benevolent hopes for Russia, poignant to the last degree. It is not inconsistent either with his character or with earlier events in his personal history that the Czar should have yielded to a single shock of feeling, and have changed in a moment from the liberator to the despot. But the evidence of what passed in his mind is wanting. Hearsay, conjecture, gossip, abound;  [281] the one man who could have told all has left no word. This only is certain, that from the close of the year 1818, the future, hitherto bright with dreams of peaceful progress, became in Alexander's view a battle-field between the forces of order and anarchy. The task imposed by Providence on himself and other kings was no longer to spread knowledge and liberty among mankind, but to defend existing authority, and even authority that was oppressive and un-Christian, against the madness that was known as popular right.

[Conferences of Aix-la-Chapelle, Oct., 1818.]

[France evacuated.]

[Proposed Quintuple Alliance.]

[Canning.]

At the end of September, 1818, the Sovereigns or Ministers of the Great Powers assembled at Aix-la-Chapelle, and the Conferences began. The first question to be decided was whether the Allied Army might safely be withdrawn from France; the second, in what form the concert of Europe should hereafter be maintained. On the first question there was no disagreement: the evacuation of France was resolved upon and promptly executed. The second question was a more difficult one. Richelieu, on behalf of King Louis XVIII., represented that France now stood on the same footing as any other European Power, and proposed that the Quadruple Alliance of 1815 should be converted into a genuine European federation by adding France to it as a fifth member. The plan had been communicated to the English Government, and would probably have received its assent but for the strong opposition raised by Canning within the Cabinet. Canning took a gloomy but a true view of the proposed concert of the Powers. He foresaw that it would really amount to a combination of governments against liberty. Therefore, while recognising the existing engagements of this country, he urged that England ought to join in no combination except that to which it had already pledged itself, namely, the combination made with the definite object of resisting French disturbance. To combine with three Powers to prevent Napoleon or the Jacobins from again becoming masters of France was a reasonable act of policy: to combine with all the Great Powers of Europe against nothing in particular was to place the country on the side of governments against peoples, and to involve England in any enterprise of repression which the Courts might think fit to undertake. Canning's warning opened the eyes of his colleagues to the view which was likely to be taken of such a general alliance by Parliament and by public opinion. Lord Castlereagh was forbidden to make this country a party to any abstract union of Governments. In memorable words the Prime Minister described the true grounds for the decision: "We must recollect in the whole of this business, and ought to make our Allies feel, that the general and European discussion of these questions will be in the British Parliament."  [282] Fear of the rising voice of the nation, no longer forced by military necessities to sanction every measure of its rulers, compelled Lords Liverpool and Castlereagh to take account of scruples which were not their own. On the same grounds, while the Ministry agreed that Continental difficulties which might hereafter arise ought to be settled by a friendly discussion among the Great Powers, it declined to elevate this occasional deliberation into a system, and to assent to the periodical meeting of a Congress. Peace might or might not be promoted by the frequent gatherings of Sovereigns and statesmen; but a council so formed, if permanent in its nature, would necessarily extinguish the independence of every minor State, and hand over the government of all Europe to the Great Courts, if only they could agree with one another.

[Declarations and Secret Treaty of Aix-la-Chapelle.]

It was the refusal of England to enter into a general league that determined the form in which the results of the Conference of 1818 were embodied. In the first place the Quadruple Alliance against French revolution was renewed, and with such seriousness that the military centres were fixed, at which, in case of any outbreak, the troops of each of the Great Powers should assemble.  [283] This Treaty, however, was kept secret, in order not to add to the difficulties of Richelieu. The published documents breathed another spirit.  [284] Without announcing an actual alliance with King Louis XVIII., the Courts, including England, declared that through the restoration of legitimate and constitutional monarchy France had regained its place in the councils of Europe, and that it would hereafter co-operate in maintaining the general peace. For this end meetings of the sovereigns or their ministers might be necessary; such meetings would, however, be arranged by the ordinary modes of negotiation, nor would the affairs of any minor State be discussed by the Great Powers, except at the direct invitation of that State, whose representatives would then be admitted to the sittings. In these guarded words the intention of forming a permanent and organised Court of Control over Europe was disclaimed. A manifesto, addressed to the world at large, declared that the sovereigns of the five great States had no other object in their union than the maintenance of peace on the basis of existing treaties. They had formed no new political combinations; their rule was the observance of international law; their object the prosperity and moral welfare of their subjects.

[Repressive tone of the Conference.]

[Metternich and Austrian principles henceforth dominant.]

The earnestness with which the statesmen of 1818, while accepting the conditions laid down by England, persevered in the project of a joint regulation of European affairs may suggest the question whether the plan which they had at heart would not in truth have operated to the benefit of mankind. The answer is, that the value of any International Council depends firstly on the intelligence which it is likely to possess, and secondly on the degree in which it is really representative. Experience proved that the Congresses which followed 1818 possessed but a limited intelligence, and that they represented nothing at all but authority. The meeting at Aix-la-Chapelle was itself the turning-point in the constitutional history of Europe. Though no open declaration was made against constitutional forms, every Sovereign and every minister who attended the Conference left it with the resolution to draw the reins of government tighter. A note of alarm had been sounded. Conspiracies in Belgium, an attempt on the life of Wellington, rumours of a plot to rescue Napoleon from St. Helena, combined with the outcry against the German Universities and the whispered tales from Moscow in filling the minds of statesmen with apprehensions. The change which had taken place in Alexander himself was of the most serious moment. Up to this time Metternich, the leader of European Conservatism, had felt that in the Czar there were sympathies with Liberalism and enlightenment which made the future of Europe doubtful.  [285] To check the dissolution of existing power, to suppress all tendency to change, was the habitual object of Austria, and the Czar was the one person who had seemed likely to prevent the principles of Austria from becoming the law of Europe. Elsewhere Metternich had little to fear in the way of opposition. Hardenberg, broken in health and ill-supported by his King, had ceased to be a power. Yielding to the apprehensions of Frederick William, perhaps with the hope of dispelling them at some future time, he took his place among the alarmists of the day, and suffered the German policy of Prussia, to which so great a future lay open a few years before, to become the mere reflex of Austrian inaction and repression.  [286] England, so long as it was represented on the Continent by Castlereagh and Wellington, scarcely counted for anything on the side of liberty. The sudden change in Alexander removed the one check that stood in Austria's way; and from this time Metternich exercised an authority in Europe such as few statesmen have ever possessed. His influence, overborne by that of the Czar during 1814 and 1815, struck root at the Conference of Aix-la-Chapelle, maintained itself unimpaired during five eventful years, and sank only when the death of Lord Castlereagh allowed the real voice of England once more to be heard, and Canning, too late to forbid the work of repression in Italy and in Spain, inaugurated, after an interval of forced neutrality, that worthier concert which established the independence of Greece.

[Metternich's advice to Prussia, 1818.]

If it is the mark of a clever statesman to know where to press and where to give way, Metternich certainly proved himself one in 1818. Before the end of the Conference he delivered to Hardenberg and to the King of Prussia two papers containing a complete set of recommendations for the management of Prussian affairs. The contents of these documents were singular enough: it is still more singular that they form the history of what actually took place in Prussia during the succeeding years. Starting with the assumption that the party of revolution had found its lever in the promise of King Frederick William to create a Representative System, Metternich demonstrated in polite language to the very men who had made this promise, that any central Representation would inevitably overthrow the Prussian State; pointed out that the King's dominions consisted of seven Provinces; and recommended Frederick William to fulfil his promise only by giving to each Province a Diet for the discussion of its own local concerns. Having thus warned the King against creating a National Parliament, like that which had thrown France into revolution in 1789, Metternich exhibited the specific dangers of the moment and the means of overcoming them. These dangers were Universities, Gymnastic establishments, and the Press. "The revolutionists," he said, "despairing of effecting their aim themselves, have formed the settled plan of educating the next generation for revolution. The Gymnastic establishment is a preparatory school for University disorders. The University seizes the youth as he leaves boyhood, and gives him a revolutionary training. This mischief is common to all Germany, and must be checked by joint action of the Governments. Gymnasia, on the contrary, were invented at Berlin, and spring from Berlin. For these, palliative measures are no longer sufficient. It has become a duty of State for the King of Prussia to destroy the evil. The whole institution in every shape must be closed and uprooted." With regard to the abuse of the Press, Metternich contented himself with saying that a difference ought to be made between substantial books and mere pamphlets or journals; and that the regulation of the Press throughout Germany at large could only be effected by an agreement between Austria and Prussia.  [287]

[Stourdza's pamphlet.]

With a million men under arms, the Sovereigns who had overthrown Napoleon trembled because thirty or forty journalists and professors pitched their rhetoric rather too high, and because wise heads did not grow upon schoolboys' shoulders. The Emperor Francis, whose imagination had failed to rise to the glories of the Holy Alliance, alone seems to have had some suspicion of the absurdity of the present alarms.  [288] The Czar distinguished himself by his zeal against the lecturers who were turning the world upside down. As if Metternich had not frightened the Congress enough already, the Czar distributed at Aix-la-Chapelle a pamphlet published by one Stourdza, a Moldavian, which described Germany as on the brink of revolution, and enumerated half a score of mortal disorders which racked that unfortunate country. The chief of all was the vicious system of the Universities, which instead of duly developing the vessel of the Christian State from the cradle of Moses,  [289] brought up young men to be despisers of law and instruments of a licentious Press. The ingenious Moldavian, whose expressions in some places bear a singular resemblance to those of Alexander, while in others they are actually identical with reflections of Metternich's not then published, went on to enlighten the German Governments as to the best means of rescuing their subjects from their perilous condition. Certain fiscal and administrative changes were briefly suggested, but the main reform urged was exactly that propounded by Metternich, the enforcement of a better discipline and of a more rigidly-prescribed course of study at the Universities, along with the supervision of all journals and periodical literature.

[The murder of Kotzebue, March 23, 1819.]

Stourdza's pamphlet, in which loose reasoning was accompanied by the coarsest invective, would have gained little attention if it had depended on its own merits or on the reputation of its author: it became a different matter when it was known to represent the views of the Czar. A vehement but natural outcry arose at the Universities against this interference of the foreigner with German domestic affairs. National independence, it seemed, had been won in the deadly struggle against France only in order that internal liberty, the promised fruit of this independence, should be sacrificed at the bidding of Russia. The Czar himself was out of reach: the vengeance of outraged patriotism fell upon an insignificant person who had the misfortune to be regarded as his principal agent. A dramatic author then famous, now forgotten, August Kotzebue, held the office of Russian agent in Central Germany, and conducted a newspaper whose object was to throw ridicule on the national movement of the day, and especially on those associations of students where German enthusiasm reached its climax. Many circumstances embittered popular feeling against this man, and caused him to be regarded less as a legitimate enemy than as a traitor and an apostate. Kotzebue had himself been a student at Jena, and at one time had turned liberal sentiments to practical account in his plays. Literary jealousies and wounded vanity had subsequently alienated him from his country, and made him the willing and acrid hireling of a foreign Court. The reports which, as Russian agent, he sent to St. Petersburg were doubtless as offensive as the attacks on the Universities which he published in his journal; but it was an extravagant compliment to the man to imagine that he was the real author of the Czar's desertion from Liberalism to reaction. This, however, was the common belief, and it cost Kotzebue dear. A student from Erlangen, Carl Sand, who had accompanied the standard at the Wartburg festival, formed the silent resolve of sacrificing his own life in order to punish the enemy of his country. Sand was a man of pure and devout, though ill-balanced character. His earlier life marked him as one whose whole being was absorbed by what he considered a divine call. He thought of the Greeks who, even in their fallen estate, had so often died to free their country from Turkish oppression, and formed the deplorable conclusion that by murdering a decayed dramatist he could strike some great blow against the powers of evil.  [290] He sought the unfortunate Kotzebue in the midst of his family, stabbed him to the heart, and then turned his weapon against himself. Recovering from his wounds, he was condemned to death, and perished, after a year's interval, on the scaffold, calling God to witness that he died for Germany to be free.

[Action of Metternich.]

The effects of Sand's act were very great, and their real nature was at once recognised. Hardenberg, the moment that he heard of Kotzebue's death, exclaimed that a Prussian Constitution had now become impossible. Metternich, who had thought the Czar mad because he desired to found a peaceful alliance of Sovereigns on religious principles, was not likely to make allowance for a kind of piety that sent young rebels over the country on missions of murder. The Austrian statesman was in Rome when the news of Kotzebue's assassination reached him. He saw that the time had come for united action throughout Germany, and, without making any public utterance, drew up a scheme of repressive measures, and sent out proposals for a gathering of the Ministers of all the principal German Courts. In the summer he travelled slowly northwards, met the King of Prussia at Teplitz, in Bohemia, and shortly afterwards opened the intended Conference of Ministers in the neighbouring town of Carlsbad. A number of innocent persons had already, at his instigation, been arrested in Prussia and other States, under circumstances deeply discreditable to Government. Private papers were seized, and garbled extracts from them published in official prints as proof of guilt.  [291] "By the help of God," Metternich wrote, "I hope to defeat the German Revolution, just as I vanquished the conqueror of the world. The revolutionists thought me far away, because I was five hundred leagues off. They deceived themselves; I have been in the midst of them, and now I am striking my blows."  [292] Metternich's plan was to enforce throughout Germany, by means of legislation in the Federal Diet, the principle which he had already privately commended to the King of Prussia. There were two distinct objects of policy before him: the first, to prevent the formation in any German State of an assembly representing the whole community, like the English House of Commons or the French Chamber of Deputies; the second, to establish a general system of censorship over the Press and over the Universities, and to create a central authority, vested, as the representative of the Diet, with inquisitorial powers.

[The South-Western States become constitutional as Prussia relapses.]

[Bavarian Constitution, May 26, 1818.]

The first of these objects, the prevention of general assemblies, had been rendered more difficult by recent acts of the Governments of Bavaria and Baden. A singular change had taken place in the relation between Prussia and the Minor States which had formerly constituted the Federation of the Rhine. When, at the Congress of Vienna, Prussian statesmen had endeavoured to limit the arbitrary rule of petty sovereigns by charging the Diet with the protection of constitutional right over all Germany, the Kings of Bavaria and Würtemberg had stoutly refused to part with sovereign power. To submit to a law of liberty, as it then seemed, was to lose their own separate existence, and to reduce themselves to dependence upon the Jacobins of Berlin. This apprehension governed the policy of the Minor Courts from 1813 to 1815. But since that time events had taken an unexpected turn. Prussia, which once threatened to excite popular movement over all Germany in its own interest, had now accepted Metternich's guidance, and made its representative in the Diet the mouthpiece of Austrian interest and policy. It was no longer from Berlin but from Vienna that the separate existence of the Minor States was threatened. The two great Courts were uniting against the independence of their weaker neighbours. The danger of any popular invasion of kingly rights in the name of German unity had passed away, and the safety of the lesser sovereigns seemed now to lie not in resisting the spirit of constitutional reform but in appealing to it. In proportion as Prussia abandoned itself to Metternich's direction, the Governments of the South-Western States familiarised themselves with the idea of a popular representation; and at the very time when the conservative programme was being drawn up for the Congress of Aix-la-Chapelle, the King of Bavaria published a Constitution. Baden followed after a short interval, and in each of these States, although the Legislature was divided into two Chambers, the representation established was not merely provincial, according to Metternich's plan, or wholly on the principle of separate Estates or Orders, as before the Revolution, but to some extent on the type of England and France, where the Lower Chamber, in theory, represented the public at large. This was enough to make Metternich condemn the new Constitutions as radically bad and revolutionary.  [293] He was, however, conscious of the difficulty of making a direct attack upon them. This task he reserved for a later time. His policy at present was to obtain a declaration from the Diet which should prevent any other Government within the League from following in the same path; while, by means of Press-laws, supervision of the Universities, and a central commission of inquiry, he expected to make the position of rebellious professors and agitators so desperate that the forces of disorder, themselves not deeply rooted in German nature, would presently disappear.

[Conference of Carlsbad, Aug., 1819.]

The Conference of Ministers at Carlsbad, which in the memory of the German people is justly associated with the suppression of their liberty for an entire generation, began and ended in the month of August, 1819. Though attended by the representatives of eight German Governments, it did little more than register the conclusions which Metternich had already formed.  [294] The zeal with which the envoy of Prussia supported every repressive measure made it useless for the Ministers of the Minor Courts to offer an open opposition. Nothing more was required than that the Diet should formally sanction the propositions thus privately accepted by all the leading Ministers. On the 20th of September this sanction was given. The Diet, which had sat for three years without framing a single useful law, ratified all Metternich's oppressive enactments in as many hours. It was ordered that in every State within the Federation the Government should take measures for preventing the publication of any journal or pamphlet except after licence given, and each Government was declared responsible to the Federation at large for any objectionable writing published within its own territory. The Sovereigns were required to appoint civil commissioners at the Universities, whose duty it should be to enforce public order and to give a salutary direction to the teaching of the professors. They were also required to dismiss all professors who should overstep the bounds of their duty, and such dismissed persons were prohibited from being employed in any other State. It was enacted that within fifteen days of the passing of the decree an extraordinary Commission should assemble at Mainz to investigate the origin and extent of the secret revolutionary societies which threatened the safety of the Federation. The Commission was empowered to examine and, if necessary, to arrest any subject of any German State. All law-courts and other authorities were required to furnish it with information and with documents, and to undertake all inquiries which the Commission might order. The Commission, however, was not a law-court itself: its duty was to report to the Diet, which would then create such judicial machinery as might be necessary.  [295]

[Supplementary Act of Vienna, June, 1820.]

These measures were of an exceptional, and purported to be of a temporary, character. There were, however, other articles which Metternich intended to raise to the rank of organic laws, and to incorporate with the Act of 1815, which formed the basis of the German Federation. The conferences of Ministers were accordingly resumed after a short interval, but at Vienna instead of at Carlsbad. They lasted for several months, a stronger opposition being now made by the Minor States than before. A second body of federal law was at length drawn up, and accepted by the Diet on the 8th of June, 1820.  [296] The most important of its provisions was that which related to the Constitutions admissible within the German League. It was declared that in every State, with the exception of the four free cities, supreme power resided in the Sovereign and in him alone, and that no Constitution might do more than bind the Sovereign to co-operate with the Estates in certain definite acts of government.  [297]

In cases where a Government either appealed for help against rebellious subjects, or was notoriously unable to exert authority, the Diet charged itself with the duty of maintaining public order.

[The reaction in Prussia.]

From this time whatever liberty existed in Germany was to be found in the Minor States, in Bavaria and Baden, and in Würtemberg, which received a Constitution a few days before the enrolment of the decrees of Carlsbad. In Prussia the reaction carried everything before it. Humboldt, the best and most liberal of the Ministers, resigned, protesting in vain against the ignominious part which the King had determined to play. He was followed by those of his colleagues whose principles were dearer to them than their places. Hardenberg remained in office, a dying man, isolated, neglected, thwarted; clinging to some last hope of redeeming his promises to the Prussian people, yet jealous of all who could have given him true aid; dishonouring by tenacity of place a career associated with so much of his country's glory, and ennobled in earlier days by so much fortitude in time of evil. There gathered around the King a body of men who could see in the great patriotic efforts and reforms of the last decade nothing but an encroachment of demagogues on the rights of power. They were willing that Prussia should receive its orders from Metternich and serve a foreign Court in the work of repression, rather than that it should take its place at the head of all Germany on the condition of becoming a free and constitutional State.  [298] The stigma of disloyalty was attached to all who had kindled popular enthusiasm in 1808 and 1812. To have served the nation was to have sinned against the Government. Stein was protected by his great name from attack, but not from calumny. His friend Arndt, whose songs and addresses had so powerfully moved the heart of Germany during the War of Liberation, was subjected to repeated legal process, and, although unconvicted of any offence, was suspended from the exercise of his professorship for twenty years. Other persons, whose fault at the most was to have worked for German unity, were brought before special tribunals, and after long trial either refused a public acquittal or sentenced to actual imprisonment. Free teaching, free discussion, ceased. The barrier of authority closed every avenue of political thought. Everywhere the agent of the State prescribed an orthodox opinion, and took note of those who raised a dissentient voice.

[The Commission at Mainz.]

The pretext made at Carlsbad for this crusade against liberty, which was more energetically carried out in Prussia than elsewhere, was the existence of a conspiracy or agitation for the overthrow of Governments and of the present constitution of the German League. It was stated that proofs existed of the intention to establish by force a Republic one and indivisible, like that of France in 1793. But the very Commission which was instituted by the Carlsbad Ministers to investigate the origin and nature of this conspiracy disproved its existence. The Commission assembled at Mainz, examined several hundred persons and many thousand documents, and after two years' labour delivered a report to the Diet. The report went back to the time of Fichte's lectures and the formation of the Tugendbund in 1808, traced the progress of all the students' associations and other patriotic societies from that time to 1820; and, while exhibiting in the worst possible light the aims and conduct of the advocates of German unity, acknowledged that scarcely a single proof had been discovered of treasonable practice, and that the loyalty of the mass of the people was itself a sufficient guarantee against the impulses of the evil-minded.  [299] Such was the impression of triviality and imposture produced at the Diet by this report, that the representatives of several States proposed that the Commission should forthwith be dissolved as useless and unnecessary. This, however, could not be tolerated by Metternich and his new disciples. The Commission was allowed to continue in existence, and with it the regime of silence and repression. The measures which had been accepted at Carlsbad as temporary and provisional became more and more a part of the habitual system of government. Prosecutions succeeded one another; letters were opened; spies attended the lectures of professors and the meetings of students; the newspapers were everywhere prohibited from discussing German affairs. In a country where there were so many printers and so many readers journalism could not altogether expire. It was still permissible to give the news and to offer an opinion about foreign lands: and for years to come the Germans, like beggars regaling themselves with the scents from rich men's kitchens,  [300] followed every stage of the political struggles that were agitating France, England, and Spain, while they were not allowed to express a desire or to formulate a grievance of their own.

[Prussian Provincial Estates, June, 1823.]

[Redeeming features of Prussian absolutism.]

In the year 1822 Hardenberg died. All hope of a fulfilment of the promises made in Prussia in 1815 had already become extinct. Not many months after the Minister's death, King Frederick William established the Provincial Estates which had been recommended to him by Metternich, and announced that the creation of a central representative system would be postponed until such time as the King should think fit to introduce it. This meant that the project was finally abandoned; and Prussia in consequence remained without a Parliament until the Revolution of 1848 was at the door. The Provincial Estates, with which the King affected to temper absolute rule, met only once in three years. Their function was to express an opinion upon local matters when consulted by the Government: their enemies said that they were aristocratic and did harm, their partizans could not pretend that they did much good. In the bitterness of spirit with which, at a later time, the friends of liberty denounced the betrayal of the cause of freedom by the Prussian Court, a darker colour has perhaps been introduced into the history of this period than really belongs to it. The wrongs sustained by the Prussian nation have been compared to those inflicted by the despotism of Spain. But, however contemptible the timidity of King Frederick William, however odious the ingratitude shown to the truest friends of King and people, the Government of 1819 is not correctly represented in such a parallel. To identify the thousand varieties of wrong under the common name of oppression, is to mistake words for things, and to miss the characteristic features which distinguish nations from one another. The greatest evils which a Government can inflict upon its subjects are probably religious persecution, wasteful taxation, and the denial of justice in the daily affairs of life. None of these were present in Prussia during the darkest days of reaction. The hand of oppression fell heavily on some of the best and some of the most enlightened men; it violated interests so precious as those of free criticism and free discussion of public affairs; but the great mass of the action of Government was never on the side of evil. The ordinary course of justice was still pure, the administration conscientious and thrifty. The system of popular education, which for the first time placed Prussia in advance of Saxony and other German States, dates from these years of warfare against liberty. A reactionary despotism built the schools and framed the laws whose reproduction in free England half a century later is justly regarded as the chief of all the liberal measures of our day. So strong, so lasting, was that vital tradition which made monarchy in Prussia an instrument for the execution of great public ends.

[A new Liberalism grows up in Germany after 1820.]

[Interest in France.]

But the old harmony between rulers and subjects in Germany perished in the system of coercion which Metternich established in 1819. Patient as the Germans were, loyal as they had proved themselves to Frederick William and to worse princes through good and evil, the galling disappointment of noble hopes, the silencing of the Press, the dissolution of societies,- calumnies, expulsions, prosecutions,-embittered many an honest mind against authority. The Commission of Mainz did not find conspirators, but it made them. As years went by, and all the means of legitimately working for the improvement of German public life were one after another extinguished, men of ardent character thought of more violent methods. Secret societies, such as Metternich had imagined, came into actual being.  [301] And among those who neither sank into apathy and despair nor enrolled themselves against existing power, a new body of ideas supplanted the old loyal belief in the regeneration of Germany by its princes. The Parliamentary struggles of France, the revolutionary movements in Italy and in Spain which began at this epoch, drew the imagination away from that pictured restoration of a free Teutonic past which had proved so barren of result, and set in its place the idea of a modern universal or European Liberalism. The hatred against France, especially among the younger men, disappeared. A distinction was made between the tyrant Napoleon and the people who were now giving to the rest of the Continent the example of a free and animated public life, and illuminating the age with a political literature so systematic and so ingenious that it seemed almost like a political philosophy. The debates in the French Assembly, the writings of French publicists, became the school of the Germans. Paris regained in foreign eyes something of the interest that it had possessed in 1789. Each victory or defeat of the French popular cause awoke the joy or the sorrow of German Liberals, to whom all was blank at home: and when at length the throne of the Bourbons fell, the signal for deliverance seemed to have sounded in many a city beyond the Rhine.

[France after 1818.]

[Richelieu resigns, Dec., 1818. Decazes keeps power.]

We have seen that in Central Europe the balance between liberty and reaction, wavering in 1815, definitely fell to the side of reaction at the Congress of Aix-la-Chapelle. It remains to trace the course of events which in France itself suspended the peaceful progress of the nation, and threw power for some years into the hands of a faction which belonged to the past. The measures carried by Decazes in 1817, which gave so much satisfaction to the French, were by no means viewed with the same approval either at London or at Vienna. The two principal of these were the Electoral Law, and a plan of military reorganisation which brought back great numbers of Napoleon's old officers and soldiers to the army. Richelieu, though responsible as the head of the Ministry, felt very grave fears as to the results of this legislation. He had already become anxious and distressed when the Congress of Aix-la-Chapelle met; and the events which took place in France during his absence, as well as the communications which passed between himself and the foreign Ministers, convinced him that a change of internal policy was necessary. The busy mind of Metternich had already been scheming against French Liberalism. Alarmed at the energy shown by Decazes, the Austrian statesman had formed the design of reconciling Artois and the Ultra-Royalists to the King's Government; and he now urged Richelieu, if his old opponents could be brought to reason, to place himself at the head of a coalition of all the conservative elements in the State.  [302] While the Congress of Aix-la-Chapelle was sitting, the partial elections for the year 1818, the second under the new Electoral Law, took place. Among the deputies returned there were some who passed for determined enemies of the Bourbon restoration, especially Lafayette, whose name was so closely associated with the humiliations of the Court in 1789. Richelieu received the news with dismay, and on his return to Paris took steps which ended in the dismissal of Decazes, and the offer of a seat in the Cabinet to Villèle, the Ultra-Royalist leader. But the attempted combination failed. Richelieu accordingly withdrew from office; and a new Ministry was formed, of which Decazes, who had proved himself more powerful than his assailants, was the real though not the nominal chief.

[Election of Grégoire, Sept., 1819.]

The victory of the young and popular statesman was seen with extreme displeasure by all the foreign Courts, nor was his success an enduring one. For awhile the current of Liberal opinion in France and the favour of King Louis XVIII. enabled Decazes to hold his own against the combinations of his opponents and the ill-will of all the most powerful men in Europe. An attack made on the Electoral Law by the Upper House was defeated by the creation of sixty new Peers, among whom there were several who had been expelled in 1815. But the forces of Liberalism soon passed beyond the Minister's own control, and his steady dependence upon Louis XVIII. now raised against him as resolute an opposition among the enemies of the House of Bourbon as among the Ultra-Royalists. In the elections of 1819 the candidates of the Ministry were beaten by men of more pronounced opinions. Among the new members there was one whose victory caused great astonishment and alarm. The ex-bishop Grégoire, one of the authors of the destruction of the old French Church in 1790, and mover of the resolution which established the Republic in 1792, was brought forward from his retirement and elected Deputy by the town of Grenoble. To understand the panic caused by this election we must recall, not the events of the Revolution, but the legends of them which were current in 1819. The history of Grégoire by no means justifies the outcry which was raised against him; his real actions, however, formed the smallest part of the things that were alleged or believed by his enemies. It was said he had applauded the execution of King Louis XVI., when he had in fact protested against it:  [303] his courageous adherence to the character of a Christian priest throughout the worst days of the Convention, his labours in organising the Constitutional Church when the choice lay between that and national atheism, were nothing, or worse than nothing, in the eyes of men who felt themselves to be the despoiled heirs of that rich and aristocratic landed society, called the Feudal Church, which Grégoire had been so active in breaking up. Unluckily for himself, Grégoire, though humane in action, had not abstained from the rhodomontades against kings in general which were the fashion in 1793. Louis XVIII., forgetting that he had himself lately made the regicide Fouché a Minister, interpreted Grégoire's election by the people of Grenoble, to which the Ultra-Royalists had cunningly contributed, as a threat against the Bourbon family. He showed the displeasure usual with him when any slight was offered to his personal dignity, and drew nearer to his brother Artois and the Ultra-Royalists, whom he had hitherto shunned as his favourite Minister's worst enemies. Decazes, true to his character as the King's friend, now confessed that he had gone too far in the legislation of 1817, and that the Electoral Law, under which such a monster as Grégoire could gain a seat, required to be altered. A project of law was sketched, designed to restore the preponderance in the constituencies to the landed aristocracy. Grégoire's election was itself invalidated; and the Ministers who refused to follow Decazes in his new policy of compromise were dismissed from their posts.

[Murder of the Duke of Berry, Feb. 13, 1820.]

[Reaction sets in.]

[Fall of Decazes. Richelieu Minister, Feb., 1820.]

A few months more passed, and an event occurred which might have driven a stronger Government than that of Louis XVIII. into excesses of reaction. The heirs to the Crown next in succession to the Count of Artois were his two sons, the Dukes of Angoulême and Berry. Angoulême was childless; the Duke of Berry was the sole hope of the elder Bourbon line, which, if he should die without a son, would, as a reigning house, become extinct, the Crown of France not descending to a female.  [304] The circumstance which made Berry's life so dear to Royalists made his destruction the all-absorbing purpose of an obscure fanatic, who abhorred the Bourbon family as the lasting symbol of the foreigner's victory over France. Louvel, a working man, had followed Napoleon to exile in Elba. After returning to his country he had dogged the footsteps of the Bourbon princes for years together, waiting for the chance of murder. On the night of the 13th of February, 1820, he seized the Duke of Berry as he was leaving the Opera House, and plunged a knife into his breast. The Duke lingered for some hours, and expired early the next morning in the presence of King Louis XVIII., the Princes, and all the Ministers. Terrible as the act was, it was the act of a single resolute mind: no human being had known of Louvel's intention. But it was impossible that political passion should await the quiet investigation of a law-court. No murder ever produced a stronger outburst of indignation among the governing classes, or was more skilfully turned to the advantage of party. The Liberals felt that their cause was lost. While fanatical Ultra-Royalists, abandoning themselves to a credulity worthy of the Reign of Terror, accused Decazes himself of complicity with the assassin, their leaders fixed upon the policy which was to be imposed on the King. It was in vain that Decazes brought forward his reactionary Electoral Law, and proposed to invest the officers of State with arbitrary powers of arrest and to re-establish the censorship of the Press. The Count of Artois insisted upon the dismissal of the Minister, as the only consolation which could be given to him for the murder of his son The King yielded; and, as an Ultra-Royalist administration was not yet possible, Richelieu unwillingly returned to office, assured by Artois that his friends had no other desire than to support his own firm and temperate rule.

[Progress of the reaction in France.]

[Ultra-Royalist Ministry, Dec., 1821.]

[The Congregation.]

Returning to power under such circumstances, Richelieu became, in spite of himself, the Minister of reaction. The Press was fettered, the legal safeguards of personal liberty were suspended, the electoral system was transformed by a measure which gave a double vote to men of large property. So violent were the passions which this retrograde march of Government excited, that for a moment Paris seemed to be on the verge of revolution. Tumultuous scenes occurred in the streets; but the troops, on whom everything depended, obeyed the orders given to them, and the danger passed away. The first elections under the new system reduced the Liberal party to impotence, and brought back to the Chamber a number of men who had sat in the reactionary Parliament of 1816. Villèle and other Ultra-Royalists were invited to join Richelieu's Cabinet. For awhile it seemed as if the passions of Church and aristocracy might submit to the curb of a practical statesmanship, friendly, if not devoted, to their own interests. But restraint was soon cast aside. The Count of Artois saw the road to power open, and broke his promise of supporting the Minister who had taken office at his request. Censured and thwarted in the Chamber of Deputies, Richelieu confessed that he had undertaken a hopeless task, and bade farewell to public life. King Louis, now nearing the grave, could struggle no longer against the brother who was waiting to ascend his throne. The next Ministry was nominated not by the King but by Artois. Around Villèle, the real head of the Cabinet, there was placed a body of men who represented not the new France, or even that small portion of it which was called to exercise the active rights of citizenship, but the social principles of a past age, and that Catholic or Ultramontane revival which was now freshening the surface but not stirring the depths of the great mass of French religious indifference. A religious society known as the Congregation, which had struck its first roots under the storm of Republican persecution, and grown up during the Empire, a solitary yet unobserved rallying-place for Catholic opponents of Napoleon's despotism, now expanded into a great organism of government. The highest in blood and in office sought membership in it: its patronage raised ambitious men to the stations they desired, its hostility made itself felt against the small as well as against the great. The spirit which now gained the ascendancy in French government was clerical even more than it was aristocratic. It was monarchical too, but rather from dislike to the secularist tone of Liberalism and from trust in the orthodoxy of the Count of Artois than from any fixed belief in absolutist principles. There might be good reason to oppose King Louis XVIII.; but what priest, what noble, could doubt the divine right of a prince who was ready to compensate the impoverished emigrants out of the public funds, and to commit the whole system of public education to the hands of the clergy?

[Bourbon rule before and after 1821.]

In the middle class of France, which from this time began to feel itself in opposition to the Bourbon Government, there had been no moral change corresponding to that which made so great a difference between the governing authority of 1819 and that of 1822. Public opinion, though strongly affected, was not converted into something permanently unlike itself by the murder of the Duke of Berry. The courtiers, the devotees, the great ladies, who had laid a bold hand upon power, had not the nation on their side, although for a while the nation bore their sway submissively. But the fate of the Bourbon monarchy was in fact decided when Artois and his confidants became its representatives. France might have forgotten that the Bourbons owed their throne to foreign victories; it could not be governed in perpetuity by what was called the Parti Prêtre. Twenty years taken from the burden of age borne by Louis XVIII., twenty years of power given to Decazes, might have prolonged the rule of the restored family perhaps for some generations. If military pride found small satisfaction in the contrast between the Napoleonic age and that which immediately succeeded it, there were enough parents who valued the blood of their children, there were enough speakers and writers who valued the liberty of discussion, enough capitalists who valued quiet times, for the new order to be recognised as no unhopeful one. France has indeed seldom had a better government than it possessed between 1816 and 1820, nor could an equal period be readily named during which the French nation, as a whole, enjoyed greater happiness.

[General causes of the victory of reaction in Europe.]

Political reaction had reached its full tide in Europe generally about five years after the end of the great war. The phenomena were by no means the same in all countries, nor were the accidents of personal influence without a large share in the determination of events: yet, underlying all differences, we may trace the operation of certain great causes which were not limited by the boundaries of individual States. The classes in which any fixed belief in constitutional government existed were nowhere very large; outside the circle of state officials there was scarcely any one who had had experience in the conduct of public affairs. In some countries, as in Russia and Prussia, the conception of progress towards self-government had belonged in the first instance to the holders of power: it had exercised the imagination of a Czar, or appealed to the understanding of a Prussian Minister, eager, in the extremity of ruin, to develop every element of worth and manliness existing within his nation. The cooling of a warm fancy, the disappearance of external dangers, the very agitation which arose when the idea of liberty passed from the rulers to their subjects, sufficed to check the course of reform. And by the side of the Kings and Ministers who for a moment had attached themselves to constitutional theories there stood the old privileged orders, or what remained of them, the true party of reaction, eager to fan the first misgivings and alarms of Sovereigns, and to arrest a development more prejudicial to their own power and importance than to the dignity and security of the Crown. Further, there existed throughout Europe the fatal and ineradicable tradition of the convulsions of the first Revolution, and of the horrors of 1793. No votary of absolutism, no halting and disquieted friend of freedom, could ever be at a loss for images of woe in presaging the results of popular sovereignty; and the action of one or two infatuated assassins owed its wide influence on Europe chiefly to the ancient name and memory of Jacobinism.

There was also in the very fact that Europe had been restored to peace by the united efforts of all the governments something adverse to the success of a constitutional or a Liberal party in any State. Constitutional systems had indeed been much praised at the Congress of Vienna; but the group of men who actually controlled Europe in 1815, and who during the five succeeding years continued in correspondence and in close personal intercourse with one another, had, with one exception, passed their lives in the atmosphere of absolute government, and learnt to regard the conduct of all great affairs as the business of a small number of very eminent individuals. Castlereagh, the one Minister of a constitutional State, belonged to a party which, to a degree almost unequalled in Europe, identified political duty with the principle of hostility to change. It is indeed in the correspondence of the English Minister himself, and in relation to subjects of purely domestic government in England, that the community of thought which now existed between all the leading statesmen of Europe finds its most singular exhibition. Both Metternich and Hardenberg took as much interest in the suppression of Lancashire Radicalism, and in the measures of coercion which the British Government thought it necessary to pass in the year 1819, as in the chastisement of rebellious pamphleteers upon the Rhine, and in the dissolution of the students' clubs at Jena. It was indeed no very great matter for the English people, who were now close upon an era of reform, that Castlereagh received the congratulations of Vienna and Berlin for suspending the Habeas Corpus Act and the right of public meeting,  [305] or that Metternich believed that no one but himself knew the real import of the shouts with which the London mob greeted Sir Francis Burdett.  [306] Neither the impending reform of the English Criminal Law nor the emancipation of Irish Catholics resulted from the enlightenment of foreign Courts, or could be hindered by their indifference. But on the Continent of Europe the progress towards constitutional freedom was indeed likely to be a slow and a chequered one when the Ministers of absolutism formed so close and intimate a band, when the nations contained within them such small bodies of men in any degree versed in public affairs, and when the institutions on which it was proposed to base the liberty of the future were so destitute of that strength which springs from connection with the past.

CHAPTER XIV.

Movements in the Mediterranean States beginning in 1820-Spain from 1814 to 1820-The South American Colonies-The Army at Cadiz: Action of Quiroga and Riego-Movement at Corunna-Ferdinand accepts the Constitution of 1812-Naples from 1815 to 1820-The Court-party, the Muratists, the Carbonari-The Spanish Constitution proclaimed at Naples-Constitutional movement in Portugal-Alexander's proposal with regard to Spain-The Conference and Declaration of Troppau-Protest of England-Conference of Laibach-The Austrians invade Naples and restore absolute Monarchy- Insurrection in Piedmont, which fails-Spain from 1820 to 1822-Death of Castlereagh-The Congress of Verona-Policy of England-The French invade Spain-Restoration of absolute Monarchy, and violence of the reaction- England prohibits the conquest of the Spanish Colonies by France, and subsequently recognises their independence-Affairs in Portugal-Canning sends troops to Lisbon-The Policy of Canning-Estimate of his place in the history of Europe.

[The Mediterranean movements, beginning in 1820.]

When the guardians of Europe, at the end of the first three years of peace, scanned from their council-chamber at Aix-la-Chapelle that goodly heritage which, under Providence, their own parental care was henceforth to guard against the assaults of malice and revolution, they had fixed their gaze chiefly on France, Germany, and the Netherlands, as the regions most threatened by the spirit of change. The forecast was not an accurate one. In each of these countries Government proved during the succeeding years to be much more than a match for its real or imaginary foes: it was in the Mediterranean States, which had excited comparatively little anxiety, that the first successful attack was made upon established power. Three movements arose successively in the three southern peninsulas, at the time when Metternich was enjoying the silence which he had imposed upon Germany, and the Ultra-Royalists of France were making good the advantage which the crime of an individual and the imprudence of a party had thrown into their hands. In Spain and in Italy a body of soldiers rose on behalf of constitutional government: in Greece a nation rose against the rule of the foreigner. In all three countries the issue of these movements was, after a longer or shorter interval, determined by the Northern Powers. All three movements were at first treated as identical in their character, and all alike condemned as the work of Jacobinism. But the course of events, and a change of persons in the government of one great State, brought about a truer view of the nature of the struggle in Greece. The ultimate action of Europe in the affairs of that country was different from its action in the affairs of Italy and Spain. It is now only remembered as an instance of political recklessness or stupidity that a conflict of race against race and of religion against religion should for a while have been confused by some of the leading Ministers of Europe with the attempt of a party to make the form of domestic government more liberal. The Hellenic rising had indeed no feature in common with the revolutions of Naples and Cadiz; and, although in order of time the opening of the Greek movement long preceded the close of the Spanish movement, the historian, who has neither the politician's motive for making a confusion, nor the protection of his excuse of ignorance, must in this case neglect the accidents of chronology, and treat the two as altogether apart.

[Spain between 1814 and 1820.]

King Ferdinand of Spain, after overthrowing the Constitution which he found in existence on his return to his country, had conducted himself as if his object had been to show to what lengths a legitimate monarch might abuse the fidelity of his subjects and defy the public opinion of Europe. The leaders of the Cortes, whom he had arrested in 1814, after being declared innocent by one tribunal after another were sentenced to long terms of imprisonment by an arbitrary decree of the King, without even the pretence of judicial forms. Men who had been conspicuous in the struggle of the nation against Napoleon were neglected or disgraced; many of the highest posts were filled by politicians who had played a double part, or had even served under the invader. Priests and courtiers intrigued for influence over the King; even when a capable Minister was placed in power through the pressure of the ambassadors, and the King's name was set to edicts of administrative reform, these edicts were made a dead letter by the powerful band who lived upon the corruption of the public service. Nothing was sacred except the interest of the clergy; this, however, was enough to keep the rural population on the King's side. The peasant, who knew that his house would not now be burnt by the French, and who heard that true religion had at length triumphed over its enemies, understood, and cared to understand, nothing more. Rumours of kingly misgovernment and oppression scarcely reached his ears. Ferdinand was still the child of Spain and of the Church; his return had been the return of peace; his rule was the victory of the Catholic faith.

[The nation satisfied: the officers discontented.]

But the acquiescence of the mass of the people was not shared by the officers of the army and the educated classes in the towns. The overthrow of the Constitution was from the first condemned by soldiers who had won distinction under the government of the Cortes; and a series of military rebellion, though isolated and on the smallest scale, showed that the course on which Ferdinand had entered was not altogether free from danger. The attempts of General Mina in 1814, and of Porlier and Lacy in succeeding years, to raise the soldiery on behalf of the Constitution, failed, through the indifference of the soldiery themselves, and the power which the priesthood exercised in garrison-towns. Discontent made its way in the army by slow degrees; and the ultimate declaration of a military party against the existing Government was due at least as much to Ferdinand's absurd system of favouritism, and to the wretched condition into which the army had been thrown, as to an attachment to the memory or the principles of constitutional rule. Misgovernment made the treasury bankrupt; soldiers and sailors received no pay for years together; and the hatred with which the Spanish people had now come to regard military service is curiously shown by an order of the Government that all the beggars in Madrid and other great towns should be seized on a certain night (July 23, 1816), and enrolled in the army.  [307] But the very beggars were more than a match for Ferdinand's administration. They heard of the fate in store for them, and mysteriously disappeared, so frustrating a measure by which it had been calculated that Spain would gain sixty thousand warriors.

[Struggle of Spain with its colonies, 1810-1820.]

The military revolution which at length broke out in the year 1820 was closely connected with the struggle for independence now being made by the American colonies of Spain; and in its turn it affected the course of this struggle and its final result. The colonies had refused to accept the rule either of Joseph Bonaparte or of the Cortes of Cadiz when their legitimate sovereign was dispossessed by Napoleon. While acting for the most part in Ferdinand's name, they had engaged in a struggle with the National Government of Spain. They had tasted independence; and although after the restoration of Ferdinand they would probably have recognised the rights of the Spanish Crown if certain concessions had been made, they were not disposed to return to the condition of inferiority in which they had been held during the last century, or to submit to rulers who proved themselves as cruel and vindictive in moments of victory as they were incapable of understanding the needs of the time. The struggle accordingly continued. Regiment after regiment was sent from Spain, to perish of fever, of forced marches, or on the field. The Government of King Ferdinand, despairing of its own resources, looked around for help among the European Powers. England would have lent its mediation, and possibly even armed assistance, if the Court of Madrid would have granted a reasonable amount of freedom to the colonies, and have opened their ports to British commerce. This, however, was not in accordance with the views of Ferdinand's advisers. Strange as it may appear, the Spanish Government demanded that the alliance of Sovereigns, which had been framed for the purpose of resisting the principle of rebellion and disorder in Europe, should intervene against its revolted subjects on the other side of the Atlantic, and it implied that England, if acting at all, should act as the instrument of the Alliance.  [308] Encouragement was given to the design by the Courts of Paris and St. Petersburg. Whether a continent claimed its independence, or a German schoolboy wore a forbidden ribbon in his cap, the chiefs of the Holy Alliance now assumed the frown of offended Providence, and prepared to interpose their own superior power and wisdom to save a misguided world from the consequences of its own folly. Alexander had indeed for a time hoped that the means of subduing the colonies might be supplied by himself; and in his zeal to supplant England in the good graces of Ferdinand he sold the King a fleet of war on very moderate terms. To the scandal of Europe the ships, when they reached Cadiz, turned out to be thoroughly rotten and unseaworthy. As it was certain that the Czar's fleet and the Spanish soldiers, however holy their mission, would all go to the bottom together as soon as they encountered the waves of the Atlantic, the expedition was postponed, and the affairs of America were brought before the Conference of Aix-la-Chapelle. The Envoys of Russia and France submitted a paper, in which, anticipating the storm-warnings of more recent times, they described the dangers to which monarchical Europe would be exposed from the growth of a federation of republics in America; and they suggested that Wellington, as "the man of Europe," should go to Madrid, to preside over a negotiation between the Court of Spain and all the ambassadors with reference to the terms to be offered to the Transatlantic States.  [309] England, however, in spite of Lord Castlereagh's dread of revolutionary contagion, adhered to the principles which it had already laid down; and as the counsellors of King Ferdinand declined to change their policy, Spain was left to subdue its colonies by itself.

[Conspiracy in the Army of Cadiz.]

It was in the army assembled at Cadiz for embarkation in the summer of 1819 that the conspiracy against Ferdinand's Government found its leaders. Secret societies had now spread themselves over the principal Spanish towns, and looked to the soldiery on the coast for the signal of revolt. Abisbal, commander at Cadiz, intending to make himself safe against all contingencies, encouraged for awhile the plots of the discontented officers: then, foreseeing the failure of the movement, he arrested the principal men by a stratagem, and went off to Madrid, to reveal the conspiracy to the Court and to take credit for saving the King's crown (July, 1819).  [310] If the army could have been immediately despatched to America, the danger would possibly have passed away. This, however, was prevented by an outbreak of yellow fever, which made it necessary to send the troops into cantonments for several months. The conspirators gained time to renew their plans. The common soldiers, who had hitherto been faithful to the Government, heard in their own squalor and inaction the fearful stories of the few sick and wounded who returned from beyond the seas, and learnt to regard the order of embarkation as a sentence of death. Several battalions were won over to the cause of constitutional liberty by their commanders. The leaders imprisoned a few months before were again in communication with their followers. After the treachery of Abisbal, it was agreed to carry out the revolt without the assistance of generals or grandees. The leaders chosen were two colonels, Quiroga and Riego, of whom the former was in nominal confinement in a monastery near Medina Sidonia, twenty miles east of Cadiz, while Riego was stationed at Cabezas, a few marches distant on the great road to Seville. The first day of the year 1820 was fixed for the insurrection. It was determined that Riego should descend upon the head-quarters, which were at Arcos, and arrest the generals before they could hear anything of the movement, while Quiroga, moving from the east, gathered up the battalions stationed on the road, and threw himself into Cadiz, there to await his colleague's approach.

[Action of Quiroga and Riego, Jan. 1820.]

The first step in the enterprise proved successful. Riego, proclaiming the Constitution of 1812, surprised the headquarters, seized the generals, and rallied several companies to his standard. Quiroga, however, though he gained possession of San Fernando, at the eastern end of the peninsula of Leon, on which Cadiz is situated, failed to make his entrance into Cadiz. The commandant, hearing of the capture of the head-quarters, had closed the city gates, and arrested the principal inhabitants whom he suspected of being concerned in the plot. The troops within the town showed no sign of mutiny. Riego, when he arrived at the peninsula of Leon, found that only five thousand men in all had joined the good cause, while Cadiz, with a considerable garrison and fortifications of great strength, stood hostile before him. He accordingly set off with a small force to visit and win over the other regiments which were lying in the neighbouring towns and villages. The commanders, however, while not venturing to attack the mutineers, drew off their troops to a distance, and prevented them from entering into any communication with Riego. The adventurous soldier, leaving Quiroga in the peninsula of Leon, then marched into the interior of Andalusia (January 27), endeavouring to raise the inhabitants of the towns. But the small numbers of his band, and the knowledge that Cadiz and the greater part of the army still held by the Government, prevented the inhabitants from joining the insurrection, even where they received Riego with kindness and supplied the wants of his soldiers. During week after week the little column traversed the country, now cut off from retreat, exhausted by forced marches in drenching rain, and harassed by far stronger forces sent in pursuit. The last town that Riego entered was Cordova. The enemy was close behind him. No halt was possible. He led his band, now numbering only two hundred men, into the mountains, and there bade them disperse (March 11).

[Corunna proclaims the Constitution Feb. 20.]

[Abisbal's defection March 4.]

With Quiroga lying inactive in the peninsula of Leon and Riego hunted from village to village, it seemed as if the insurrection which they had begun could only end in the ruin of its leaders. But the movement had in fact effected its object. While the courtiers around King Ferdinand, unwarned by the news from Cadiz, continued their intrigues against one another, the rumour of rebellion spread over the country. If no great success had been achieved by the rebels, it was also certain that no great blow had been struck by the Government. The example of bold action had been set; the shock given at one end of the peninsula was felt at the other; and a fortnight before Riego's band dispersed, the garrison and the citizens of Corunna together declared for the Constitution (February 20). From Corunna the revolutionary movement spread to Ferrol and to all the other coast-towns of Galicia. The news reached Madrid, terrifying the Government, and exciting the spirit of insurrection in the capital itself. The King summoned a council of the leading men around him. The wisest of them advised him to publish a moderate Constitution, and, by convoking a Parliament immediately, to stay the movement, which would otherwise result in the restoration of the Assembly and the Constitution of 1812. They also urged the King to abolish the Inquisition forthwith. Ferdinand's brother, Don Carlos, the head of the clerical party, succeeded in preventing both measures. Though the generals in all quarters of Spain wrote that they could not answer for the troops, there were still hopes of keeping down the country by force of arms. Abisbal, who was at Madrid, was ordered to move with reinforcements towards the army in the south. He set out, protesting to the King that he knew the way to deal with rebels. When he reached Ocaña he proclaimed the Constitution himself (March 4).

[Ferdinand accepts the Constitution 1812, March 9.]

It was now clear that the cause of absolute monarchy was lost. The ferment in Madrid increased. On the night of the 6th of March all the great bodies of State assembled for council in the King's palace, and early on the 7th Ferdinand published a proclamation, stating that he had determined to summon the Cortes immediately. This declaration satisfied no one, for the Cortes designed by the King might be the mere revival of a mediæval form, and the history of 1814 showed how little value was to be attached to Ferdinand's promises. Crowds gathered in the great squares of Madrid, crying for the Constitution of 1812. The statement of the Minister of War that the Guard was on the point of joining the people now overcame even the resistance of Don Carlos and the confessors; and after a day wasted in dispute, Ferdinand announced to his people that he was ready to take the oath to the Constitution which they desired. The next day was given up to public rejoicings; the book of the Constitution was carried in procession through the city with the honours paid to the Holy Sacrament, and all political prisoners were set at liberty. The prison of the Inquisition was sacked, the instruments of torture broken in pieces. On the 9th the leaders of the agitation took steps to make the King fulfil his promise. A mob invaded the court and threshold of the palace. At their demand the municipal council of 1814 was restored; its members were sent, in company with six deputies chosen by the populace, to receive the pledges of the King. Ferdinand, all smiles and bows, while he looked forward to the day when force or intrigue should make him again absolute master of Spain, and enable him to take vengeance upon the men who were humiliating, him, took the oath of fidelity to the Constitution of 1812.  [311] New Ministers were immediately called to office, and a provisional Junta was placed by their side as the representative of the public until the new Cortes should be duly elected.

[Condition of Naples, 1815-1820.]

Tidings of the Spanish revolution passed rapidly over Europe, disquieting the courts and everywhere reviving the hopes of the friends of popular right. Before four months had passed, the constitutional movement begun in Cadiz was taken up in Southern Italy. The kingdom of Naples was one of those States which had profited the most by French conquest. During the nine years that its crown was held by Joseph Bonaparte and Murat, the laws and institutions which accompanied Napoleon's supremacy had rudely broken up the ancient fixity of confusions which passed for government, and had aroused no insignificant forces of new social life. The feudal tenure of land, and with it something of the feudal structure of society, had passed away: the monasteries had been dissolved; the French civil code, and a criminal code based upon that of France, had taken the place of a thousand conflicting customs and jurisdictions; taxation had been made, if not light, yet equitable and simple; justice was regular, and the same for baron and peasant; brigandage had been extinguished; and, for the first time in many centuries, the presence of a rational and uniform administration was felt over all the south of Italy. Nor on the restoration of King Ferdinand had any reaction been permitted to take place like that which in a moment destroyed the work of reform in Spain and in Westphalia. England and Austria insisted that there should be neither vengeance nor counterrevolution. Queen Marie Caroline, the principal agent in the cruelties of 1799, was dead; Ferdinand himself was old and indolent, and willing to leave affairs in the hands of Ministers more intelligent than himself. Hence the laws and the administrative system of Murat remained on the whole unchanged.  [312] As in France, a Bourbon Sovereign placed himself at the head of a political order fashioned by Napoleon and the Revolution. Where changes in the law were made, or acts of State revoked, it was for the most part in consequence of an understanding with the Holy See. Thus, while no attempt was made to eject the purchasers of Church-lands, the lands not actually sold were given back to the Church; a considerable number of monasteries were restored; education was allowed to fall again into the hands of the clergy; the Jesuits were recalled, and the Church regained its jurisdiction in marriage-causes, as well as the right of suppressing writings at variance with the Catholic faith.

[Hostility between the Court party and the Muratists.]

But the legal and recognised changes which followed Ferdinand's return by no means expressed the whole change in the operation of government. If there were not two conflicting systems at work, there were two conflicting bodies of partisans in the State. Like the emigrants who returned with Louis XVIII., a multitude of Neapolitans, high and low, who had either accompanied the King in his exile to Sicily or fought for him on the mainland in 1799 and 1806, now expected their reward. In their interest the efficiency of the public service was sacrificed and the course of justice perverted. Men who had committed notorious crimes escaped punishment if they had been numbered among the King's friends; the generals and officials who had served under Murat, though not removed from their posts, were treated with discourtesy and suspicion. It was in the army most of all that the antagonism of the two parties was felt. A medal was struck for service in Sicily, and every year spent there in inaction was reckoned as two in computing seniority. Thus the younger officers of Murat found their way blocked by a troop of idlers, and at the same time their prospects suffered from the honest attempts made by Ministers to reduce the military expenditure. Discontent existed in every rank. The generals were familiar with the idea of political change, for during the last years of Murat's reign they had themselves thought of compelling him to grant a Constitution: the younger officers and the sergeants were in great part members of the secret society of the Carbonari, which in the course of the last few years had grown with the weakness of the Government, and had now become the principal power in the Neapolitan kingdom.

[The Carbonari.]

The origin of this society, which derived its name and its symbolism from the trade of the charcoal-burner, as Freemasonry from that of the builder, is uncertain. Whether its first aim was resistance to Bourbon tyranny after 1799, or the expulsion of the French and Austrians from Italy, in the year 1814 it was actively working for constitutional government in opposition to Murat, and receiving encouragement from Sicily, where Ferdinand was then playing the part of constitutional King. The maintenance of absolute government by the restored Bourbon Court severed the bond which for a time existed between legitimate monarchy and conspiracy; and the lodges of the Carbonari, now extending themselves over the country with great rapidity, became so many centres of agitation against despotic rule. By the year 1819 it was reckoned that one person out of every twenty-five in the kingdom of Naples had joined the society. Its members were drawn from all classes, most numerously perhaps from the middle class in the towns; but even priests had been initiated, and there was no branch of the public service that had not Carbonari in its ranks. The Government, apprehending danger from the extension of the sect, tried to counteract it by founding a rival society of Calderari, or Braziers, in which every miscreant who before 1815 had murdered and robbed in the name of King Ferdinand and the Catholic faith received a welcome. But though the number of such persons was not small, the growth of this fraternity remained far behind that of its model; and the chief result of the competition was that intrigue and mystery gained a greater charm than ever for the Italians, and that all confidence in Government perished, under the sense that there was a hidden power in the land which was only awaiting the due moment to put forth its strength in revolutionary action.

[Morelli's movement, July 2, 1820.]

After the proclamation of the Spanish Constitution, an outbreak in the kingdom of Naples had become inevitable. The Carbonari of Salerno, where the sect had its headquarters, had intended to rise at the beginning of June; their action, however, was postponed for some months, and it was anticipated by the daring movement of a few sergeants belonging to a cavalry regiment stationed at Nola, and of a lieutenant, named Morelli, whom they had persuaded to place himself at their head. Leading out a squadron of a hundred and fifty men in the direction of Avellino on the morning of July 2nd, Morelli proclaimed the Constitution. One of the soldiers alone left the band; force or persuasion kept others to the Standard, though they disapproved of the enterprise. The inhabitants of the populous places that lie between Nola and Avellino welcomed the squadron, or at least offered it no opposition: the officer commanding at Avellino came himself to meet Morelli, and promised him assistance. The band encamped that night in a village; on the next day they entered Avellino, where the troops and townspeople, headed by the bishop and officers, declared in their favour. From Avellino the news of the movement spread quickly over the surrounding country. The Carbonari were everywhere prepared for revolt; and before the Government had taken a single step in its own defence, the Constitution had been joyfully and peacefully accepted, not only by the people but by the militia and the regular troops, throughout the greater part of the district that lies to the east of Naples.

[Affairs at Naples, July 2-7.]

The King was on board ship in the bay, when, in the afternoon of July 2nd, intelligence came of Morelli's revolt at Nola. Nothing was done by the Ministry on that day, although Morelli and his band might have been captured in a few hours if any resolute officer, with a few trustworthy troops, had been sent against them. On the next morning, when the garrison of Avellino had already joined the mutineers, and taken up a strong position commanding the road from Naples, General Carrascosa was sent, not to reduce the insurgents-for no troops were given to him-but to pardon, to bribe, and to coax them into submission. [313] Carrascosa failed to effect any good; other generals, who, during the following days, attempted to attack the mutineers, found that their troops would not follow them, and that the feeling of opposition to the Government, though it nowhere broke into lawlessness, was universal in the army as well as the nation. If the people generally understood little of politics, they had learnt enough to dislike arbitrary taxation and the power of arbitrary arrest. Not a single hand or voice was anywhere raised in defence of absolutism. Escaping from Naples, where he was watched by the Government, General Pepe, who was at once the chief man among the Carbonari and military commandant of the province in which Avellino lies, went to place himself at the head of the revolution. Naples itself had hitherto remained quiet, but on the night of July 6th a deputation from the Carbonari informed the King that they could no longer preserve tranquillity in the city unless a Constitution was granted. The King, without waiting for morning, published an edict declaring that a Constitution should be drawn up within eight days; immediately afterwards he appointed a new Ministry, and, feigning illness, committed the exercise of royal authority to his son, the Duke of Calabria.

[Ferdinand takes the Oath to the Spanish Constitution, July 13.]

Ferdinand's action was taken by the people as a stratagem. He had employed the device of a temporary abdication some years before in cajoling the Sicilians; and the delay of eight days seemed unnecessary to ardent souls who knew that a Spanish Constitution was in existence and did not know of its defects in practice. There was also on the side of the Carbonari the telling argument that Ferdinand, as a possible successor to his nephew, the childless King of Spain, actually had signed the Spanish Constitution in order to preserve his own contingent rights to that crown. What Ferdinand had accepted as Infante of Spain he might well accept as King of Naples. The cry was therefore for the immediate proclamation of the Spanish Constitution of 1812. The court yielded, and the Duke of Calabria, as viceroy, published an edict making this Constitution the law of the kingdom of the Two Sicilies. But the tumult continued, for deceit was still feared, until the edict appeared again, signed by the King himself. Then all was rejoicing. Pepe, at the head of a large body of troops, militia and Carbonari, made a triumphal entry into the city, and, in company with Morelli and other leaders of the military rebellion, was hypocritically thanked by the Viceroy for his services to the nation. On the 13th of July the King, a hale but venerable-looking man of seventy, took the oath to the Constitution before the altar in the royal chapel. The form of words had been written out for him; but Ferdinand was fond of theatrical acts of religion, and did not content himself with reading certain solemn phrases. Raising his eyes to the crucifix above the altar, he uttered aloud a prayer that if the oath was not sincerely taken the vengeance of God might fall upon his head. Then, after blessing and embracing his sons, the venerable monarch wrote to the Emperor of Austria, protesting that all that he did was done under constraint, and that his obligations were null and void.  [314]

[Affairs in Portugal, 1807-1820.]

A month more passed, and in a third kingdom absolute government fell before the combined action of soldiers and people. The Court of Lisbon had migrated to Brazil in 1807, when the troops of Napoleon first appeared upon the Tagus, and Portugal had since then been governed by a Regency, acting in the name of the absent Sovereign. The events of the Peninsular War had reduced Portugal almost to the condition of a dependency of Great Britain. Marshal Beresford, the English commander-in-chief of its army, kept his post when the war was over, and with him there remained a great number of English officers who had led the Portuguese regiments in Wellington's campaigns. The presence of these English soldiers was unwelcome, and commercial rivalry embittered the natural feeling of impatience towards an ally who remained as master rather than guest. Up to the year 1807 the entire trade with Brazil had been confined by law to Portuguese merchants; when, however, the Court had established itself beyond the Atlantic, it had opened the ports of Brazil to British ships, in return for the assistance given by our own country against Napoleon. Both England and Brazil profited by the new commerce, but the Portuguese traders, who had of old had the monopoly, were ruined. The change in the seat of government was in fact seen to be nothing less than a reversal of the old relations between the European country and its colony. Hitherto Brazil had been governed in the interests of Portugal; but with a Sovereign fixed at Rio Janeiro, it was almost inevitable that Portugal should be governed in the interests of Brazil. Declining trade, the misery and impoverishment resulting from a long war, resentment against a Court which could not be induced to return to the kingdom and against a foreigner who could not be induced to quit it, filled the army and all classes in the nation with discontent. Conspiracies were discovered as early as 1817, and the conspirators punished with all the barbarous ferocity of the Middle Ages. Beresford, who had not sufficient tact to prevent the execution of a sentence ordering twelve persons to be strangled, beheaded, and then burnt in the streets of Lisbon, found, during the two succeeding years, that the state of the country was becoming worse and worse. In the spring of 1820, when the Spanish revolution had made some change in the neighbouring kingdom, either for good or evil, inevitable, Beresford set out for Rio Janeiro, intending to acquaint the King with the real condition of affairs, and to use his personal efforts in hastening the return of the Court to Lisbon. Before he could recross the Atlantic, the Government which he left behind him at Lisbon had fallen.

[Revolution at Oporto, August 1820.]

The grievances of the Portuguese army made it the natural centre of disaffection, but the military conspirators had their friends among all classes. On the 24th of August, 1820, the signal of revolt was given at Oporto. Priests and magistrates, as well as the town-population, united with officers of the army in declaring against the Regency, and in establishing a provisional Junta, charged with the duty of carrying on the government in the name of the King until the Cortes should assemble and frame a Constitution. No resistance was offered by any of the civil or military authorities at Oporto. The Junta entered upon its functions, and began by dismissing all English officers, and making up the arrears of pay due to the soldiers. As soon as the news of the revolt reached Lisbon, the Regency itself volunteered to summon the Cortes, and attempted to conciliate the remainder of the army by imitating the measures of the Junta of Oporto.  [315] The troops, however, declined to act against their comrades, and on the 15th of September the Regency was deposed, and a provisional Junta installed in the capital. Beresford, who now returned from Brazil, was forbidden to set foot on Portuguese soil. The two rival governing-committees of Lisbon and Oporto coalesced; and after an interval of confusion the elections to the Cortes were held, resulting in the return of a body of men whose loyalty to the Crown was not impaired by their hostility to the Regency. The King, when the first tidings of the constitutional movement reached Brazil, gave a qualified consent to the summoning of the Cortes which was announced by the Regency, and promised to return to Europe. Beresford, continuing his voyage to England without landing at Lisbon, found that the Government of this country had no disposition to interfere with the domestic affairs of its ally.

[Alexander proposes joint action with regard to Spain, April, 1820.]

It was the boast of the Spanish and Italian Liberals that the revolutions effected in 1820 were undisgraced by the scenes of outrage which had followed the capture of the Bastille and the overthrow of French absolutism thirty years before.  [316] The gentler character of these southern movements proved, however, no extenuation in the eyes of the leading statesmen of Europe: on the contrary, the declaration of soldiers in favour of a Constitution seemed in some quarters more ominous of evil than any excess of popular violence. The alarm was first sounded at St. Petersburg. As soon as the Czar heard of Riego's proceedings at Cadiz, he began to meditate intervention; and when it was known that Ferdinand had been forced to accept the Constitution of 1812, he ordered his ambassadors to propose that all the Great Powers, acting through their Ministers at Paris, should address a remonstrance to the representative of Spain, requiring the Cortes to disavow the crime of the 8th of March, by which they had been called into being, and to offer a pledge of obedience to their King by enacting the most rigorous laws against sedition and revolt.  [317] In that case, and in that alone, the Czar desired to add, would the Powers maintain their relations of confidence and amity with Spain.

[England prevents joint diplomatic intervention.]

This Russian proposal was viewed with some suspicion at Vienna; it was answered with a direct and energetic negative from London. Canning was still in the Ministry. The words with which in 1818 he had protested against a league between England and autocracy were still ringing in the ears of his colleagues. Lord Liverpool's Government knew itself to be unpopular in the country; every consideration of policy as well as of self-interest bade it resist the beginnings of an intervention which, if confined to words, was certain to be useless, and, if supported by action, was likely to end in that alliance between France and Russia which had been the nightmare of English statesmen ever since 1814, and in a second occupation of Spain by the very generals whom Wellington had spent so many years in dislodging. Castlereagh replied to the Czar's note in terms which made it clear that England would never give its sanction to a collective interference with Spain.  [318] Richelieu, the nominal head of the French Government, felt too little confidence in his position to act without the concurrence of Great Britain; and the crusade of absolutism against Spanish liberty was in consequence postponed until the victory of the Ultra-Royalists at Paris was complete, and the overthrow of Richelieu had brought to the head of the French State a group of men who felt no scruple in entering upon an aggressive war.

[Naples and the Great Powers.]

[Austria.]

[England admits Austrian but not joint intervention.]

But the shelter of circumstances which for a while protected Spain from the foreigner did not extend to Italy, when in its turn the Neapolitan revolution called a northern enemy into the field. Though the kingdom of the Two Sicilies was in itself much less important than Spain, the established order of the Continent was more directly threatened by a change in its government. No European State was exposed to the same danger from a revolution in Madrid as Austria from a revolution in Naples. The Czar had invoked the action of the Courts against Spain, not because his own dominions were in peril, but because the principle of monarchical right was violated: with Austria the danger pressed nearer home. The establishment of constitutional liberty in Naples was almost certain to be followed by an insurrection in the Papal States and a national uprising in the Venetian provinces; and among all the bad results of Austria's false position in Italy, one of the worst was that in self-defence it was bound to resist every step made towards political liberty beyond its own frontier. The dismay with which Metternich heard of the collapse of absolute government at Naples  [319] was understood and even shared by the English Ministry, who at this moment were deprived of their best guide by Canning's withdrawal. Austria, in peace just as much as in war, had uniformly been held to be the natural ally of England against the two aggressive Courts of Paris and St. Petersburg. It seemed perfectly right and natural to Lord Castlereagh that Austria, when its own interests were endangered by the establishment of popular sovereignty at Naples, should intervene to restore King Ferdinand's power; the more so as the secret treaty of 1815, by which Metternich had bound this sovereign to maintain absolute monarchy, had been communicated to the ambassador of Great Britain, and had received his approval. But the right to intervene in Italy belonged, according to Lord Castlereagh, to Austria alone. The Sovereigns of Europe had no more claim, as a body, to interfere with Naples than they had to interfere with Spain. Therefore, while the English Government sanctioned and even desired the intervention of Austria, as a State acting in protection of its own interests against revolution in a neighbouring country, it refused to sanction any joint intervention of the European Powers, and declared itself opposed to the meeting of a Congress where any such intervention might be discussed.  [320]

[Conference at Troppau, Oct. 1820.]

Had Metternich been free to follow his own impulses, he would have thrown an army into Southern Italy as soon as soldiers and stores could be collected, and have made an end of King Ferdinand's troubles forthwith. It was, however, impossible for him to disregard the wishes of the Czar, and to abandon all at once the system of corporate action, which was supposed to have done such great things for Europe.  [321] A meeting of sovereigns and Ministers was accordingly arranged, and at the end of October the Emperor of Austria received the Czar and King Frederick William in the little town of Troppau, in Moravia. France had itself first recommended the summoning of a Congress to deal with Neapolitan affairs, and it was believed for a while that England would be isolated in its resistance to a joint intervention. But before the Congress assembled, the firm language of the English Ministry had drawn Richelieu over to its side;  [322] and although one of the two French envoys made himself the agent of the Ultra-Royalist faction, it was not possible for him to unite his country with the three Eastern Courts. France, through the weakness of its Government and the dissension between its representatives, counted for nothing at the Congress. England sent its ambassador from Vienna, but with instructions to act as an observer and little more; and in consequence the meeting at Troppau resolved itself into a gathering of the three Eastern autocrats and their Ministers. As Prussia had ceased to have any independent foreign policy whatever, Metternich needed only to make certain of the support of the Czar in order to range on his side the entire force of eastern and central Europe in the restoration of Neapolitan despotism.

[Contest between Metternich and Capodistrias.]

[Circular of Troppau, Dec. 8, 1820.]

[The principle of intervention laid down by three Courts.]

The plan of the Austrian statesman was not, however, to be realised without some effort. Alexander had watched with jealousy Metternich's recent assumption of a dictatorship over the minor German Courts; he had never admitted Austria's right to dominate in Italy; and even now some vestiges of his old attachment to liberal theories made him look for a better solution of the Neapolitan problem than in that restoration of despotism pure and simple which Austria desired. While condemning every attempt of a people to establish its own liberties, Alexander still believed that in some countries sovereigns would do well to make their subjects a grant of what he called sage and liberal institutions. It would have pleased him best if the Neapolitans could have been induced by peaceful means to abandon their Constitution, and to accept in return certain chartered rights as a gift from their King; and the concurrence of the two Western Powers might in this case possibly have been regained. This project of a compromise, by which Ferdinand would have been freed from his secret engagement with Austria, was exactly what Metternich desired to frustrate. He found himself matched, and not for the first time, against a statesman who was even more subtle than himself. This was Count Capodistrias, a Greek who from a private position had risen to be Foreign Minister of Russia, and was destined to become the first sovereign, in reality if not in title, of his native land. Capodistrias, the sympathetic partner of the Czar's earlier hopes, had not travelled so fast as his master along the reactionary road. He still represented what had been the Italian policy of Alexander some years before, and sought to prevent the re-establishment of absolute rule at Naples, at least by the armed intervention of Austria. Metternich's first object was to discredit the Minister in the eyes of his sovereign. It is said that he touched the Czar's keenest fears in a conversation relating to a mutiny that had just taken place among the troops at St. Petersburg, and so in one private interview cut the ground from under Capodistrias' feet; he also humoured the Czar by reviving that monarch's own favourite scheme for a mutual guarantee of all the Powers against revolution in any part of Europe. Alexander had proposed in 1818 that the Courts should declare resistance to authority in any country to be a violation of European peace, entitling the Allied Powers, if they should think fit, to suppress it by force of arms. This doctrine, which would have empowered the Czar to throw the armies of a coalition upon London if the Reform Bill had been carried by force, had hitherto failed to gain international acceptance owing to the opposition of Great Britain. It was now formally accepted by Austria and Prussia. Alexander saw the federative system of European monarchy, with its principle of collective intervention, recognised as an established fact by at least three of the great Powers;  [323] and in return he permitted Metternich to lay down the lines which, in the case of Naples, this intervention should follow. It was determined to invite King Ferdinand to meet his brother-sovereigns at Laibach, in the Austrian province of Carniola, and through him to address a summons to the Neapolitan people, requiring them, in the name of the three Powers, and under threat of invasion, to abandon their Constitution. This determination was announced, as a settled matter, to the envoys of England and France; and a circular was issued from Troppau by the three Powers to all the Courts of Europe (Dec. 8), embodying the doctrine of federative intervention, and expressing a hope that England and France would approve its immediate application in the case of Naples.  [324]

[Protest of England.]

There was no ground whatever for this hope with regard to England. On the contrary, in proportion as the three Courts strengthened their union and insisted on their claim to joint jurisdiction over Europe, they drove England away from them. Lord Castlereagh had at first promised the moral support of this country to Austria in its enterprise against Naples; but when this enterprise ceased to be the affair of Austria alone, and became part of the police-system of the three despotisms, it was no longer possible for the English Government to view it with approval or even with silence. The promise of a moral support was withdrawn: England declared that it stood strictly neutral with regard to Naples, and protested against the doctrine contained in the Troppau circular, that a change of government in any State gave the Allied Powers the right to intervene.  [325]

France made no such protest; but it was still hoped at Paris that an Austrian invasion of Southern Italy, so irritating to French pride, might be averted. King Louis XVIII. endeavoured, but in vain, to act the part of mediator, and to reconcile the Neapolitan House of Bourbon at once with its own subjects and with the Northern Powers.

[Conference at Laibach, Jan., 1821.]

The summons went out from the Congress to King Ferdinand to appear at Laibach. It found him enjoying all the popularity of a constitutional King, surrounded by Ministers who had governed under Murat, exchanging compliments with a democratic Parliament, lavishing distinctions upon the men who had overthrown his authority, and swearing to everything that was set before him. As the Constitution prohibited the King from leaving the country without the consent of the Legislature, it was necessary for Ferdinand to communicate to Parliament the invitation which he had received from the Powers, and to take a vote of the Assembly on the subject of his journey. Ferdinand's Ministers possessed some political experience; they recognised that it would be impossible to maintain the existing Constitution against the hostility of three great States, and hoped that the Parliament would consent to Ferdinand's departure on condition that he pledged himself to uphold certain specified principles of free government. A message to the Assembly was accordingly made public, in which the King expressed his desire to mediate with the Powers on this basis. But the Ministers had not reckoned with the passions of the people. As soon as it became known that Ferdinand was about to set out, the leaders of the Carbonari mustered their bands. A host of violent men streamed into Naples from the surrounding country. The Parliament was intimidated, and Ferdinand was prohibited from leaving Naples until he had sworn to maintain the Constitution actually in force, that, namely, which Naples had borrowed from Spain. Ferdinand, whose only object was to escape from the country as quickly as possible, took the oath with his usual effusions of patriotism. He then set out for Leghorn, intending to cross from thence into Northern Italy. No sooner had he reached the Tuscan port than he addressed a letter to each of the five principal sovereigns of Europe, declaring that his last acts were just as much null and void as all his earlier ones. He made no attempt to justify, or to excuse, or even to explain his conduct; nor is there the least reason to suppose that he considered the perjuries of a prince to require a justification. "These sorry protests," wrote the secretary of the Congress of Troppau, "will happily remain secret. No Cabinet will be anxious to draw them from the sepulchre of its archives. Till then there is not much harm done."

[Ferdinand at Laibach.]

[Demands of the Allies on Naples.]

Ferdinand reached Laibach, where the Czar rewarded him for the fatigues of his journey by a present of some Russian bears. His arrival was peculiarly agreeable to Metternich, whose intentions corresponded exactly with his own; and the fact that he had been compelled to swear to maintain the Spanish Constitution at Naples acted favourably for the Austrian Minister, inasmuch as it enabled him to say to all the world that negotiation was now out of the question.  [326] Capodistrias, brought face to face with failure, twisted about, according to his rival's expression, like a devil in holy water, but all in vain. It was decided that Ferdinand should be restored as absolute monarch by an Austrian army, and that, whether the Neapolitans resisted or submitted, their country should be occupied by Austrian troops for some years to come. The only difficulty remaining was to vest King Ferdinand's conduct in some respectable disguise. Capodistrias, when nothing else was to be gained, offered to invent an entire correspondence, in which Ferdinand should proudly uphold the Constitution to which he had sworn, and protest against the determination of the Powers to force the sceptre of absolutism back into his hand.  [327] This device, however, was thought too transparent. A letter was sent in the King's name to his son, the Duke of Calabria, stating that he had found the three Powers determined not to tolerate an order of things sprung from revolution; that submission alone would avert war; but that even in case of submission certain securities for order, meaning the occupation of the country by an Austrian army, would be exacted. The letter concluded with the usual promises of reform and good government. It reached Naples on the 9th of February, 1821. No answer was either expected or desired. On the 6th the order had been given to the Austrian army to cross the Po.

[State of Naples and Sicily.]

[The Austrians enter Naples, March 24, 1821.]

[Third Neapolitan restoration.]

There was little reason to fear any serious resistance on the part of the Neapolitans. The administration of the State was thoroughly disorganised; the agitation of the secret societies had destroyed all spirit of obedience among the soldiers; a great part of the army was absent in Sicily, keeping guard over a people who, under wiser management, might have doubled the force which Naples now opposed to the invader. When the despotic government of Ferdinand was overthrown, the island of Sicily, or that part of it which was represented by Palermo, had claimed the separate political existence which it had possessed between 1806 and 1815, offering to remain united to Naples in the person of the sovereign, but demanding a National Parliament and a National Constitution of its own. The revolutionary Ministers of Naples had, however, no more sympathy with the wishes of the Sicilians than the Spanish Liberals of 1812 had with those of the American Colonists. They required the islanders to accept the same rights and duties as any other province of the Neapolitan kingdom, and, on their refusal, sent over a considerable force and laid siege to Palermo.[328] The contest soon ended in the submission of the Sicilians, but it was found necessary to keep twelve thousand troops on the island in order to prevent a new revolt. The whole regular army of Naples numbered little more than forty thousand; and although bodies of Carbonari and of the so-called Militia set out to join the colours of General Pepe and to fight for liberty, they remained for the most part a disorderly mob, without either arms or discipline. The invading army of Austria, fifty thousand strong, not only possessed an immense superiority in organisation and military spirit, but actually outnumbered the forces of the defence. At the first encounter, which took place at Rieti, in the Papal States, the Neapolitans were put to the rout. Their army melted away, as it had in Murat's campaign in 1815. Nothing was heard among officers and men but accusations of treachery; not a single strong point was defended; and on the 24th of March the Austrians made their entry into Naples. Ferdinand, halting at Florence, sent on before him the worst instruments of his former despotism. It was indeed impossible for these men to renew, under Austrian protection, the scenes of reckless bloodshed which had followed the restoration of 1799; and a great number of compromised persons had already been provided with the means of escape. But the hand of vengeance was not easily stayed. Courts-martial and commissions of judges began in all parts of the kingdom to sentence to imprisonment and death. An attempted insurrection in Sicily and some desperate acts of rebellion in Southern Italy cost the principal actors their lives; and when an amnesty was at length proclaimed, an exception was made against those who were now called the deserters, and who were lately called the Sacred Band, of Nola, that is to say, the soldiers who had first risen for the Constitution. Morelli, who had received the Viceroy's treacherous thanks for his conduct, was executed, along with one of his companions; the rest were sent in chains to labour among felons. Hundreds of persons were left lying, condemned or uncondemned, in prison; others, in spite of the amnesty, were driven from their native land; and that great, long-lasting stream of fugitives now began to pour into England, which, in the early memories of many who are not yet old, has associated the name of Italian with the image of an exile and a sufferer.

[Insurrection in Piedmont, March 10.]

There was a moment in the campaign of Austria against Naples when the invading army was threatened with the most serious danger. An insurrection broke out in Piedmont, and the troops of that country attempted to unite with the patriotic party of Lombardy in a movement which would have thrown all Northern Italy upon the rear of the Austrians. In the first excess of alarm, the Czar ordered a hundred thousand Russians to cross the Galician frontier, and to march in the direction of the Adriatic. It proved unnecessary, however, to continue this advance. The Piedmontese army was divided against itself; part proclaimed the Spanish Constitution, and, on the abdication of the King, called upon his cousin, the Regent, Charles Albert of Carignano, to march against the Austrians; part adhered to the rightful heir, the King's brother, Charles Felix, who was absent at Modena, and who, with an honesty in strong contrast to the frauds of the Neapolitan Court, refused to temporise with rebels, or to make any compromise with the Constitution. The scruples of the Prince of Carignano, after he had gone some way with the military party of action, paralysed the movement of Northern Italy. Unsupported by Piedmontese troops, the conspirators of Milan failed to raise any open insurrection. Austrian soldiers thronged westwards from the Venetian fortresses, and entered Piedmont itself; the collapse of the Neapolitan army destroyed the hopes of the bravest patriots; and the only result of the Piedmontese movement was that the grasp of Austria closed more tightly on its subject provinces, while the martyrs of Italian freedom passed out of the sight of the world, out of the range of all human communication, buried for years to come in the silent, unvisited prison of the North.  [329]

[The French Ultra-Royalists urging attack on Spain.]

Thus the victory of absolutism was completed, and the law was laid down to Europe that a people seeking its liberties elsewhere than in the grace and spontaneous generosity of its legitimate sovereign became a fit object of attack for the armies of the three Great Powers. It will be seen in a later chapter how Metternich persuaded the Czar to include under the anathema issued by the Congress of Laibach (May, 1821)  [330] the outbreak of the Greeks, which at this moment began, and how Lord Castlereagh supported the Austrian Minister in denying to these rebels against the Sultan all right or claim to the consideration of Europe. Spain was for the present left unmolested; but the military operations of 1821 prepared the way for a similar crusade against that country by occasioning the downfall of Richelieu's Ministry, and throwing the government of France entirely into the hands of the Ultra-Royalists. All parties in the French Chamber, whether they condemned or approved the suppression of Neapolitan liberty, censured a policy which had kept France in inaction, and made Austria supreme in Italy. The Ultra-Royalists profited by the general discontent to overthrow the Minister whom they had promised to support (Dec., 1821); and from this time a war with Spain, conducted either by France alone or in combination with the three Eastern Powers, became the dearest hope of the rank and file of the dominant faction. Villèle, their nominal chief, remained what he had been before, a statesman among fanatics, and desired to maintain the attitude of observation as long as this should be possible. A body of troops had been stationed on the southern frontier in 1820 to prevent all intercourse with the Spanish districts afflicted with the yellow fever. This epidemic had passed away, but the number of the troops was now raised to a hundred thousand. It was, however, the hope of Villèle that hostilities might be averted unless the Spaniards should themselves provoke a combat, or, by resorting to extreme measures against King Ferdinand, should compel Louis XVIII. to intervene on behalf of his kinsman. The more violent section of the French Cabinet, represented by Montmorency, the Foreign Minister, called for an immediate march on Madrid, or proposed to delay operations only until France should secure the support of the other Continental Powers.

[Spain from 1820 to 1822.]

[Ferdinand plots with the Serviles against the Constitution.]

The condition of Spain in the year 1822 gave ample encouragement to those who longed to employ the arms of France in the royalist cause. The hopes of peaceful reform, which for the first few months after the revolution had been shared even by foreign politicians at Madrid, had long vanished. In the moment of popular victory Ferdinand had brought the leaders of the Cortes from their prisons and placed them in office. These men showed a dignified forgetfulness of the injuries which they had suffered. Misfortune had calmed their impetuosity, and taught them more of the real condition of the Spanish people. They entered upon their task with seriousness and good faith, and would have proved the best friends of constitutional monarchy if Ferdinand had had the least intention of co-operating with them loyally. But they found themselves encountered from the first by a double enemy. The clergy, who had overthrown the Constitution six years before, intrigued or openly declared against it as soon as it was revived; the more violent of the Liberals, with Riego at their head, abandoned themselves to extravagances like those of the club-orators of Paris in 1791, and did their best to make any peaceable administration impossible. After combating these anarchists, or Exaltados, with some success, the Ministry was forced to call in their aid, when, at the instigation of the Papal Nuncio, the King placed his veto upon a law dissolving most of the monasteries  [331] (Oct., 1820). Ferdinand now openly combined with the enemies of the Constitution, and attempted to transfer the command of the army to one of his own agents. The plot failed; the Ministry sent the alarm over the whole country, and Ferdinand stood convicted before his people as a conspirator against the Constitution which he had sworn to defend. The agitation of the clubs, which the Ministry had hitherto suppressed, broke out anew. A storm of accusations assailed Ferdinand himself. He was compelled at the end of the year 1820 to banish from Madrid most of the persons who had been his confidants; and although his dethronement was not yet proposed, he had already become, far more than Louis XVI. of France under similar conditions, the recognised enemy of the revolution, and the suspected patron of every treason against the nation.

[The Ministry between the Exaltados and Serviles, 1821.]

[Attempted coup d'état, July 6, 1822.]

[Royalists revolt in the north.]

The attack of the despotic Courts on Naples in the spring of 1821 heightened the fury of parties in Spain, encouraging the Serviles, or Absolutists, in their plots, and forcing the Ministry to yield to the cry for more violent measures against the enemies of the Constitution. In the south of Spain the Exaltados gained possession of the principal military and civil commands, and openly refused obedience to the central administration when it attempted to interfere with their action Seville, Carthagena, and Cadiz acted as if they were independent Republics and even spoke of separation from Spain. Defied by its own subordinates in the provinces, and unable to look to the King for any sincere support, the moderate governing party lost all hold upon the nation. In the Cortes elected in 1822 the Exaltados formed the majority, and Riego was appointed President. Ferdinand now began to concert measures of action with the French Ultra-Royalists. The Serviles, led by priests, and supported by French money, broke into open rebellion in the north. When the session of the Cortes ended, the King attempted to overthrow his enemies by military force. Three battalions of the Royal Guard, which had been withdrawn from Madrid, received secret orders to march upon the capital (July 6, 1822), where Ferdinand was expected to place himself at their head. They were, however, met and defeated in the streets by other regiments, and Ferdinand, vainly attempting to dissociate himself from the action of his partisans, found his crown, if not his life, in peril. He wrote to Louis XVIII. that he was a prisoner. Though the French King gave nothing more than good counsel, the Ultra-Royalists in the French Cabinet and in the army now strained every nerve to accelerate a war between the two countries. The Spanish Absolutists seized the town of Seo d'Urgel, and there set up a provisional government. Civil war spread over the northern provinces. The Ministry, which was now formed of Riego's friends, demanded and obtained from the Cortes dictatorial powers like those which the French Committee of Public Safety had wielded in 1793, but with far other result. Spain found no Danton, no Carnot, at this crisis, when the very highest powers of intellect and will would have been necessary to arouse and to arm a people far less disposed to fight for liberty than the French were in 1793. One man alone, General Mina, checked and overthrew the rebel leaders of the north with an activity superior to their own. The Government, boastful and violent in its measures, effected scarcely anything in the organisation of a national force, or in preparing the means of resistance against those foreign armies with whose attack the country was now plainly threatened.

[England and the Congress of 1822.]

When the Congress of Laibach broke up in the spring of 1821. its members determined to renew their meeting in the following year, in order to decide whether the Austrian army might then be withdrawn from Naples, and to discuss other questions affecting their common interests. The progress of the Greek insurrection and a growing strife between Russia and Turkey had since then thrown all Italian difficulties into the shade. The Eastern question stood in the front rank of European politics; next in importance came the affairs of Spain. It was certain that these, far more than the occupation of Naples, would supply the real business of the Congress of 1822. England had a far greater interest in both questions than in the Italian negotiations of the two previous years. It was felt that the system of abstention which England had then followed could be pursued no longer, and that the country must be represented not by some casual and wandering diplomatist, but by its leading Minister, Lord Castlereagh. The intentions of the other Powers in regard to Spain were matter of doubt; it was the fixed policy of Great Britain to leave the Spanish revolution in Europe to run its own course, and to persuade the other Powers to do the same. But the difficulties connected with Spain did not stop at the Spanish frontier. The South American colonies had now in great part secured their independence. They had developed a trade with Great Britain which made it impossible for this country to ignore their flag and the decisions of their law courts. The British navigation-laws had already been modified by Parliament in favour of their shipping; and although it was no business of the English Government to grant a formal title to communities which had made themselves free, the practical recognition of the American States by the appointment of diplomatic agents could in several cases not be justly delayed. Therefore, without interfering with any colonies which were still fighting or still negotiating with Spain, the British Minister proposed to inform the Allied cabinets of the intention of this country to accredit agents to some of the South American Republics, and to recommend to them the adoption of a similar policy.

[Death of Castlereagh, Aug. 12, 1822.]

Such was the tenour of the instructions which, a few weeks before his expected departure for the Continent, Castlereagh drew up for his own guidance, and submitted to the Cabinet and the King.  [332] Had he lived to fulfil the mission with which he was charged, the recognition of the South American Republics, which adds so bright a ray to the fame of Canning, would probably have been the work of the man who, more than any other, is associated in popular belief with the traditions of a hated and outworn system of oppression. Two more years of life, two more years of change in the relations of England to the Continent, would have given Castlereagh a different figure in the history both of Greece and of America. No English statesman in modern times has been so severely judged. Circumstances, down to the close of his career, withheld from Castlereagh the opportunities which fell to his successor; ties from which others were free made it hard for him to accelerate the breach with the Allies of 1814. Antagonists showed Castlereagh no mercy, no justice. The man whom Byron disgraced himself by ridiculing after his death possessed in a rich measure the qualities which, in private life, attract esteem and love. His public life, if tainted in earlier days by the low political morality of the time, rose high above that of every Continental statesman of similar rank, with the single exception of Stein. The best testimony to his integrity is the irritation which it caused to Talleyrand.  [333] If the consciousness of labour unflaggingly pursued in the public cause, and animated on the whole by a pure and earnest purpose, could have calmed the distress of a breaking mind, the decline of Castlereagh's days might have been one of peace. His countrymen would have recognised that, if blind to the rights of nations, Castlereagh had set to foreign rulers the example of truth and good faith. But the burden of his life was too heavy to bear. Mists of despondency obscured the outlines of the real world, and struck chill into his heart. Death, self-invoked, brought relief to the over-wrought brain, and laid Castlereagh, with all his cares, in everlasting sleep.

[Canning Foreign Secretary. Wellington deputed to the Congress, Sept., 1822.]

[Congress of Verona, Oct., 1822.]

The vacant post was filled by Canning, by far the most gifted of the band of statesmen who had begun their public life in the school of Pitt. Wellington undertook to represent England at the Congress of 1822, which was now about to open at Vienna. His departure was, however, delayed for several weeks, and the preliminary meeting, at which it had been intended to transact all business not relating to Italy, was almost over before his arrival. Wellington accordingly travelled on to Verona, where Italian affairs were to be dealt with; and the Italian Conference, which the British Government had not intended to recognise, thus became the real Congress of 1822. Anxious as Lord Castlereagh had been on the question of foreign interference with Spain, he hardly understood the imminence of the danger. In passing through Paris, Wellington learnt for the first time that a French or European invasion of Spain would be the foremost object of discussion among the Powers; and on reaching Verona he made the unwelcome discovery that the Czar was bent upon sending a Russian army to take part, as the mandatary of Europe, in overthrowing the Spanish Constitution. Alexander's desire was to obtain a joint declaration from the Congress like that which had been issued against Naples by the three Courts at Troppau, but one even more formidable, since France might be expected in the present case to give its concurrence, which had been withheld before. France indeed occupied, according to the absolutist theory of the day, the same position in regard to a Jacobin Spain as Austria in regard to a Jacobin Naples, and might perhaps claim to play the leading military part in the crusade of repression. But the work was likely to be a much more difficult one than that of 1821. The French troops, said the Czar, were not trustworthy; and there was a party in France which might take advantage of the war to proclaim the second Napoleon or the Republic. King Louis XVIII. could not therefore be allowed to grapple with Spain alone. It was necessary that the principal force employed by the alliance should be one whose loyalty and military qualities were above suspicion: the generals who had marched from Moscow to Paris were not likely to fail beyond the Pyrenees: and a campaign of the Russian army in Western Europe promised to relieve the Czar of some of the discontent of his soldiers, who had been turned back after entering Galicia in the previous year, and who had not been allowed to assist their fellow-believers in Greece in their struggle against the Sultan.  [334]

[No joint declaration by made by the Congress against Spain.]

Wellington had ascertained, while in Paris, that King Louis XVIII. and Villèle were determined under no circumstances to give Russian troops a passage through France. His knowledge of this fact enabled him to speak with some confidence to Alexander. It was the earnest desire of the English Government to avert war, and its first object was therefore to prevent the Congress, as a body, from sending an ultimatum to Spain. If all the Powers united in a declaration like that of Troppau, war was inevitable; if France were left to settle its own disputes with its neighbour, English mediation might possibly preserve peace. The statement of Wellington, that England would rather sever itself from the great alliance than consent to a joint declaration against Spain, had no doubt its effect in preventing such a declaration being proposed; but a still weightier reason against it was the direct contradiction between the intentions of the French Government and those of the Czar. If the Czar was determined to be the soldier of Europe, while on the other hand King Louis absolutely denied him a passage through France, it was impossible that the Congress should threaten Spain with a collective attack. No great expenditure of diplomacy was therefore necessary to prevent the summary framing of a decree against Spain like that which had been framed against Naples two years before. In the first despatches which he sent back to England Wellington expressed his belief that the deliberations of the Powers would end in a decision to leave the Spaniards to themselves.

[Course of the negotiation against Spain.]

But the danger was only averted in appearance. The impulse to war was too strong among the French Ultra-Royalists for the Congress to keep silence on Spanish affairs. Villèle indeed still hoped for peace, and, unlike other members of his Cabinet, he desired that, if war should arise, France should maintain entire freedom of action, and enter upon the struggle as an independent Power, not as the instrument of the European concert. This did not prevent him, however, from desiring to ascertain what assistance would be forthcoming, if France should be hard pressed by its enemy. Instructions were given to the French envoys at Verona to sound the Allies on this question.  [335] It was out of the inquiry so suggested that a negotiation sprang which virtually combined all Europe against Spain. The envoy Montmorency, acting in the spirit of the war party, demanded of all the Powers whether, in the event of France withdrawing its ambassador from Madrid, they would do the same, and whether, in case of war, France would receive their moral and material support. Wellington in his reply protested against the framing of hypothetical cases; the other envoys answered Montmorency's questions in the affirmative. The next step was taken by Metternich, who urged that certain definite acts of the Spanish people or Government ought to be specified as rendering war obligatory on France and its allies, and also that, with a view of strengthening the Royalist party in Spain, notes ought to be presented by all the ambassadors at Madrid, demanding a change in the Constitution. This proposal was in its turn submitted to Wellington and rejected by him. It was accepted by the other plenipotentiaries, and the acts of the Spanish people were specified on which war should necessarily follow. These were, the commission of any act of violence against a member of the royal family, the deposition of the King, or an attempt to change the dynasty. A secret clause was added to the second part of the agreement, to the effect that if the Spanish Government made no satisfactory answer to the notes requiring a change in the Constitution, all the ambassadors should be immediately withdrawn. A draft of the notes to be presented was sketched; and Montmorency, who thought that he had probably gone too far in his stipulations, returned to Paris to submit the drafts to the King before handing them over to the ambassadors at Paris for transmission to Madrid.

[Villèle and Montmorency.]

[Speech of Louis XVIII., Jan. 27, 1823.]

It was with great dissatisfaction that Villèle saw how his colleague had committed France to the direction of the three Eastern Powers. There was no likelihood that the Spanish Government would make the least concession of the kind required, and in that case France stood pledged, if the action of Montmorency was ratified, to withdraw its ambassador from Madrid at once. Villèle accordingly addressed himself to the ambassadors at Paris, asking that the despatch of the notes might be postponed. No notice was taken of his request: the notes were despatched forthwith. Roused by this slight, Villèle appealed to the King not to submit to the dictation of foreign Courts. Louis XVIII. declared in his favour against all the rest of the Cabinet, and Montmorency had to retire from office. But the decision of the King meant that he disapproved of the negotiations of Verona as shackling the movements of France, not that he had freed himself from the influence of the war-party. Chateaubriand, the most reckless agitator for hostilities, was appointed Foreign Minister. The mediation of Great Britain was rejected;  [336] and in his speech at the opening of the Chambers of 1823, King Louis himself virtually published the declaration of war.

[England in 1823.]

[French invasion of Spain, April, 1823.]

The ambassadors of the three Eastern Courts had already presented their notes at Madrid demanding a change in the Constitution; and, after receiving a high-spirited answer from the Ministers, they had quitted the country. Canning, while using every diplomatic effort to prevent an unjust war, had made it clear to the Spaniards that England could not render them armed assistance. The reasons against such an intervention were indeed overwhelming. Russia, Austria, and Prussia would have taken the field rather than have permitted the Spanish Constitution to triumph; and although, if leagued with Spain in a really national defence like that of 1808, Great Britain might perhaps have protected the Peninsula against all the Powers of Europe combined, it was far otherwise when the cause at stake was one to which a majority of the Spanish nation had shown itself to be indifferent, and against which the northern provinces had actually taken up arms. The Government and the Cortes were therefore left to defend themselves as best they could against their enemies. They displayed their weakness by enacting laws of extreme severity against deserters, and by retiring, along with the recalcitrant King, from Madrid to Seville. On the 7th of April the French troops, led by the Duke of Angoulême, crossed the frontier. The priests and a great part of the peasantry welcomed them as deliverers: the forces opposed to them fell back without striking a blow. As the invader advanced towards the capital, gangs of royalists, often led by monks, spread such terror and devastation over the northern provinces that the presence of foreign troops became the only safeguard for the peaceable inhabitants.  [337] Madrid itself was threatened by the corps of a freebooter named Bessières. The commandant sent his surrender to the French while they were still at some distance, begging them to advance as quickly as possible in order to save the city from pillage. The message had scarcely been sent when Bessières and his bandits appeared in the suburbs. The governor drove them back, and kept the royalist mob within the city at bay for four days more. On the 23rd of May the advance-guard of the French army entered the capital.

[Angoulême and the Regency, and the ambassadors.]

It had been the desire of King Louis XVIII. and Angoulême to save Spain from the violence of royalist and priestly fanaticism. On reaching Madrid, Angoulême intended to appoint a provisional, government himself; he was, however, compelled by orders from Paris to leave the election in the hands of the Council of Castille, and a Regency came into power whose first acts showed in what spirit the victory of the French was to be used. Edicts were issued declaring all the acts of the Cortes affecting the monastic orders to be null and void, dismissing all officials appointed since March 7, 1820, and subjecting to examination those who, then being in office, had not resigned their posts.  [338] The arrival of the ambassadors of the three Eastern Powers encouraged the Regency in their antagonism to the French commander. It was believed that the Cabinet of Paris was unwilling to restore King Ferdinand as an absolute monarch, and intended to obtain from him the grant of institutions resembling those of the French Charta. Any such limitation of absolute power was, however, an object of horror to the three despotic Courts. Their ambassadors formed themselves into a council with the express object of resisting the supposed policy of Angoulême. The Regency grew bolder, and gave the signal for general retribution upon the Liberals by publishing an order depriving all persons who had served in the voluntary militia since March, 1820, of their offices, pensions, and titles. The work inaugurated in the capital was carried much further in the provinces. The friends of the Constitution, and even soldiers who were protected by their capitulation with the French, were thrown into prison by the new local authorities. The violence of the reaction reached such a height that Angoulême, now on the march to Cadiz, was compelled to publish an ordinance forbidding arrests to be made without the consent of a French commanding officer, and ordering his generals to release the persons who had been arbitrarily imprisoned. The council of ambassadors, blind in their jealousy of France to the danger of an uncontrolled restoration, drew up a protest against his ordinance, and desired that the officers of the Regency should be left to work their will.

[The Cortes at Cadiz.]

[Ferdinand liberated, Oct. 1.]

After spending some weeks in idle debates at Seville, the Cortes had been compelled by the appearance of the French on the Sierra Morena to retire to Cadiz. As King Ferdinand refused to accompany them, he was declared temporarily insane, and forced to make the journey (June 12). Angoulême, following the French vanguard after a considerable interval, appeared before Cadiz in August, and sent a note to King Ferdinand, recommending him to publish an amnesty, and to promise the restoration of the mediæval Cortes. It was hoped that the terms suggested in this note might be accepted by the Government in Cadiz as a basis of peace, and so render an attack upon the city unnecessary. The Ministry, however, returned a defiant answer in the King's name. The siege of Cadiz accordingly began in earnest. On the 30th of August the fort of the Trocadero was stormed; three weeks later the city was bombarded. In reply to all proposals for negotiation Angoulême stated that he could only treat when King Ferdinand was within his own lines. There was not the least hope of prolonging the defence of Cadiz with success, for the combat was dying out even in those few districts of Spain where the constitutional troops had fought with energy. Ferdinand himself pretended that he bore no grudge against his Ministers, and that the Liberals had nothing to fear from his release. On the 30th of September he signed, as if with great satisfaction, an absolute and universal amnesty.  [339] On the following day he was conveyed with his family across the bay to Angoulême's head-quarters.

[Violence of the Restoration.]

The war was over: the real results of the French invasion now came into sight. Ferdinand had not been twelve hours in the French camp when, surrounded by monks and royalist desperadoes, he published a proclamation invalidating every act of the constitutional Government of the last three years, on the ground that his sanction had been given under constraint. The same proclamation ratified the acts of the Regency of Madrid. As the Regency of Madrid had declared all persons concerned in the removal of the King to Cadiz to be liable to the penalties of high treason, Ferdinand had in fact ratified a sentence of death against several of the men from whom he had just parted in friendship.  [340] Many of these victims of the King's perfidy were sent into safety by the French. But Angoulême was powerless to influence Ferdinand's policy and conduct. Don Saez, the King's confessor, was made First Secretary of State. On the 4th of October an edict was issued banishing for ever from Madrid, and from the country fifty miles round it, every person who during the last three years had sat in the Cortes, or who had been a Minister, counsellor of State, judge, commander, official in any public office, magistrate, or officer in the so-called voluntary militia. It was ordered that throughout Spain a solemn service should be celebrated in expiation of the insults offered to the Holy Sacrament; that missions should be sent over the land to combat the pernicious and heretical doctrines associated with the late outbreak, and that the bishops should relegate to monasteries of the strictest observance the priests who had acted as the agents of an impious faction.  [341] Thus the war of revenge was openly declared against the defeated party. It was in vain that Angoulême indignantly reproached the King, and that the ambassadors of the three Eastern Courts pressed him to draw up at least some kind of amnesty. Ferdinand travelled slowly towards Madrid, saying that he could take no such step until he reached the capital. On the 7th of November, Riego was hanged. Thousands of persons were thrown into prison, or compelled to fly from the country. Except where order was preserved by the French, life and property were at the mercy of royalist mobs and the priests who led them; and although the influence of the Russian statesman Pozzo di Borgo at length brought a respectable Ministry into office, this only roused the fury of the clerical party, and led to a cry for the deposition of the King, and for the elevation of his more fanatical brother, Don Carlos, to the throne. Military commissions were instituted at the beginning of 1824 for the trial of accused persons, and a pretended amnesty, published six months later, included in its fifteen classes of exception the participators in almost every act of the revolution. Ordinance followed upon ordinance, multiplying the acts punishable with death, and exterminating the literature which was believed to be the source of all religious and social heterodoxy. Every movement of life was watched by the police; every expression of political opinion was made high treason. Young men were shot for being freemasons; women were sent to prison for ten years for possessing a portrait of Riego. The relation of the restored Government to its subjects was in fact that which belonged to a state of civil war. Insurrections arose among the fanatics who were now taking the name of the Carlist or Apostolic party, as well as among a despairing remnant of the Constitutionalists. After a feeble outbreak of the latter at Tarifa, a hundred and twelve persons were put to death by the military commissions within eighteen days.  [342] It was not until the summer of 1825 that the jurisdiction of these tribunals and the Reign of Terror ended.

[England prohibits the conquest of Spanish colonies by France or its allies.]

[England recognises the independence of the colonies. 1824-5.]

France had won a cheap and inglorious victory. The three Eastern Courts had seen their principle of absolutism triumph at the cost of everything that makes government morally better than anarchy. One consolation remained for those who felt that there was little hope for freedom on the Continent of Europe. The crusade against Spanish liberty had put an end for ever to the possibility of a joint conquest of Spanish America in the interest of despotism. The attitude of England was no longer what it had been in 1818. When the Czar had proposed at the Congress of Aix-la-Chapelle that the allied monarchs should suppress the republican principle beyond the seas, Castlereagh had only stated that England could bear no part in such an enterprise; he had not said that England would effectually prevent others from attempting it. This was the resolution by which Canning, isolated and baffled by the conspiracy of Verona, proved that England could still do something to protect its own interest and the interests of mankind against a league of autocrats. There is indeed little doubt that the independence of the Spanish colonies would have been recognised by Great Britain soon after the war of 1823, whoever might have been our Minister for Foreign Affairs, but this recognition was a different matter in the hands of Canning from what it would have been in the hands of his predecessor. The contrast between the two men was one of spirit rather than of avowed rules of action. Where Castlereagh offered apologies to the Continental sovereigns, Canning uttered defiance  [343] The treaties of 1815, which connected England so closely with the foreign courts, were no work of his; though he sought not to repudiate them, he delighted to show that in spite of them England has still its own policy, its own sympathies, its own traditions. In face of the council of kings and its assumption of universal jurisdiction, he publicly described himself as an enthusiast for the independence of nations. If others saw little evidence that France intended to recompense itself for its services to Ferdinand by appropriating some of his rebellious colonies, Canning was quick to lay hold of every suspicious circumstance. At the beginning of the war of 1823 he gave a formal warning to the ambassador of Louis XVIII. that France would not be permitted to bring any of these provinces under its dominion, whether by conquest or cession.  [344] When the war was over, he rejected the invitation of Ferdinand's Government to take part in a conference at Paris, where the affairs of South America were to be laid before the Allied Powers.  [345] What these Powers might or might not think on the subject of America was now a matter of indifference, for the policy of England was fixed, and it was useless to debate upon a conclusion that could not be altered. British consular agents were appointed in most of the colonies before the close of the year 1823; and after some interval the independence of Buenos Ayres, Colombia, and Mexico were formally recognised by the conclusion of commercial treaties. "I called the New World into existence," cried Canning, when reproached with permitting the French occupation of Spain, "in order to redress the balance of the Old." The boast, famous in our Parliamentary history, has left an erroneous impression of the part really played by Canning at this crisis. He did not call the New World into existence; he did not even assist it in winning independence, as France had assisted the United States fifty years before; but when this independence had been won, he threw over it the aegis of Great Britain, declaring that no other European Power should reimpose the yoke which Spain had not been able to maintain.

[Affairs in Portugal.]

[Constitution granted by Pedro, May, 1826.]

The overthrow of the Spanish Constitution by foreign arms led to a series of events in Portugal which forced England to a more direct intervention in the Peninsula than had yet been necessary, and heightened the conflict that had sprung up between its policy and that of Continental absolutism. The same parties and the same passions, political and religious, existed in Portugal as in Spain, and the enemies of the Constitution found the same support at foreign Courts. The King of Portugal, John VI., was a weak but not ill-meaning man; his wife, who was a sister of Ferdinand of Spain, and his son Don Miguel were the chiefs of the conspiracy against the Cortes. In June, 1823, a military revolt, arranged by Miguel, brought the existing form of government to an end: the King promised, however, when dissolving the Cortes, that a Constitution should be bestowed by himself upon Portugal; and he seems to have intended to keep his word. The ambassadors of France and Austria were, however, busy in throwing hindrances in the way, and Don Miguel prepared to use violence to prevent his father from making any concession to the Liberals. King John, in fear for his life, applied to England for troops; Canning declined to land soldiers at Lisbon, but sent a squadron, with orders to give the King protection. The winter of 1823 was passed in intrigues; in May, 1824, Miguel arrested the Ministers and surrounded the King's palace with troops. After several days of confusion King John made his escape to the British ships, and Miguel, who was alternately cowardly and audacious, then made his submission, and was ordered to leave the country. King John died in the spring of 1826 without having granted a Constitution. Pedro, his eldest son, had already been made Emperor of Brazil; and, as it was impossible that Portugal and Brazil could again be united, it was arranged that Pedro's daughter, when of sufficient age, should marry her uncle Miguel, and so save Portugal from the danger of a contested succession. Before renouncing the crown of Portugal, Pedro granted a Constitution to that country. A Regency had already been appointed by King John, in which neither the Queen-dowager nor Miguel was included.

[Desertion of Portuguese soldiery, 1826.]

[Spain permits the deserters to attack Portugal.]

[Canning sends troops to Lisbon, Dec., 1826.]

Miguel had gone to Vienna. Although a sort of Caliban in character and understanding, this Prince met with the welcome due to a kinsman of the Imperial house, and to a representative of the good cause of absolutism. He was received by Metternich with great interest, and his fortunes were taken under the protection of the Austrian Court. In due time, it was hoped this savage and ignorant churl would do yeoman's service to Austrian principles in the Peninsula. But the Regency and the new Constitution of Portugal had not to wait for the tardy operation of Metternich's covert hostility. The soldiery who had risen at Miguel's bidding in 1823 now proclaimed him King, and deserted to Spanish soil. Within the Spanish frontier they were received by Ferdinand's representatives with open arms. The demands made by the Portuguese ambassador at Madrid for their dispersion and for the surrender of their weapons were evaded. The cause of these armed bands on the frontier became the cause of the Clerical and Ultra-Royalist party over all Europe. Money was sent to them from France and Austria. They were joined by troops of Spanish Carlists or Apostolicals; they were fed, clothed, and organised, if not by the Spanish Government itself, at least by those over whose action the Spanish Government exercised control.  [346] Thus raised to considerable military strength, they made incursions into Portugal, and at last attempted a regular invasion. The Regency of Lisbon, justly treating these outrages as the act of the Spanish Government, and appealing to the treaties which bound Great Britain to defend Portugal against foreign attack, demanded the assistance of this country. More was involved in the action taken by Canning than a possible contest with Spain; the seriousness of the danger lay in the fact that Spain was still occupied by French armies, and that a war with Spain might, and probably would, involve a war with France, if not with other Continental Powers. But the English Ministry waited only for the confirmation of the alleged facts by their own ambassador. The treaty-rights of Portugal were undoubted; the temper of the English Parliament and nation, strained to the utmost by the events of the last three years, was such that a war against Ferdinand and against the destroyers of Spanish liberty would have caused more rejoicing than alarm. Nine days after the formal demand of the Portuguese arrived, four days after their complaint was substantiated by the report of our ambassador, Canning announced to the House of Commons that British troops were actually on the way to Lisbon. In words that alarmed many of his own party, and roused the bitter indignation of every Continental Court, Canning warned those whose acts threatened to force England into war, that the war, if war arose, would be a war of opinion, and that England, however earnestly she might endeavour to avoid it, could not avoid seeing ranked under her banner all the restless and discontented of any nation with which she might come into conflict. As for the Portuguese Constitution which formed the real object of the Spanish attack, it had not, Canning said, been given at the instance of Great Britain, but he prayed that Heaven might prosper it. It was impossible to doubt that a Minister who spoke thus, and who, even under expressions of regret, hinted at any alliance with the revolutionary elements in France and Spain, was formidably in earnest. The words and the action of Canning produced the effect which he desired. The Government of Ferdinand discovered the means of checking the activity of the Apostolicals: the presence of the British troops at Lisbon enabled the Portuguese Regency to throw all its forces upon the invaders and to drive them from the country. They were disbanded when they re-crossed the Spanish frontier; the French Court loudly condemned their immoral enterprise; and the Constitution of Portugal seemed, at least for the moment, to have triumphed over its open and its secret enemies.

[The policy of Canning.]

The tone of the English Government had indeed changed since the time when Metternich could express a public hope that the three Eastern Powers would have the approval of this country in their attack upon the Constitution of Naples. In 1820 such a profession might perhaps have passed for a mistake; in 1826 it would have been a palpable absurdity. Both in England and on the Continent it was felt that the difference between the earlier and the later spirit of our policy was summed up in the contrast between Canning and Castlereagh. It has become an article of historical faith that Castlereagh's melancholy death brought one period of our foreign policy to a close and inaugurated another: it has been said that Canning liberated England from its Continental connexions; it has even been claimed for him that he performed for Europe no less a task than the dissolution of the Holy Alliance.[347] The figure of Canning is indeed one that will for ever fill a great space in European history; and the more that is known of the opposition which he encountered both from his sovereign and from his great rival Wellington, the greater must be our admiration for his clear, strong mind, and for the conquering force of his character. But the legend which represents English policy as taking an absolutely new departure in 1822 does not correspond to the truth of history. Canning was a member of the Cabinet from 1816 to 1820; it is a poor compliment to him to suppose that he either exercised no influence upon his colleagues or acquiesced in a policy of which he disapproved; and the history of the Congress of Aix-la-Chapelle proves that his counsels had even at that time gained the ascendant. The admission made by Castlereagh in 1820, after Canning had left the Cabinet, that Austria, as a neighbouring and endangered State, had a right to suppress the revolutionary constitution of Naples, would probably not have gained Canning's assent; in all other points, the action of our Government at Troppau and Laibach might have been his own. Canning loved to speak of his system as one of neutrality, and of non-interference in that struggle between the principles of despotism and of democracy which seemed to be spreading over Europe. He avowed his sympathy for Spain as the object of an unjust and unprovoked war, but he most solemnly warned the Spaniards not to expect English assistance. He prayed that the Constitution of Portugal might prosper, but he expressly disclaimed all connection with its origin, and defended Portugal not because it was a Constitutional State, but because England was bound by treaties to defend it against foreign invasion. The arguments against intervention on behalf of Spain which Canning addressed to the English sympathisers with that country might have been uttered by Castlereagh; the denial of the right of foreign Powers to attack the Spanish Constitution, with which Castlereagh headed his own instructions for Verona, might have been written by Canning.

[Canning and the European concert.]

The statements that Canning withdrew England from the Continental system, and that he dissolved the Holy Alliance, cannot be accepted without large correction. The general relations existing between the Great Powers were based, not on the ridiculous and obsolete treaty of Holy Alliance, but on the Acts which were signed at the Conference of Aix-la-Chapelle. The first of these was the secret Quadruple Treaty which bound England and the three Eastern Powers to attack France in case a revolution in that country should endanger the peace of Europe; the second was the general declaration of all the five Powers that they would act in amity and take counsel with one another. From the first of these alliances Canning certainly did not withdraw England. He would perhaps have done so in 1823 if the Quadruple Treaty had bound England to maintain the House of Bourbon on the French throne; but it had been expressly stated that the deposition of the Bourbons would not necessarily and in itself be considered by England as endangering the peace of Europe. This treaty remained in full force up to Canning's death; and if a revolutionary army had marched from Paris upon Antwerp, he would certainly have claimed the assistance of the three Eastern Powers. With respect to the general concert of Europe, established or confirmed by the declaration of Aix-la-Chapelle, this had always been one of varying extent and solidity. Both France and England had held themselves aloof at Troppau. The federative action was strongest and most mischievous not before but after the death of Castlereagh, and in the period that followed the Congress of Verona; for though the war against Spain was conducted by France alone, the three Eastern Powers had virtually made themselves responsible for the success of the enterprise, and it was the influence of their ambassadors at Paris and Madrid which prevented any restrictions from being imposed upon Ferdinand's restored sovereignty.

Canning is invested with a spurious glory when it is said that his action in Spain and in Portugal broke up the league of the Continental Courts. Canning indeed shaped the policy of our own country with equal independence and wisdom, but the political centre of Europe was at this time not London but Vienna. The keystone of the European fabric was the union of Austria and Russia, and this union was endangered, not by anything that could take place in the Spanish Peninsula, but by the conflicting interests of these two great States in regard to the Ottoman Empire. From the moment when the Treaty of Paris was signed, every Austrian politician fixed his gaze upon the roads leading to the Lower Danube, and anxiously noted the signs of coming war, or of continued peace, between Russia and the Porte.  [348] It was the triumph of Metternich to have diverted the Czar's thoughts during the succeeding years from his grievances against Turkey, and to have baffled the Russian diplomatists and generals who, like Capodistrias, sought to spur on their master to enterprises of Eastern conquest. At the Congress of Verona the shifting and incoherent manoeuvres of Austrian statecraft can indeed only be understood on the supposition that Metternich was thinking all the time less of Spain than of Turkey, and struggling at whatever cost to maintain that personal influence over Alexander which had hitherto prevented the outbreak of war in the East. But the antagonism so long suppressed broke out at last. The progress of the Greek insurrection brought Austria and Russia not indeed into war, but into the most embittered hostility with one another. It was on this rock that the ungainly craft which men called the Holy Alliance at length struck and went to pieces. Canning played his part well in the question of the East, but he did not create this question. There were forces at work which, without his intervention, would probably have made an end of the despotic amities of 1815. It is not necessary to the title of a great statesman that he should have called into being the elements which make a new political order possible; it is sufficient praise that he should have known how to turn them to account.

CHAPTER XV.

Condition of Greece: its Races and Institutions-The Greek Church-Communal System-The Ægæan Islands-The Phanariots-Greek Intellectual Revival; Koraes-Beginning of Greek National Movement; Contact of Greece with the French Revolution and Napoleon-The Hetæria Philike-Hypsilanti's Attempt in the Danubian Provinces; its Failure-Revolt of the Morea: Massacres: Execution of Gregorius, and Terrorism at Constantinople-Attitude of Russia, Austria, and England-Extension of the Revolt: Affairs at Hydra-The Greek Leaders-Fall of Tripolitza-The Massacre of Chios- Failure of the Turks in the Campaign of 1822-Dissensions of the Greeks-Mahmud calls upon Mehemet Ali for Aid-Ibrahim conquers Crete and invades the Morea-Siege of Missolonghi-Philhellenism in Europe-Russian Proposal for Intervention-Conspiracies in Russia: Death of Alexander: Accession of Nicholas-Military Insurrection at St. Petersburg- Anglo-Russian Protocol-Treaty between England, Russia, and France-Death of Canning-Navarino-War between Russia and Turkey-Campaigns of 1828 and 1829-Treaty of Adrianople-Capodistrias President of Greece-Leopold accepts and then declines the Greek Crown-Murder of Capodistrias-Otho, King of Greece.

[Greece in the Napoleonic age.]

Of the Christian races which at the beginning of the third decade of this century peopled the European provinces of the Ottoman Empire, the Greek was that which had been least visibly affected by the political and military events of the Napoleonic age. Servia, after a long struggle, had in the year 1817 gained local autonomy under its own princes, although Turkish troops still garrisoned its fortresses, and the sovereignty of the Sultan was acknowledged by the payment of tribute. The Romanic districts, Wallachia and Moldavia, which, in the famous interview of Tilsit, Napoleon had bidden the Czar to make his own, were restored by Russia to the Porte in the Treaty of Bucharest in 1812, but under conditions which virtually established a Russian protectorate. Greece, with the exception of the Ionian Islands, had neither been the scene of any military operations, nor formed the subject of any treaty. Yet the age of the French Revolution and of the Napoleonic wars had silently wrought in the Greek nation the last of a great series of changes which fitted it to take its place among the free peoples of Europe. The signs were there from which those who could read the future might have gathered that the political resurrection of Greece was near at hand. There were some who, with equal insight and patriotism, sought during this period to lay the intellectual foundation for that national independence which they foresaw that their children would win with the sword.

[Greece in the eighteenth century.]

The forward movement of the Greek nation may be said, in general terms, to have become visible during the first half of the eighteenth century. Serfage had then disappeared; the peasant was either a free-holder, or a farmer paying a rent in kind for his land. In the gradual and unobserved emancipation of the labouring class the first condition of national revival had already been fulfilled. The peasantry had been formed which, when the conflict with the Turk broke out, bore the brunt of the long struggle. In comparison with the Prussian serf, the Greek cultivator at the beginning of the eighteenth century was an independent man: in comparison with the English labourer, he was well fed and well housed. The evils to which the Greek population was exposed, wherever Greeks and Turks lived together, were those which brutalised or degraded the Christian races in every Ottoman province. There was no redress for injury inflicted by a Mohammedan official or neighbour. If a wealthy Turk murdered a Greek in the fields, burnt down his house, and outraged his family, there was no court where the offender could be brought to justice. The term by which the Turk described his Christian neighbour was "our rayah," that is, "our subject." A Mohammedan landowner might terrorise the entire population around him, carry off the women, flog and imprison the men, and yet feel that he had committed no offence against the law; for no law existed but the Koran, and no Turkish court of justice but that of the Kadi, where the complaint of the Christian passed for nothing.

This was the monstrous relation that existed between the dominant and the subject nationalities, not in Greece only, but in every part of the Ottoman Empire where Mohammedans and Christians inhabited the same districts. The second great and general evil was the extortion practised by the tax-gatherers, and this fell upon the poorer Mohammedans equally with the Christians, except in regard to the poll-tax, or haratsch, the badge of servitude, which was levied on Christians alone. All land paid tithe to the State; and until the tax-gatherer had paid his visit it was not permitted to the peasant to cut the ripe crop. This rule enabled the tax-gatherer, whether a Mohammedan or a Christian, to inflict ruin upon those who did not bribe himself or his masters; for by merely postponing his visit he could destroy the value of the harvest. Round this central institution of tyranny and waste, there gathered, except in the districts protected by municipal privileges, every form of corruption natural to a society where the State heard no appeals, and made no inquiry into the processes employed by those to whom it sold the taxes. What was possible in the way of extortion was best seen in the phenomenon of well-built villages being left tenantless, and the population of rich districts dying out in a time of peace, without pestilence, without insurrection, without any greater wrong on the part of the Sultan's government than that normal indifference which permitted the existence of a community to depend upon the moderation or the caprice of the individual possessors of force.

[Origin of modern Greece Byzantine, not classic.]

[Slavonic and Albanian elements.]

Such was the framework, or, as it may be said, the common-law of the mixed Turkish and Christian society of the Ottoman Empire. On this background we have now to trace the social and political features which stood out in Greek life, which preserved the race from losing its separate nationality, and which made the ultimate recovery of its independence possible. In the first outburst of sympathy and delight with which every generous heart in western Europe hailed the standard of Hellenic freedom upraised in 1821, the twenty centuries which separated the Greece of literature from the Greece of to-day were strangely forgotten. The imagination went straight back to Socrates and Leonidas, and pictured in the islander or the hillsman who rose against Mahmud II. the counterpart of those glorious beings who gave to Europe the ideals of intellectual energy, of plastic beauty, and of poetic truth. The illusion was a happy one, if it excited on behalf of a brave people an interest which Servia or Montenegro might have failed to gain; but it led to a reaction when disappointments came; it gave inordinate importance to the question of the physical descent of the Greeks; and it produced a false impression of the causes which had led up to the war of independence, and of the qualities, the habits, the bonds of union, which exercised the greatest power over the nation. These were, to a great extent, unlike anything existing in the ancient world; they had originated in Byzantine, not in classic Greece; and where the scenes of old Hellenic history appeared to be repeating themselves, it was due more to the continuing influence of the same seas and the same mountains than to the survival of any political fragments of the past. The Greek population had received a strong Slavonic infusion many centuries before. More recently, Albanian settlers had expelled the inhabitants from certain districts both in the mainland and in the Morea. Attica, Boeotia, Corinth, and Argolis were at the outbreak of the war of independence peopled in the main by a race of Albanian descent, who still used, along with some Greek, the Albanian language.[349] The sense of a separate nationality was, however, weak among these settlers, who, unlike some small Albanian communities in the west of the Morea, were Christians, not Mohammedans. Neighbourhood, commerce, identity of religion and similarity of local institutions were turning these Albanians into Greeks; and no community of pure Hellenic descent played a greater part in the national war, or exhibited more of the maritime energy and daring which we associate peculiarly with the Hellenic name, than the islanders of Hydra and Spetza, who had crossed from the Albanian parts of the Morea and taken possession of these desert rocks not a hundred years before. The same phenomenon of an assimilation of Greeks and Albanians was seen in southern Epirus, the border-ground between the two races. The Suliotes, Albanian mountaineers, whose military exploits form one of the most extraordinary chapters in history, showed signs of Greek influences before the Greek war of independence began, and in this war they made no distinction between the Greek cause and their own. Even the rule of the ferocious Ali Pasha at Janina had been favourable to the extension of Greek civilisation in Epirus. Under this Mohammedan tyrant Janina contained more schools than Athens. The Greek population of the district increased; and in the sense of a common religious antagonism to the Mohammedan, the Greek and the Albanian Christians in Epirus forgot their difference of race.

[The Greek Church.]

[Lower clergy.]

[The Patriarch an imperial functionary.]

[The Bishops civil magistrates.]

The central element in modern Greek life was the religious profession of the Orthodox Eastern Church. Where, as in parts of Crete, the Greek adopted Mohammedanism, all the other elements of his nationality together did not prevent him from amalgamating with the Turk. The sound and popular forces of the Church belonged to the lower clergy, who, unlike the priests of the Roman Church, were married and shared the life of the people. If ignorant and bigoted, they were nevertheless the real guardians of national spirit; and if their creed was a superstition rather than a religion, it at least kept the Greeks in a wholesome antagonism to the superstition of their masters. The higher clergy stood in many respects in a different position. The Patriarch of Constantinople was a great officer of the Porte. His dignities and his civil jurisdiction had been restored and even enlarged by the Mohammedan conquerors of the Greek Empire, with the express object of employing the Church as a means of securing obedience to themselves: and it was quite in keeping with the history of this great office that, when the Greek national insurrection at last broke out, the Patriarch Gregorius IV. should have consented, though unwillingly, to launch the curse of the Church against it. The Patriarch gained his office by purchase, or through intrigues at the Divan; he paid an enormous annual backsheesh for it; and he was liable to be murdered or deposed as soon as his Mussulman patrons lost favour with the Sultan, or a higher bid was made for his office by a rival ecclesiastic. To satisfy the claims of the Palace the Patriarch was compelled to be an extortioner himself. The bishoprics in their turn were sold in his ante-chambers, and the Bishops made up the purchase-money by fleecing their clergy. But in spite of a deserved reputation for venality, the Bishops in Greece exercised very great influence, both as ecclesiastics and as civil magistrates. Whether their jurisdiction in lawsuits between Christians arose from the custom of referring disputes to their arbitration or was expressly granted to them by the Sultan, they virtually displaced in all Greek communities the court of the Kadi, and afforded the merchant or the farmer a tribunal where his own law was administered in his own language. Even a Mohammedan in dispute with a Christian would sometimes consent to bring the matter before the Bishops' Court rather than enforce his right to obtain the dilatory and capricious decision of an Ottoman judge.

[Communal organisation.]

[The Morea.]

The condition of the Greeks living in the country that now forms the Hellenic Kingdom and in the Ægæan Islands exhibited strong local contrasts. It was, however, common to all that, while the Turk held the powers of State in his hand, the details of local administration in each district were left to the inhabitants, the Turk caring nothing about these matters so long as the due amount of taxes was paid and the due supply of sailors provided. The apportionment of taxes among households and villages seems to have been the germ of self-government from which several types of municipal organisation, some of them of great importance in the history of the Greek nation, developed. In the Paschalik of the Morea the taxes were usually farmed by the Voivodes, or Beys, the Turkish governors of the twenty-three provinces into which the Morea was divided. But in each village or township the inhabitants elected officers called Proestoi, who, besides collecting the taxes and managing the affairs of their own communities, met in a district-assembly, and there determined what share of the district-taxation each community should bear. One Greek officer, called Primate, and one Mohammedan, called Ayan, were elected to represent the district, and to take part in the council of the Pasha of the Morea, who resided at Tripolitza.  [350] The Primates exercised considerable power. Created originally by the Porte to expedite the collection of the revenue, they became a Greek aristocracy. They were indeed an aristocracy of no very noble kind. Agents of a tyrannical master, they shared the vices of the tyrant and of the slave. Often farmers of the taxes themselves, obsequious and intriguing in the palace of the Pasha at Tripolitza, grasping and despotic in their native districts, they were described as a species of Christian Turk. But whatever their vices, they saved the Greeks from being left without leaders. They formed a class accustomed to act in common, conversant with details of administration, and especially with the machinery for collecting and distributing supplies. It was this financial experience of the Primates of the Morea which gave to the rebellion of the Greeks what little unity of organisation it exhibited in its earliest stage.

[Northern Greece. The Armatoli and the Klephts.]

On the north of the Gulf of Corinth the features of the communal system were less distinct than in the Morea. There was, however, in the mountain-country of Ætolia and Pindus a rough military organisation which had done great service to Greece in keeping alive the national spirit and habits of personal independence. The Turks had found a local militia established in this wild region at the time of their conquest, and had not interfered with it for some centuries. The Armatoli, or native soldiery, recruited from peasants, shepherds, and muleteers, kept Mohammedan influences at a distance, until, in the eighteenth century, the Sultans made it a fixed rule of policy to diminish their numbers and to reduce the power of their captains. Before 1820 the Armatoli had become comparatively few and weak; but as they declined, bands of Klephts, or brigands, grew in importance; and the mountaineer who was no longer allowed to practise arms as a guardian of order, enlisted himself among the robbers. Like the freebooters of our own northern border, these brigands became the heroes of song. Though they plundered the Greek as well as the Mohammedan, the national spirit approved their exploits. It was, no doubt, something, that the physical energy of the marauder and the habit of encountering danger should not be wholly on the side of the Turk and the Albanian. But the influence of the Klephts in sustaining Greek nationality has been overrated. They had but recently become numerous, and the earlier organisation of the northern Armatoli was that to which the sound and vigorous character of the Greek peasantry in these regions, the finest part of the Greek race on the mainland, was really due.  [351]

[The Ægæan Islands.]

[Chios.]

In the islands of the Ægæan the condition of the Greeks was on the whole happy and prosperous. Some of these islands had no Turkish population; in others the caprice of a Sultana, the goodwill of the Capitan Pasha who governed the Archipelago, or the judicious offer of a sum of money when money was wanted by the Porte, had so lightened the burden of Ottoman sovereignty, that the Greek island-community possessed more liberty than was to be found in any part of Europe, except Switzerland. The taxes payable to the central government, including the haratsch or poll-tax levied on all Christians, had often been commuted for a fixed sum, which was raised without the interposition of the Turkish tax-gatherer. In Hydra, Spetza, and Psara, the so-called nautical islands, the supremacy of the Turk was felt only in the obligation to furnish sailors to the Ottoman navy, and in the payment of a tribute of about £100 per annum. The government of these three islands was entirely in the hands of the inhabitants. In Chios, though a considerable Mussulman population existed by the side of the Greek, there was every sign of peace and prosperity. Each island bore its own peculiar social character, and had its municipal institutions of more or less value. The Hydriote was quarrelsome, turbulent, quick to use the knife, but outspoken, honest in dealing, and an excellent sailor. The picture of Chian life, as drawn even by those who have judged the Greeks most severely, is one of singular beauty and interest; the picture of a self-governing society in which the family trained the citizen in its own bosom, and in which, while commerce enriched all, the industry of the poor within their homes and in their gardens was refined by the practice of an art. The skill which gave its value to the embroidery and to the dyes of Chios was exercised by those who also worked the hand-loom and cultivated the mastic and the rose. The taste and the labour of man requited nature's gifts of sky, soil, and sea; and in the pursuit of occupations which stimulated, not deadened, the faculties of the worker, idleness and intemperance were alike unknown.  [352] How bright a scene of industry, when compared with the grime and squalor of the English factory-town, where the human and the inanimate machine grind out their yearly mountains of iron-ware and calico, in order that the employer may vie with his neighbours in soulless ostentation, and the workman consume his millions upon millions in drink.

[The Greeks have ecclesiastical power in other Turkish provinces.]

The territory where the Greeks formed the great majority of the population included, beyond the boundaries of the present Hellenic Kingdom, the islands adjacent to the coast of Asia Minor, Crete, and the Chalcidic peninsula in Macedonia. But the activity of the race was not confined within these limits. If the Greek was a subject in his own country, he was master in the lands of some of his neighbours. A Greek might exercise power over other Christian subjects of the Porte either as an ecclesiastic, or as the delegate of the Sultan in certain fixed branches of the administration. The authority of the Patriarch of Constantinople was recognised over the whole of the European provinces of Turkey, except Servia. The Bishops in all these provinces were Greeks; the services of the Church were conducted in the Greek tongue; the revenues of the greater part of the Church-lands, and the fees of all the ecclesiastical courts, went into Greek pockets. In things religious, and in that wide range of civil affairs which in communities belonging to the Eastern Church appertains to the higher religious office, the Greeks had in fact regained the ascendancy which they had possessed under the Byzantine Empire. The dream of the Churchman was not the creation of an independent kingdom of Greece, but the restoration of the Eastern Empire under Greek supremacy. When it was seen that the Slav and the Rouman came to the Greek for law, for commercial training, for religious teaching, and looked to the Patriarch of Constantinople as the ultimate judge of all disputes, it was natural that the belief should arise that, when the Turk passed away, the Greek would step into his place. But the influence of the Greeks, great as it appeared to be, did not in reality reach below the surface, except in Epirus. The bishops were felt to be foreigners and extortioners. There was no real process of assimilation at work, either in Bulgaria or in the Danubian Provinces. The slow and plodding Bulgarian peasant, too stupid for the Greek to think of him as a rival, preserved his own unchanging tastes and nationality, sang to his children the songs which he had learnt from his parents, and forgot the Greek which he had heard in the Church when he re-entered his home.  [353] In Roumania, the only feeling towards the Greek intruder was one of intense hatred.

[The Phanariot officials of the Porte.]

[Greek Hospodars.]

Four great offices of the Ottoman Empire were always held by Greeks. These were the offices of Dragoman,[354] or Secretary, of the Porte, Dragoman of the Fleet, and the governorships, called Hospodariates, of Wallachia and Moldavia. The varied business of the Patriarchate of Constantinople, the administration of its revenues, the conduct of its law-courts, had drawn a multitude of pushing and well-educated Greeks to the quarter of Constantinople called the Phanar, in which the palace of the Patriarch is situated. Merchants and professional men inhabited the same district. These Greeks of the capital, the so-called Phanariots, gradually made their way into the Ottoman administration as Turkish energy declined, and the conquering race found that it could no longer dispense with the weapons of calculation and diplomacy. The Treaty of Carlowitz, made in 1699, after the unsuccessful war in which the Turks laid siege to Vienna, was negotiated on behalf of the Porte by Alexander Maurokordatos, a Chian by birth, who had become physician to the Sultan and was virtually the Foreign Minister of Turkey. His sons, Nicholas and Constantine, were made Hospodars of Wallachia and Moldavia early in the eighteenth century; and from this time forward, until the outbreak of the Greek insurrection, the governorships of the Roumanian provinces were entrusted to Phanariot families. The result was that a troop of Greek adventurers passed to the north of the Danube, and seized upon every office of profit in these unfortunate lands. There were indeed individuals among the Hospodars, especially among the Maurokordati, who rendered good service to their Roumanian subjects; but on the whole the Phanariot rule was grasping, dishonest, and cruel.  [355] Its importance in relation to Greece was not that it Hellenised the Danubian countries, for that it signally failed to do; but that it raised the standard of Greek education, and enlarged the range of Greek thought, by opening a political and administrative career to ambitious men. The connection of the Phanariots with education was indeed an exceedingly close one. Alexander Maurokordatos was the ardent and generous founder of schools for the instruction of his countrymen in Constantinople as well as in other cities, and for the improvement of the existing language of Greece. His example was freely followed throughout the eighteenth century. It is, indeed, one of the best features in the Greek character that the owner of wealth has so often been, and still so often is, the promoter of the culture of his race. As in Germany in the last century, and in Hungary and Bohemia at a more recent date, the national revival of Greece was preceded by a striking revival of interest in the national language.

[Greek intellectual movement in the eighteenth century.]

The knowledge of ancient Greek was never wholly lost among the priesthood, but it had become useless. Nothing was read but the ecclesiastic commonplace of a pedantic age; and in the schools kept by the clergy before the eighteenth century the ancient language was taught only as a means of imparting divinity. The educational movement promoted by men like Maurokordatos had a double end; it revived the knowledge of the great age of Greece through its literature, and it taught the Greek to regard the speech which he actually used not as a mere barbarous patois which each district had made for itself, but as a language different indeed from that of the ancient world, yet governed by its own laws, and capable of performing the same functions as any other modern tongue. It was now that the Greek learnt to call himself Hellen, the name of his forefathers, instead of Romaios, a Roman. As the new schools grew up and the old ones were renovated or transformed, education ceased to be merely literary. In the second half of the eighteenth century science returned in a humble form to the land that had given it birth, and the range of instruction was widened by men who had studied law, physics, and moral philosophy at foreign Universities. Something of the liberal spirit of the inquirers of Western Europe arose among the best Greek teachers. Though no attack was made upon the doctrines of the Church, and no direct attack was made upon the authority of the Sultan, the duty of religious toleration was proclaimed in a land where bigotry had hitherto reigned supreme, and the political freedom of ancient Greece was held up as a glorious ideal to a less happy age. Some of the higher clergy and of the Phanariot instruments of Turkish rule took fright at the independent spirit of the new learning, and for a while it seemed as if the intellectual as well as the political progress of Greece might be endangered by ecclesiastical ill-will. But the attachment of the Greek people to the Church was so strong and so universal that, although satire might be directed against the Bishops, a breach with the Church formed no part of the design of any patriot. The antagonism between episcopal and national feeling, strongest about the end of the eighteenth century, declined during succeeding years, and had almost disappeared before the outbreak of the war of liberation.

[Koraes, 1748-1833.]

[The language of Modern Greece.]

The greatest scholar of modern Greece was also one of its greatest patriots. Koraes, known as the legislator of the Greek language, was born in 1748, of Chian parents settled at Smyrna. The love of learning, combined with an extreme independence of character, made residence insupportable to him in a land where the Turk was always within sight, and where few opportunities existed for gaining wide knowledge. His parents permitted him to spend some years at Amsterdam, where a branch of their business was established. Recalled to Smyrna at the age of thirty, Koraes almost abandoned human society. The hand of a beautiful heiress could not tempt him from the austere and solitary life of the scholar; and quitting his home, he passed through the medical school of Montpellier, and settled at Paris. He was here when the French Revolution began. The inspiration of that time gave to his vast learning and inborn energy a directly patriotic aim. For forty years Koraes pursued the work of serving Greece by the means open to the scholar. The political writings in which he addressed the Greeks themselves or appealed to foreigners in favour of Greece, admirable as they are, do not form the basis of his fame. The peculiar task of Koraes was to give to the reviving Greek nation the national literature and the form of expression which every civilised people reckons among its most cherished bonds of unity. Master, down to the minutest details, of the entire range of Greek writings, and of the history of the Greek language from classical times down to our own century, Koraes was able to select the Hellenic authors, Christian as well as Pagan, whose works were best suited for his countrymen in their actual condition, and to illustrate them as no one could who had not himself been born and bred among Greeks. This was one side of Koraes' literary task. The other was to direct the language of the future Hellenic kingdom into its true course. Classical writing was still understood by the educated in Greece, but the spoken language of the people was something widely different. Turkish and Albanian influences had barbarised the vocabulary; centuries of ignorance had given play to every natural irregularity of local dialect. When the restoration of Greek independence came within view, there were some who proposed to revive artificially each form used in the ancient language, and thus, without any real blending, to add the old to the new: others, seeing this to be impossible, desired that the common idiom, corrupt as it was, should be accepted as a literary language. Koraes chose the middle and the rational path. Taking the best written Greek of the day as his material, he recommended that the forms of classical Greek, where they were not wholly obsolete, should be fixed in the grammar of the language. While ridiculing the attempt to restore modes of expression which, even in the written language, had wholly passed out of use, he proposed to expunge all words that were in fact not Greek at all, but foreign, and to replace them by terms formed according to the natural laws of the language. The Greek, therefore, which Koraes desired to see his countrymen recognise as their language, and which he himself used in his writings, was the written Greek of the most cultivated persons of his time, purged of its foreign elements, and methodised by a constant reference to a classical model, which, however, it was not to imitate pedantically. The correctness of this theory has been proved by its complete success. The patois which, if it had been recognised as the language of the Greek kingdom, would now have made Herodotus and Plato foreign authors in Athens, is indeed still preserved in familiar conversation, but it is little used in writing and not taught in schools. A language year by year more closely approximating in its forms to that of classical Greece unites the Greeks both with their past and among themselves, and serves as the instrument of a widening Hellenic civilization in the Eastern Mediterranean. The political object of Koraes has been completely attained. No people in Europe is now prouder of its native tongue, or turns it to better account in education, than his countrymen. In literature, the renovated language has still its work before it. The lyric poetry that has been written in Greece since the time of Koraes is not wanting, if a foreigner may express an opinion, in tenderness and grace The writer who shall ennoble Greek prose with the energy and directness of the ancient style has yet to arise  [356]

[Development of Greek commerce, 1750-1820.]

[The Treaty of Kainardji, 1774.]

The intellectual advance of the Greeks in the eighteenth century was closely connected with the development of their commerce, and this in its turn was connected with events in the greater cycle of European history. A period of comparative peace and order in the Levantine waters, following the final expulsion of the Venetians from the Morea in 1718, gave play to the natural aptitude of the Greek islanders for coasting-trade. Then ships, still small and unfit to venture on long voyages, plied between the harbours in the Ægæan and in the Black Sea, and brought profit to their owners in spite of the imposition of burdens from which not only many of the Mussulman subjects of the Sultan, but foreign nations protected by commercial treaties, were free. It was at this epoch, after Venice had lost its commercial supremacy in the Eastern Mediterranean, that Russia began to exercise a direct influence upon the fortunes of Greece. The Empress Catherine had formed the design of conquering Constantinople, and intended, under the title of Protectress of the Christian Church, to use the Greeks as her allies. In the war which broke out between Russia and Turkey in 1768, a Russian expeditionary force landed in the Morea, and the Greeks were persuaded to take up arms. The Moreotes themselves paid dearly for the trust which they had placed in the orthodox Empress. They were virtually abandoned to the vengeance of their oppressors; but to Greece at large the conditions on which peace was made proved of immense benefit. The Treaty of Kainardji, signed in 1774, gave Russia the express right to make representations at Constantinople on behalf of the Christian inhabitants of the Danubian provinces; it also bound the Sultan to observe certain conditions in his treatment of the Greek islanders. Out of these clauses, Russian diplomacy constructed a general right of interference on behalf of any Christian subjects of the Porte. The Treaty also opened the Black Sea to Russian ships of commerce, and conferred upon Russia the commercial privileges of the most favoured nation.[357] The result of this compact was a very remarkable one. The Russian Government permitted hundreds of Greek shipowners to hoist its own flag, and so changed the footing of Greek merchantmen in every port of the Ottoman Empire. The burdens which had placed the Greek trader at a disadvantage, when compared with the Mohammedan, vanished. A host of Russian consular agents, often Greeks themselves, was scattered over the Levant. Eager for opportunities of attaching the Greeks to their Russian patrons, quick to make their newly-won power felt by the Turks, these men extracted a definite meaning from the clauses of the Treaty of Kainardji, by which the Porte had bound itself to observe the rights of its Christian subjects. The sense of security in the course of their business, no less than the emancipation from commercial fetters, gave an immense impulse to Greek traders. Their ships were enlarged; voyages, hitherto limited to the Levant, were extended to England and even to America; and a considerable armament of cannon was placed on board each ship for defence against the attack of Algerian pirates.

[Foundation of Odessa, 1792.]

[Death of Rhegas, 1798.]

[Influence of the French Revolution on Greece.]

Before the end of the eighteenth century another war between Turkey and Russia, resulting in the cession of the district of Oczakoff on the northern shore of the Black Sea, made the Greeks both carriers and vendors of the corn-export of Southern Russia. The city of Odessa was founded on the ceded territory. The merchants who raised it to its sudden prosperity were not Russians but Greeks; and in the course of a single generation many a Greek trading-house, which had hitherto deemed the sum of £3,000 to be a large capital, rose to an opulence little behind that of the great London firms. Profiting by the neutrality of Turkey or its alliance with England during a great part of the revolutionary war, the Greeks succeeded to much of the Mediterranean trade that was lost by France and its dependencies. The increasing intelligence of the people was shown in the fact that foreigners were no longer employed by Greek merchants as their travelling agents in distant countries; there were countrymen enough of their own who could negotiate with an Englishman or a Dane in his own language. The richest Greeks were no doubt those of Odessa and Salonica, not of Hellas proper; but even the little islands of Hydra and Spetza, the refuge of the Moreotes whom Catherine had forsaken in 1770, now became communities of no small wealth and spirit. Psara, which was purely Greek, formed with these Albanian colonies the nucleus of an Ægæan naval Power. The Ottoman Government, cowed by its recent defeats, and perhaps glad to see the means of increasing its resources, made no attempt to check the growth of the Hellenic armed marine. Under the very eyes of the Sultan, the Hydriote and Psarian captains, men as venturesome as the sea-kings of ancient Greece, accumulated the artillery which was hereafter to hold its own against many an Ottoman man-of-war, and to sweep the Turkish merchantmen from the Ægæan. Eighteen years before the Greek insurrection broke out, Koraes, calling the attention of Western Europe to the progress made by his country, wrote the following significant words:-"If the Ottoman Government could have foreseen that the Greeks would create a merchant-navy, composed of several hundred vessels, most of them regularly armed, it would have crushed the movement at its commencement. It is impossible to calculate the effects which may result from the creation of this marine, or the influence which it may exert both upon the destiny of the oppressed nation and upon that of its oppressors."  [358] Like its classic sisterland in the Mediterranean, Greece was stirred by the far-sounding voices of the French Revolution. The Declaration of the Rights of Man, the revival of a supposed antique Republicanism, the victories of Hoche and Bonaparte, successively kindled the enthusiasm of a race already restless under the Turkish yoke. France drew to itself some of the hopes that had hitherto been fixed entirely upon Russia. Images and ideas of classic freedom invaded the domain where the Church had hitherto been all in all; the very sailors began to call their boats by the names of Spartan and Athenian heroes, as well as by those of saints and martyrs. In 1797 Venice fell, and Bonaparte seized its Greek possessions, the Ionian Islands. There was something of the forms of liberation in the establishment of French rule; the inhabitants of Zante were at least permitted to make a bonfire of the stately wigs worn by their Venetian masters. Great changes seemed to be near at hand. It was not yet understood that France fought for empire, not for justice; and the man who, above all others, represented the early spirit of the revolution among the Greeks, the poet Rhegas, looked to Bonaparte to give the signal for the rising of the whole of the Christian populations subject to Mohammedan rule. Rhegas, if he was not a wise politician, was a thoroughly brave man, and he was able to serve his country as a martyr. While engaged in Austria in conspiracies against the Sultan's Government, and probably in intrigues with Bernadotte, French ambassador at Vienna, he was arrested by the agents of Thugut, and handed over to the Turks. He was put to death at Belgrade, with five of his companions, in May, 1798. The songs of Rhegas soon passed through every household in Greece. They were a precious treasure to his countrymen, and they have immortalised his name as a patriot. But the work which he had begun languished for a time after his death. The series of events which followed Bonaparte's invasion of Egypt extinguished the hope of the liberation of Greece by the French Republic. Among the higher Greek clergy the alliance with the godless followers of Voltaire was seen with no favourable eye. The Porte was even able to find a Christian Patriarch to set his name to a pastoral, warning the faithful against the sin of rebellion, and reminding them that, while Satan was creating the Lutherans and Calvinists, the infinite mercy of God had raised up the Ottoman Power in order that the Orthodox Church might be preserved pure from the heresies of the West.  [359]

[The Ionian Islands. 1798-1815.]

[Ali Pasha, 1798-1821.]

From the year 1798 down to the Peace of Paris, Greece was more affected by the vicissitudes of the Ionian Islands and by the growth of dominion of Ali Pasha in Albania than by the earlier revolutionary ideas. France was deprived of its spoils by the combined Turkish and Russian fleets in the coalition of 1799, and the Ionian Islands were made into a Republic under the protection of the Czar and the Sultan. It was in the native administration of Corfu that the career of Capodistrias began. At the peace of Tilsit the Czar gave these islands back to Napoleon, and Capodistrias, whose ability had gained general attention, accepted an invitation to enter the Russian service. The islands were then successively beleaguered and conquered by the English, with the exception of Corfu; and after the fall of Napoleon they became a British dependency. Thus the three greatest Powers of Europe were during the first years of this century in constant rivalry on the east of the Adriatic, and a host of Greeks, some fugitives, some adventurers, found employment among their armed forces. The most famous chieftain in the war of liberation, Theodore Kolokotrones, a Klepht of the Morea, was for some years major of a Greek regiment in the pay of England. In the meantime Ali Pasha, on the neighbouring mainland, neither rested himself nor allowed any of his neighbours to rest. The Suliotes, vanquished after years of heroic defence, migrated in a body to the Ionian Islands in 1804. Every Klepht and Armatole of the Epirote border had fought at some time either for Ali or against him; for in the extension of his violent and crafty rule Ali was a friend to-day and an enemy to-morrow alike to Greek, Turk, and Albanian. When his power was at its height, Ali's court at Janina was as much Greek as it was Mohammedan: soldiers, merchants, professors, all, as it was said, with a longer or a shorter rope round their necks, played their part in the society of the Epirote capital.  [360] Among the officers of Ali's army there were some who were soon to be the military rivals of Kolokotrones in the Greek insurrection: Ali's physician, Dr. Kolettes, was gaining an experience and an influence among these men which afterwards placed him at the head of the Government. For good or for evil, it was felt that the establishment of a virtually independent kingdom of Albania must deeply affect the fate of Greece; and when at length Ali openly defied the Sultan, and Turkish armies closed round his castle at Janina, the conflict between the Porte and its most powerful vassal gave the Greeks the signal to strike for their own independence.

[The Hetæria Philike.]

The secret society, which under the name of Hetæria Philike, or association of friends, inaugurated the rebellion of Greece, was founded in 1814, after it had become clear that the Congress of Vienna would take no steps on behalf of the Christian subjects of the Porte. The founders of this society were traders of Odessa, and its earliest members seem to have been drawn more from the Greeks in Russia and in the Danubian provinces than from those of Greece Proper. The object of the conspiracy was the expulsion of the Turk from Europe, and the re-establishment of a Greek Eastern Empire. It was pretended by the council of directors that the Emperor Alexander had secretly joined them; and the ingenious fiction was circulated that a society for the preservation of Greek antiquities, for which Capodistrias had gained the patronage of the Czar and other eminent men at the Congress of Vienna, was in fact this political association in disguise. The real chiefs of the conspiracy always spoke of themselves as acting under the instructions of a nameless superior power. They were as little troubled by scruple in thus deceiving their followers as they were in planning a general massacre of the Turks, and in murdering their own agents when they wished to have them out of the way. The ultimate design of the Hetæria was an unsound one, and its operations were based upon an imposture; but in exciting the Greeks against Turkish rule, and in inspiring confidence in its own resources and authority, it was completely successful. In the course of six years every Greek of note, both in Greece itself and in the adjacent countries, had joined the association. The Turkish Government had received warnings of the danger which threatened it, but disregarded them until revolt was on the point of breaking out. The very improvement in the condition of the Christians, the absence of any crying oppression or outrage in Greece during late years, probably lulled the anxieties of Sultan Mahmud, who, terrible as he afterwards proved himself, had not hitherto been without sympathy for the Rayah. But the history of France, no less than the history of Greece, shows that it is not the excess, but the sense, of wrong that produces revolution. A people may be so crushed by oppression as to suffer all conceivable misery with patience. It is when the pulse has again begun to beat strong, when the eye is fixed no longer on the ground, and the knowledge of good and evil again burns in the heart, that the right and the duty of resistance is felt.

[Capodistrias and Hypsilanti.]

Early in 1820 the ferment in Greece had become so general that the chiefs of the Hetæria were compelled to seek at St. Petersburg for the Russian leader who had as yet existed only in their imagination. There was no dispute as to the person to whom the task of restoring the Eastern Empire rightfully belonged. Capodistrias, at once a Greek and Foreign Minister of Russia, stood in the front rank of European statesmen; he was known to love the Greek cause; he was believed to possess the strong personal affection of the Emperor Alexander. The deputies of the Hetæria besought him to place himself at its head. Capodistrias, however, knew better than any other man the force of those influences which would dissuade the Czar from assisting Greece. He had himself published a pamphlet in the preceding year recommending his countrymen to take no rash step; and, apart from all personal considerations, he probably believed that he could serve Greece better as Minister of Russia than by connecting himself with any dangerous enterprise. He rejected the offers of the Hetærists, who then turned to a soldier of some distinction in the Russian army, Prince Alexander Hypsilanti, a Greek exile, whose grandfather, after governing Wallachia as Hospodar, had been put to death by the Turks for complicity with the designs of Rhegas. It is said that Capodistrias encouraged Hypsilanti to attempt the task which he had himself declined, and that he allowed him to believe that if Greece once rose in arms the assistance of Russia could not long be withheld.  [361] Hypsilanti, sacrificing his hopes of the recovery of a great private fortune through the intercession of the Czar at Constantinople, placed himself at the head of the Hetæria, and entered upon a career, for which, with the exception of personal courage proved in the campaigns against Napoleon, he seems to have possessed no single qualification.

[The Herærist plan.]

In October, 1820, the leading Hetærists met in council at Ismail to decide whether the insurrection against the Turk should begin in Greece itself or in the Danubian provinces. Most of the Greek officers in the service of Sutsos, the Hospodar of Moldavia, were ready to join the revolt. With the exception of a few companies serving as police, there were no Turkish soldiers north of the Danube, the Sultan having bound himself by the Treaty of Bucharest to send no troops into the Principalities without the Czar's consent. It does not appear that the Hetærists had yet formed any calculation as to the probable action of the Roumanian people: they had certainly no reason to believe that this race bore good-will to the Greeks, or that it would make any effort to place a Greek upon the Sultan's throne. The conspirators at Ismail were so far on the right track that they decided that the outbreak should begin, not on the Danube, but in Peloponnesus. Hypsilanti, however, full of the belief that Russia would support him, reversed this conclusion, and determined to raise his standard in Moldavia.  [362] And now for the first time some account was taken of the Roumanian population. It was known that the mass of the people groaned under the feudal oppression of the Boyards, or landowners, and that the Boyards themselves detested the government of the Greek Hospodars. A plan found favour among Hypsilanti's advisers that the Wallachian peasantry should first be called to arms by a native leader for the redress of their own grievances, and that the Greeks should then step in and take control of the insurrectionary movement. Theodor Wladimiresco, a Roumanian who had served in the Russian army, was ready to raise the standard of revolt among his countrymen. It did not occur to the Hetærists that Wladimiresco might have a purpose of his own, or that the Roumanian population might prefer to see the Greek adventure fail. No sovereign by divine right had a firmer belief in his prerogative within his own dominions than Hypsilanti in his power to command or outwit Roumanians, Slavs, and all other Christian subjects of the Sultan.

[Hypsilanti in Roumania March, 1821.]

The feint of a native rising was planned and executed. In February, 1821, while Hypsilanti waited on the Russian frontier, Wladimiresco proclaimed the abolition of feudal services, and marched with a horde of peasants upon Bucharest. On the 16th of March the Hetærists began their own insurrection by a deed of blood that disgraced the Christian cause. Karavias, a conspirator commanding the Greek troops of the Hospodar at Galatz, let loose his soldiers and murdered every Turk who could be hunted down. Hypsilanti crossed the Pruth next day, and appeared at Jassy with a few hundred followers. A proclamation was published in which the Prince called upon all Christian subjects of the Porte to rise, and declared that a great European Power, meaning Russia, supported him in his enterprise. Sutsos, the Hospodar, at once handed over all the apparatus of government, and supplied the insurgents with a large sum of money. Two thousand armed men, some of them regular troops, gathered round Hypsilanti at Jassy. The roads to the Danube lay open before him; the resources of Moldavia were at his disposal; and had he at once thrown a force into Galatz and Ibraila, he might perhaps have made it difficult for Turkish troops to gain a footing on the north of the Danube.

[The Czar disavows the movement.]

But the incapacity of the leader became evident from the moment when he began his enterprise. He loitered for a week at Jassy, holding court and conferring titles, and then, setting out for Bucharest, wasted three weeks more upon the road. In the meantime the news of the insurrection, and of the fraudulent use that had been made of his own name, reached the Czar, who was now engaged at the Congress of Laibach. Alexander was at this moment abandoning himself heart and soul to Metternich's reactionary influence, and ordering his generals to make ready a hundred thousand men to put down the revolution in Piedmont. He received with dismay a letter from Hypsilanti invoking his aid in a rising which was first described in the phrases of the Holy Alliance as the result of a divine inspiration, and then exhibited as a master-work of secret societies and widespread conspiracy. A stern answer was sent back. Hypsilanti was dismissed from the Russian service; he was ordered to lay down his arms, and a manifesto was published by the Russian Consul at Jassy declaring that the Czar repudiated and condemned the enterprise with which his name had been connected. The Patriarch of Constantinople, helpless in the presence of Sultan Mahmud, now issued a ban of excommunication against the leader and all his followers. Some weeks later the Congress of Laibach officially branded the Greek revolt as a work of the same anarchical spirit which had produced the revolutions of Italy and Spain.  [363]

[The enterprise fails.]

The disavowal of the Hetærist enterprise by the Czar was fatal to its success. Hypsilanti, indeed, put on a bold countenance and pretended that the public utterances of the Russian Court were a mere blind, and in contradiction to the private instructions given him by the Czar; but no one believed him. The Roumanians, when they knew that aid was not coming from Russia, held aloof, or treated insurgents as enemies. Turkish troops crossed the Danube, and Hypsilanti fell back from Bucharest towards the Austrian frontier. Wladimiresco followed him, not however to assist him in his struggle, but to cut off his retreat and to betray him to the enemy. It was in vain that the bravest of Hypsilanti's followers, Georgakis, a Greek from Olympus, sought the Wallachian at his own headquarters, exposed his treason to the Hetærist officers who surrounded him, and carried him, a doomed man, to the Greek camp. Wladimiresco's death was soon avenged. The Turks advanced. Hypsilanti was defeated in a series of encounters, and fled ignobly from his followers, to seek a refuge, and to find a prison, in Austria. Bands of his soldiers, forsaken by their leader, sold their lives dearly in a hopeless struggle. At Skuleni, on the Pruth, a troop of four hundred men refused to cross to Russian soil until they had given battle to the enemy. Standing at bay, they met the onslaught of ten times their number of pursuers. Georgakis, who had sworn that he would never fall alive into the enemy's hands, kept his word. Surrounded by Turkish troops in the tower of a monastery, he threw open the doors for those of his comrades who could to escape, and then setting fire to a chest of powder, perished in the explosion, together with his assailants.

[Revolt of Morea, April 2, 1891.]

The Hetærist invasion of the Principalities had ended in total failure, and with it there passed away for ever the dream of re-establishing the Eastern Empire under Greek ascendancy. But while this enterprise, planned in vain reliance upon foreign aid and in blind assumption of leadership over an alien race, collapsed through the indifference of a people to whom the Greeks were known only as oppressors, that genuine uprising of the Greek nation, which, in spite of the nullity of its leaders, in spite of the crimes, the disunion, the perversity of a race awaking from centuries of servitude, was to add one more to the free peoples of Europe, broke out in the real home of the Hellenes, in the Morea and the islands of the Ægæan. Soon after Hypsilanti's appearance in Moldavia the Turkish governor of the Morea, anticipating a general rebellion of the Greeks, had summoned the Primates of his province to Tripolitza, with the view of seizing them as hostages. The Primates of the northern district set out, but halted on their way, debating whether they should raise the standard of insurrection or wait for events. While they lingered irresolutely at Kalavryta the decision passed out of their hands, and the people rose throughout the Morea. The revolt of the Moreot Greeks against their oppressors was from the first, and with set purpose, a war of extermination. "The Turk," they sang in their war-songs, "shall live no longer, neither in Morea nor in the whole earth." This terrible resolution was, during the first weeks of the revolt, carried into literal effect. The Turks who did not fly from their country-houses to the towns where there were garrisons or citadels to defend them, were attacked and murdered with their entire families, men, women and children. This was the first act of the revolution; and within a few weeks after the 2nd of April, on which the first outbreaks occurred, the open country was swept clear of its Ottoman population, which had numbered about 25,000, and the residue of the lately dominant race was collected within the walls of Patras, Tripolitza, and other towns, which the Greeks forthwith began to beleaguer.  [364]

[Terrorism at Constantinople.]

[Execution of the Patriarch, April 22.]

The news of the revolt of the Morea and of the massacre of Mohammedans reached Constantinople, striking terror into the politicians of the Turkish capital, and rousing the Sultan Mahmud to a vengeance tiger-like in its ferocity, but deliberate and calculated like every bloody deed of this resolute and able sovereign. Reprisals had already been made upon the Greeks at Constantinople for the acts of Hypsilanti, and a number of innocent persons had been put to death by the executioner, but no general attack upon the Christians had been suggested, nor had the work of punishment passed out of the hands of the government itself. Now, however, the fury of the Mohammedan populace was let loose upon the infidel. The Sultan called upon his subjects to arm themselves in defence of their faith. Executions were redoubled; soldiers and mobs devastated Greek settlements on the Bosphorus; and on the most sacred day of the Greek Church a blow was struck which sent a thrill over Eastern Europe. The Patriarch of Constantinople had celebrated the service which ushers in the dawn of Easter Sunday, when he was summoned by the Dragoman of the Porte to appear before a Synod hastily assembled. There an order of the Sultan was read declaring Gregorius IV. a traitor, and degrading him from his office. The Synod was commanded to elect his successor. It did so. While the new Archbishop was receiving his investiture, Gregorius was led out, and was hanged, still wearing his sacred robes, at the gate of his palace. His body remained during Easter Sunday and the two following days at the place of execution. It was then given to the Jews to be insulted, dragged through the streets, and cast into the sea. The Archbishops of Adrianople, Salonica, and Tirnovo suffered death on the same Easter Sunday. The body of Gregorius, floating in the waves, was picked up by a Greek ship and carried to Odessa. Brought, as it was believed, by a miracle to Christian soil, the relics of the Patriarch received at the hands of the Russian government the funeral honours of a martyr. Gregorius had no doubt had dealings with the Hetærists; but he was put to death untried; and whatever may have been the real extent of his offence, he was executed not for this but in order to strike terror into the Sultan's Christian subjects.

[Massacre of Christians, April-October.]

[Effect on Russia.]

[Russian ambassador leaves Constantinople, July 27.]

During the succeeding months, in Asia Minor as well as in Macedonia and at Constantinople itself, there were wholesale massacres of the Christians, and the churches of the Greeks were pillaged or destroyed by their enemies, both Jews and Turks. Smyrna, Adrianople, and Salonica, in so far as these towns were Greek, were put to the sack; thousands of the inhabitants were slain by the armed mobs who held command, or were sold into slavery. It was only the fear of a war with Russia which at length forced Sultan Mahmud to stop these deeds of outrage and to restore some of the conditions of civilised life in the part of his dominions which was not in revolt. The Russian army and nation would have avenged the execution of the Patriarch by immediate war if popular instincts had governed its ruler. Strogonoff, the ambassador at Constantinople, at once proposed to the envoys of the other Powers to unite in calling up war-ships for the protection of the Christians. Joint action was, however, declined by Lord Strangford, the representative of England, and the Porte was encouraged by the attitude of this politician to treat the threats of Strogonoff with indifference. There was an interval during which the destiny of a great part of Eastern Europe depended upon the fluctuations of a single infirm will. The Czar had thoroughly identified himself while at Laibach with the principles and the policy of European conservatism, and had assented to the declaration in which Metternich placed the Greek rebellion, together with the Spanish and Italian insurrections, under the ban of Europe. Returning to St. Petersburg, Alexander, in spite of the veil that intercepts from every sovereign the real thoughts and utterances of his people, found himself within the range of widely different influences. Russian passions were not roused by what might pass in Italy or Spain. The Russian priest, the soldier, the peasant understood nothing of theories of federal intervention, and of the connection between Neapolitan despotism and the treaties of 1815: but his blood boiled when he heard that the chief priest of his Church had been murdered by the Sultan, and that a handful of his brethren were fighting for their faith unhelped. Alexander felt to some extent the throb of national spirit. There had been a time in his life when a single hour of strong emotion or of overpowering persuasion had made him renounce every obligation and unite with Napoleon against his own allies; and there were those who in 1821 believed that the Czar would as suddenly break loose from his engagements with Metternich and throw himself, with a fanatical army and nation, into a crusade against the Turk. Sultan Mahmud had himself given to the Russian party of action a ground for denouncing him in the name of Russian honour and interests independently of all that related to Greece. In order to prevent the escape of suspected persons, the Porte had ordered Russian vessels to be searched at Constantinople, and it had forced all corn-ships coming from the Euxine to discharge their cargoes at the Bosphorus, under the apprehension that the corn-supplies of the capital would be cut off by Greek vessels in command of the Ægæan. Further, Russia had by treaty the right to insist that the Danubian Principalities should be governed by their civil authorities, the Hospodars, and not by Turkish Pashas, insurrection in Wallachia had been put down, but the rule of Hospodars had not been restored; Turkish generals, at the head of their forces, still administered their provinces under military law. On all these points Russia had at least the semblance of grievances of its own. The outrages which shocked all Europe were not the only wrong which Russian pride called upon the Czar to redress. The influence of Capodistrias revived at St. Petersburg. A despatch was sent to Constantinople declaring that the Porte had begun a war for life or death with the Christian religion, and that its continued existence among the Powers of Europe must depend upon its undertaking to restore the churches which had been destroyed, to guarantee the inviolability of Christian worship in the future, and to discriminate in its punishments between the innocent and the guilty. Presenting ultimatum from his master, Strogonoff, in accordance with his instructions, demanded a written answer within eight days. No such answer came. On the 27th of July the ambassador quitted Constantinople. War seemed to be on the point of breaking out.

[Eastern policy of Austria.]

The capital where these events were watched with the greatest apprehension was Vienna. The fortunes of the Ottoman Empire have always been most intimately connected with those of Austria; and although the long struggle of the House of Hapsburg with Napoleon and its wars in recent times with Prussia and with Italy have made the western aspect of Austrian policy more prominent and more familiar than its eastern one, the eastern interests of the monarchy have always been at least as important in the eyes of its actual rulers. Before the year 1720 Austria, not Russia, was the great enemy of Turkey and the aggressive Power of the east of Europe. After 1780 the Emperor Joseph had united with Catherine of Russia in a plan for dividing the Sultan's dominions in Europe, and actually waged a war for this purpose. In 1795 the alliance, with the same object, had been prospectively revived by Thugut; in 1809, after the Treaty of Tilsit, Metternich had determined in the last resort to combine with Napoleon and Alexander in dismembering Turkey, if all diplomatic means should fail to prevent a joint attack on the Porte by France and Russia. But this resolution had been adopted by Metternich only as a matter of necessity, and in view of a combination which threatened to reduce Austria to the position of a vassal State. Metternich's own definite and consistent policy after 1814 was the maintenance of the Ottoman Empire. His statesmanship was, as a rule, governed by fear; and his fear of Alexander was second only to his old fear of Napoleon. Times were changed since Joseph and Thugut could hope to enter upon a game of aggression with Russia upon equal terms. The Austrian army had been beaten in every battle that it had fought during nearly twenty years. Province after province had been severed from it, without, except in the Tyrol, raising a hand in its support; and when in 1821 the Minister compared Austria's actual Empire and position in Europe, won and maintained in great part by his own diplomacy, with the ruin to which a series of wars had brought it ten years before, he might well thank Heaven that international Congresses were still so much in favour with the Courts, and tremble at the clash of arms which from the remote Morea threatened to call Napoleon's northern conquerors once more into the field  [365]

[Eastern policy of England.]

England was not, like Austria, exposed to actual danger by the advance of Russia towards the Ægæan; but the growth of Russian power had been viewed with alarm by English politicians since 1788, when Pitt had formed a triple alliance with Prussia and Holland for the purpose of defending the Porte against the attacks of Catherine and Joseph. The interest of Great Britain in the maintenance of the Ottoman Empire had not been laid down as a principle before that date, nor was it then acknowledged by the Whig party. It was asserted by Pitt from considerations relating to the European balance of power, not, as in our own times, with a direct reference to England's position in India. The course of events from 1792 to 1807 made England and Russia for awhile natural allies; but this friendship was turned into hostility by the Treaty of Tilsit; and although after a few years Alexander was again fighting for the same cause as Great Britain, and the public opinion of this country enthusiastically hailed the issue of the Moscow campaign, English statesmen never forgot the interview upon the Niemen, and never, in the brightest moments of victory, regarded Alexander without some secret misgivings. During the campaign of 1814 in France, Castlereagh's willingness to negotiate with Bonaparte was due in great part to the fear that Alexander's high-wrought resolutions would collapse before Napoleon could be thoroughly crushed, and that reaction would carry him into a worse peace than that which he then disdained.  [366] The negotiations at the Congress of Vienna brought Great Britain and Russia, as it has been seen, into an antagonism which threatened to end in the resort to arms; and the tension which then and for some time afterwards existed between the two governments led English Ministers to speak, certainly in exaggerated and misleading language, of the mutual hostility of the English and the Russian nations. From 1815 to 1821 the Czar had been jealously watched. It had been rumoured over and over again that he was preparing to invade the Ottoman Empire; and when the rebellion of the Greeks broke out, the one thought of Castlereagh and his colleagues was that Russia must be prevented from throwing itself into the fray, and that the interests of Great Britain required that the authority of the Sultan should as soon as possible be restored throughout his dominions.

[Fears of new period of warfare.]

[Metternich and the Greeks.]

Both at London therefore and at Vienna the rebellion of Greece was viewed by governments only as an unfortunate disturbance which was likely to excite war between Russia and its neighbours, and to imperil the peace of Europe at large. It may seem strange that the spectacle of a nation rising to assert its independence should not even have aroused the question whether its claims deserved to be considered. But to do justice at least to the English Ministers of 1821, it must be remembered how terrible, how overpowering, were the memories left by the twenty years of European war that had closed in 1815, and at how vast a cost to mankind the regeneration of Greece would have been effected, if, as then seemed probable, it had ranged the Great Powers again in arms against one another, and re-kindled the spirit of military aggression which for a whole generation had made Europe the prey of rival coalitions. It is impossible to read the letter in which Castlereagh pleaded with the Czar to sacrifice his own glory and popularity to the preservation of European peace, without perceiving in what profound earnestness the English statesman sought to avert the renewal of an epoch of conflict, and how much the apprehension of coming calamity predominated in his own mind over the mere jealousy of an extension of Russian power.  [367] If Castlereagh had no thought for Greece itself, it was because the larger interests of Europe wholly absorbed him, and because he lacked the imagination and the insight to conceive of a better adjustment of European affairs under the widening recognition of national rights. The Minister of Austria, to whom at this crisis Castlereagh looked as his natural ally, had no doubt the same dread of a renewed convulsion of Europe, but in his case it was mingled with considerations of a much narrower kind. It is not correct to say that Metternich was indifferent to the Greek cause; he actually hated it, because it gave a stimulus to the liberal movement of Germany. In his empty and pedantic philosophy of human action, Metternich linked together every form of national aspiration and unrest as something presumptuous and wanton. He understood nothing of the debt that mankind owes to the spirit of freedom. He was just as ready to dogmatise upon the wickedness of the English Reform Bill as he was to trace the hand of Capodistrias in every tumult in Servia or the Morea: and even if there had been no fear of Russian aggression in the background, he would instinctively have condemned the Greek revolt when he saw that the light-headed professors in the German Universities were beginning to agitate in its favour, and that the recalcitrant minor Courts regarded it with some degree of sympathy.

[Alexander adheres to policy of peace.]

[Capdostrias retires, Aug 1822.]

The policy of Metternich in the Eastern Question had for its object the maintenance of the existing order of things; and as it was certain that some satisfaction or other must be given to Russian pride, Metternich's counsel was that the grievances of the Czar which were specifically Russian should be clearly distinguished from questions relating to the independence of Greece; and that on the former the Porte should be recommended to agree with its adversary quickly, the good offices of Europe being employed within given limits on the Czar's behalf; so that, the Russian causes of complaint being removed, Alexander might without loss of honour leave the Greeks to be subdued, and resume the diplomatic relations with Constantinople which had been so perilously severed by Strogonoff's departure. It remained for the Czar to decide whether, as head of Russia and protector of the Christians of the East, he would solve the Eastern Question by his own sword, or whether, constant to the principle and ideal of international action to which he had devoted himself since 1815, he would commit his cause to the joint mediation of Europe, and accept such solution of the problem as his allies might attain. In the latter case it was clear that no blow would be struck on behalf of Greece. For a year or more the balance wavered; at length the note of triumph sounded in the Austrian Cabinet. Capodistrias, the representative of the Greek cause at St. Petersburg, rightly measured the force of the opposing impulses in the Czar's mind. He saw that Alexander, interested as he was in Italy and Spain, would never break with that federation of the Courts which he had himself created, nor shake off the influences of legitimism which had dominated him since the Congress of Aix-la-Chapelle. Submitting when contention had become hopeless, and anticipating his inevitable fall by a voluntary retirement from public affairs, Capodistrias, still high in credit and reputation, quitted St. Petersburg under the form leave of absence, and withdrew to Geneva, there to await events, and to enjoy the distinction of a patriot whom love for Greece had constrained to abandon one of the most splendid positions in Europe. Grave, melancholy, and austere, as one who suffered with his country, Capodistrias remained in private life till the vanquished cause had become the victorious one, and the liberated Greek nation called him to place himself at its head.

[Extension of the Greek revolt.]

[Central Greece.]

[Fall of Ali Pasha, Feb., 1822.]

[Chalcidice.]

An international diplomatic campaign of vast activity and duration began in the year 1821, but the contest of arms was left, as Metternich desired, to the Greeks and the Turks alone. The first act of the war was the insurrection of the Morea: the second was the extension of this insurrection over parts of Continental Greece and the Archipelago, and its summary extinction by the Turk in certain districts, which in consequence remained for the future outside the area of hostilities, and so were not ultimately included in the Hellenic Kingdom. Central Greece, that is, the country lying immediately north of the Corinthian Gulf, broke into revolt a few weeks later than the Morea. The rising against the Mohammedans was distinguished by the same merciless spirit: the men were generally massacred; the women, if not killed, were for the most part sold into slavery; and when, after an interval of three years, Lord Byron came to Missolonghi, he found that a miserable band of twenty-three captive women formed the sole remnant of the Turkish population of that town. Thessaly, with some exceptions, remained passive, and its inaction was of the utmost service to the Turkish cause; for Ali Pasha in Epirus was now being besieged by the Sultan's armies, and if Thessaly had risen in the rear of these troops, they could scarcely have escaped destruction. Khurshid, the Ottoman commander conducting the siege of Janina, held firmly to his task, in spite of the danger which threatened his communications, and in spite of the circumstance that his whole household had fallen into the hands of the Moreot insurgents. His tenacity saved the border-provinces for the Ottoman Empire. No combination was effected between Ali and the Greeks, and at the beginning of 1822 the Albanian chieftain lost both his stronghold and his life. In the remoter district of Chalcidice, on the Macedonian coast, where the promontory of Athos and the two parallel peninsulas run out into the Ægæan, and a Greek population, clearly severed from the Slavic inhabitants of the mainland, maintained its own communal and religious organisation, the national revolt broke out under Hetærist leaders. The monks of Mount Athos, like their neighbours, took up arms. But there was little sympathy between the privileged chiefs of these abbeys and the desperate men who had come to head the revolt. The struggle was soon abandoned; and, partly by force of arms, partly by negotiation, the authority of the Sultan was restored without much difficulty throughout this region.

[The Ægæan Islands.]

The settlements of the Ægæan which first raised the flag of Greek independence were the so-called Nautical Islands, Hydra, Spetza, and Psara, where the absence of a Turkish population and the enjoyment of a century of self-government had allowed the bold qualities of an energetic maritime race to grow to their full vigour. Hydra and Spetza were close to the Greek coast, Psara was on the farther side of the archipelago, almost within view of Asia Minor; so that in joining the insurrection its inhabitants showed great heroism, for they were exposed to the first attack of any Turkish force that could maintain itself for a few hours at sea, and the whole adjacent mainland was the recruiting-ground of the Sultan. At Hydra the revolt against the Ottoman was connected with the internal struggles of the little community, and these in their turn were connected with the great economical changes of Europe which, at the opposite end of the continent, and in a widely different society, led to the enactment of the English Corn Laws, and to the strife of classes which resulted from them. During Napoleon's wars the carrying-trade of most nations had become extinct; little corn reached England, and few besides Greek ships navigated the Euxine and Mediterranean. When peace opened the markets and the ports of all nations, just as the renewed importation of foreign corn threatened to lower the profits of English farmers and the rents of English landlords, so the reviving freedom of navigation made an end of the monopoly of the Hydriote and Psarian merchantmen. The shipowners formed an oligarchy in Hydra; the captains and crews of their ships, though they shared the profits of each voyage, were excluded from any share in the government of the island. Failure of trade, want and inactivity, hence led to a political opposition. The shipowners, wealthy and privileged men, had no inclination to break with the Turk; the captains and sailors, who had now nothing to lose, declared for Greek independence. There was a struggle in which for awhile nothing but the commonest impulses of need and rapacity came into play; but the greater cause proved its power: Hydra threw in its lot with Greece; and although private greed and ill-faith, as well as great cruelty, too often disgraced both the Hydriote crews and those of the other islands, the nucleus of a naval force was now formed which made the achievement of Greek independence possible. The three islands which led the way were soon followed by the wealthier and more populous Samos and by the greater part of the Archipelago. Crete, inhabited by a mixed Greek and Turkish population, also took up arms, and was for years to come the scene of a bloody and destructive warfare.

[The Greek leaders.]

Within the Morea the first shock of the revolt had made the Greeks masters of everything outside the fortified towns. The reduction of these places was at once undertaken by the insurgents. Tripolitza, lately the seat of the Turkish government, was the centre of operations, and in the neighbourhood of this town the first provisional government of the Greeks, called the Senate of Kaltesti, was established. Demetrius Hypsilanti, a brother of the Hetærist leader, whose failure in Roumania was not yet known, landed in the Morea and claimed supreme power. He was tumultuously welcomed by the peasant-soldiers, though the Primates, who had hitherto held undisputed sway, bore him no good will. Two other men became prominent at this time as leaders in the Greek war of liberation. These were Maurokordatos, a descendant of the Hospodars of Wallachia-a politician superior to all his rivals in knowledge and breadth of view, but wanting in the faculty of action required by the times-and Kolokotrones, a type of the rough fighting Klepht; a mere savage in attainments, scarcely able to read or write, cunning, grossly avaricious and faithless, incapable of appreciating either military or moral discipline, but a born soldier in his own irregular way, and a hero among peasants as ignorant as himself. There was yet another, who, if his character had been equal to his station, would have been placed at the head of the government of the Morea. This was Petrobei, chief of the family of Mauromichalis, ruler of the rugged district of Maina, in the south-west of Peloponnesus, where the Turk had never established more than nominal sovereignty. A jovial, princely person, exercising among his clansmen a mild Homeric sway, Petrobei, surrounded by his nine vigorous sons, was the most picturesque figure in Greece. But he had no genius for great things. A sovereignty, which in other hands might have expanded to national dominion, remained with Petrobei a mere ornament and curiosity; and the power of the deeply-rooted clan-spirit of the Maina only made itself felt when, at a later period, the organisation of a united Hellenic State demanded its sacrifice.

[Fall of Tripolitza, Oct. 5, 1821.]

Anarchy, egotism, and ill-faith disgraced the Greek insurrection from its beginning to its close. There were, indeed, some men of unblemished honour among the leaders, and the peasantry in the ranks fought with the most determined courage year after year; but the action of most of those who figured as representatives of the people brought discredit upon the national cause. Their first successes were accompanied by gross treachery and cruelty. Had the Greek leaders been Bourbon kings, nurtured in all the sanctities of divine right, instead of tax-gatherers and cattle-lifters, truants from the wild school of Turkish violence and deceit, they could not have perjured themselves with lighter hearts. On the surrender of Navarino, in August, 1821, after a formal capitulation providing for the safety of its Turkish inhabitants, men, women, and children were indiscriminately massacred. The capture of Tripolitza, which took place two months later, was changed from a peaceful triumph into a scene of frightful slaughter by the avarice of individual chiefs, who, while negotiations were pending, made their way into the town, and bargained with rich inhabitants to give them protection in return for their money and jewels. The soldiery, who had undergone the labours of the siege for six months, saw that their reward was being pilfered from them. Defying all orders, and in the absence of Demetrius Hypsilanti, the commander-in-chief, they rushed upon the fortifications of Tripolitza, and carried them by storm. A general massacre of the inhabitants followed. For three days the work of carnage was continued in the streets and houses, until few out of a population of many thousands remained living. According to the testimony of Kolokotrones himself, the roads were so choked with the dead, that as he rode from the gateway to the citadel his horse's hoofs never touched the ground.  [368]

[The Massacre of Chios, April-June, 1822.]

In the opening scenes of the Greek insurrection the barbarity of Christians and of Ottomans was perhaps on a level. The Greek revenged himself with the ferocity of the slave who breaks his fetters; the Turk resorted to wholesale massacre and extermination as the normal means of government in troubled times. And as experience has shown that the savagery of the European yields in one generation to the influences of civilised rule, while the Turk remains as inhuman to-day as he was under Mahmud II., so the history of 1822 proved that the most devilish passions of the Greek were in the end but a poor match for disciplined Turkish prowess in the work of butchery. It was no easy matter for the Sultan to requite himself for the sack of Tripolitza upon Kolokotrones and his victorious soldiers; but there was a peaceful and inoffensive population elsewhere, which offered all the conditions for free, unstinted, and unimperilled vengeance which the Turk desires. A body of Samian troops had landed in Chios, and endeavoured, but with little success, to excite the inhabitants to revolt, the absence of the Greek fleet rendering them an almost certain prey to the Sultan's troops on the mainland. The Samian leader nevertheless refused to abandon the enterprise, and laid siege to the citadel, in which there was a Turkish garrison. Before this fortress could be reduced, a relieving army of seven thousand Turks, with hosts of fanatical volunteers, landed on the island. The Samians fled; the miserable population of Chios was given up to massacre. For week after week the soldiery and the roving hordes of Ottomans slew, pillaged, and sold into slavery at their pleasure. In parts of the island where the inhabitants took refuge in the monasteries, they were slaughtered by thousands together; others, tempted back to their homes by the promulgation of an amnesty, perished family by family. The lot of those who were spared was almost more pitiable than of those who died. The slave-markets of Egypt and Tunis were glutted with Chian captives. The gentleness, the culture, the moral worth of the Chian community made its fate the more tragical. No district in Europe had exhibited a civilisation more free from the vices of its type: on no community had there fallen in modern times so terrible a catastrophe. The estimates of the destruction of life at Chios are loosely framed; among the lowest is that which sets the number of the slain and the enslaved at thirty thousand. The island, lately thronging with life and activity, became a thinly-populated place. After a long period of depression and the slow return of some fraction of its former prosperity, convulsions of nature have in our own day again made Chios a ruin. A new life may arise when the Turk is no longer master of its shores, but the old history of Chios is closed for ever.

[Exploit of Kanaris, June 18th, 1822.]

The impression made upon public opinion in Europe by the massacre of 1822 was a deep and lasting one, although it caused no immediate change in the action of Governments. The general feeling of sympathy for the Greeks and hatred for the Turks, which ultimately forced the Governments to take up a different policy, was intensified by a brilliant deed of daring by which a Greek captain avenged the Chians upon their devastor, and by the unexpected success gained by the insurgents on the mainland against powerful armies of the Sultan. The Greek executive, which was now headed by Maurokordatos, had been guilty of gross neglect in not sending over the fleet in time to prevent the Turks from landing in Chios. When once this landing had been effected, the ships which afterwards arrived were powerless to prevent the massacre, and nothing could be attempted except against the Turkish fleet itself. The instrument of destruction employed by the Greeks was the fire-ship, which had been used with success against the Turk in these same waters in the war of 1770. The sacred month of the Ramazan was closing, and on the night of June 18, Kara Ali, the Turkish commander, celebrated the festival of Bairam with above a thousand men on board his flag-ship. The vessel was illuminated with coloured lanterns. In the midst of the festivities, Constantine Kanaris, a Psarian captain, brought his fire-ship unobserved right up to the Turkish man-of-war, and drove his bowsprit firmly into one of her portholes; then, after setting fire to the combustibles, he stepped quietly into a row-boat, and made away. A breeze was blowing, and in a moment the Turkish crew were enveloped in a mass of flames. The powder on board exploded; the boats were sunk; and the vessel, with its doomed crew, burned to the water-edge, its companions sheering off to save themselves from the shower of blazing fragments that fell all around. Kara Ali was killed by a broken mast; a few of his men saved their lives by swimming or were picked up by rescuers; the rest perished. Such was the consternation caused by the deed of Kanaris, that the Ottoman fleet forthwith quitted the Ægæan waters, and took refuge under the guns of the Dardanelles. Kanaris, unknown before, became from this exploit a famous man in Europe. It was to no stroke of fortune or mere audacity that he owed his success, but to the finest combination of nerve and nautical skill. His feat, which others were constantly attempting, but with little success, to imitate, was repeated by him in the same year. He was the most brilliant of Greek seamen, a simple and modest hero; and after his splendid achievements in the war of liberation, he served his country well in a political career. Down to his death in a hale old age, he was with justice the idol and pride of the Greek nation.

[Double invasion of Greece 1822.]

[Destruction of the Philhellenes near Arta, July 16.]

[Unsuccessful siege of Missolonghi, Nov., 1822.]

The fall of the Albanian rebel, Ali Pasha, in the spring of 1822 made it possible for Sultan Mahmud, who had hitherto been crippled by the resistance of Janina, to throw his whole land-force against the Hellenic revolt; and the Greeks of the mainland, who had as yet had to deal only with scattered detachments or isolated garrisons, now found themselves exposed to the attack of two powerful armies. Kurshid, the conqueror of Ali Pasha, took up his headquarters at Larissa in Thessaly, and from this base the two invading armies marched southwards on diverging lines. The first, under Omer Brionis, was ordered to make its way through Southern Epirus to the western entrance of the Corinthian Gulf, and there to cross into the Morea; the second, under Dramali, to reduce Central Greece, and enter the Morea by the isthmus of Corinth; the conquest of Tripolitza and the relief of the Turkish coast-fortresses which were still uncaptured being the ultimate end to be accomplished by the two armies in combination with one another and with the Ottoman fleet. Not less than fifty thousand men were under the orders of the Turkish commanders, the division of Dramali being by far the larger of the two. Against this formidable enemy the Greeks possessed poor means of defence, nor were their prospects improved when Maurokordatos, the President, determined to take a military command, and to place himself at the head of the troops in Western Greece. There were indeed urgent reasons for striking with all possible force in this quarter. The Suliotes, after seventeen years of exile in Corfu, had returned to their mountains, and were now making common cause with Greece. They were both the military outwork of the insurrection, and the political link between the Hellenes and the Christian communities of Albania, whose action might become of decisive importance in the struggle against the Turks. Maurokordatos rightly judged the relief of Suli to be the first and most pressing duty of the Government. Under a capable leader this effort would not have been beyond the power of the Greeks; directed by a politician who knew nothing of military affairs, it was perilous in the highest degree. Maurokordatos, taking the command out of abler hands, pushed his troops forward to the neighbourhood of Arta, mismanaged everything, and after committing a most important post to Botzares, an Albanian chieftain of doubtful fidelity, left two small regiments exposed to the attack of the Turks in mass. One of these regiments, called the corps of Philhellenes, was composed of foreign officers who had volunteered to serve in the Greek cause as common soldiers. Its discipline was far superior to anything that existed among the Greeks themselves; and at its head were men who had fought in Napoleon's campaigns. But this corps, which might have become the nucleus of a regular army, was sacrificed to the incapacity of the general and the treachery of his confederate. Betrayed and abandoned by the Albanian, the Philhellenes met the attack of the Turks gallantly, and almost all perished. Maurokordatos and the remnant of the Greek troops now retired to Missolonghi. The Suliotes, left to their own resources, were once more compelled to quit their mountain home, and to take refuge in Corfu. Their resistance, however, delayed the Turks for some months, and it was not until the beginning of November that the army of Omer Brionis, after conquering the intermediate territory, appeared in front of Missolonghi. Here the presence of Maurokordatos produced a better effect than in the field. He declared that he would never leave the town as long as a man remained to fight the Turks. Defences were erected, and the besiegers kept at bay for two months. On the 6th of January, 1823, Brionis ordered an assault. It was beaten back with heavy loss; and the Ottoman commander, hopeless of maintaining his position throughout the winter, abandoned his artillery, and retired into the interior of the country.  [369]

[Dramali passes the Isthmus of Corinth, July 1822.]

[His retreat and destruction, Aug., 1822.]

In the meantime Dramali had advanced from Thessaly with twenty-four thousand infantry and six thousand cavalry, the most formidable armament that had been seen in Greece since the final struggle between the Turks and Venetians in 1715. At the terror of his approach all hopes of resistance vanished. He marched through Boeotia and Attica, devastating the country, and reached the isthmus of Corinth in July, 1822. The mountain passes were abandoned by the Greeks; the Government, whose seat was at Argos, dispersed; and Dramali moved on to Nauplia, where the Turkish garrison was on the point of surrendering to the Greeks. The entrance to the Morea had been won; the very shadow of a Greek government had disappeared, and the definite suppression of the revolt seemed now to be close at hand. But two fatal errors of the enemy saved the Greek cause. Dramali neglected to garrison the passes through which he had advanced; and the commander of the Ottoman fleet, which ought to have met the land-force at Nauplia, disobeyed his instructions and sailed on to Patras. Two Greeks, at this crisis of their country's history, proved themselves equal to the call of events. Demetrius Hypsilanti, now President of the Legislature, refused to fly with his colleagues, and threw himself, with a few hundred men, into the Acropolis of Argos. Kolokotrones, hastening to Tripolitza, called out every man capable of bearing arms, and hurried back to Argos, where the Turks were still held at bay by the defenders of the citadel. Dramali could no longer think of marching into the interior of the Morea. The gallantry of Demetrius had given time for the assemblage of a considerable force, and the Ottoman general now discovered the ruinous effect of his neglect to garrison the passes in his rear. These were seized by Kolokotrones. The summer-drought threatened the Turkish army with famine; the fleet which would have rendered them independent of land-supplies was a hundred miles away; and Dramali, who had lately seen all Greece at his feet, now found himself compelled to force his way back through the enemy to the isthmus of Corinth. The measures taken by Kolokotrones to intercept his retreat were skilfully planned, and had they been adequately executed not a man of the Ottoman army would have escaped. It was only through the disorder and the cupidity of the Greeks themselves that a portion of Dramali's force succeeded in cutting its way back to Corinth. Baggage was plundered while the retreating enemy ought to have been annihilated, and divisions which ought to have co-operated in the main attack sought trifling successes of their own. But the losses and the demoralisation of the Turkish army were as ruinous to it as total destruction. Dramali himself fell ill and died; and the remnant of his troops which had escaped from the enemy's hands perished in the neighbourhood of Corinth from sickness and want.

[Greek Civil Wars, 1824.]

The decisive events of 1822 opened the eyes of European Governments to the real character of the Greek national rising, and to the probability of its ultimate success. The forces of Turkey were exhausted for the moment, and during the succeeding year no military operations could be undertaken by the Sultan on anything like the same scale. It would perhaps have been better for the Greeks themselves if the struggle had been more continuously sustained. Nothing but foreign pressure could give unity to the efforts of a race distracted by so many local rivalries, and so many personal ambitions and animosities. Scarcely was the extremity of danger passed when civil war began among the Greeks themselves. Kolokotrones set himself up in opposition to the Legislature, and seized on some of the strong places in the Morea. This first outbreak of the so-called military party against the civil authorities was, however, of no great importance. The Primates of the Morea took part with the representatives of the islands and of Central Greece against the disturber of the peace, and an accommodation was soon arranged. Konduriottes, a rich ship-owner of Hydra, was made President, with Kolettes, a politician of great influence in Central Greece, as his Minister. But in place of the earlier antagonism between soldier and civilian, a new and more dangerous antagonism, that of district against district, now threatened the existence of Greece. The tendency of the new government to sacrifice everything to the interest of the islands at once became evident. Konduriottes was a thoroughly incompetent man, and made himself ridiculous by appointing his friends, the Hydriote sea-captains, to the highest military and civil posts. Rebellion again broke out, and Kolokotrones was joined by his old antagonists, the Primates of the Morea. A serious struggle ensued, and the government, which was really conducted by Kolettes, displayed an energy that surprised both its friends and its foes. The Morea was invaded by a powerful force from Hydra. No mercy was shown to the districts which supported the rebels. Kolokotrones was thoroughly defeated, and compelled to give himself up to the Government. He was carried to Hydra and thrown into prison, where he remained until new peril again rendered his services indispensable to Greece.

[Mahmud calls for the help of Egypt.]

After the destruction of Dramali's army and the failure of the Ottoman navy to effect any result whatever, the Sultan appears to have conceived a doubt whether the subjugation of Greece might not in fact be a task beyond his own unaided power. Even if the mainland were conquered, it was certain that the Turkish fleet could never reduce the islands, nor prevent the passage of supplies and reinforcements from these to the ports of the Morea. Strenuous as Mahmud had hitherto shown himself in crushing his vassals who, like Ali Pasha, attempted to establish an authority independent of the central government, he now found himself compelled to apply to the most dangerous of them all for assistance. Mehemet Ali, Pasha of Egypt, had risen to power in the disturbed time that followed the expulsion of Napoleon's forces from Egypt. His fleet was more powerful than that of Turkey. He had organised an army composed of Arabs, negroes, and fellahs, and had introduced into it, by means of French officers, the military system and discipline of Europe. The same reform had been attempted in Turkey seventeen years before by Mahmud's predecessor, Selim III., but it had been successfully resisted by the soldiery of Constantinople, and Selim had paid for his innovations with his life. Mahmud, silent and tenacious, had long been planning the destruction of the Janissaries, the mutinous and degraded representatives of a once irresistible force, who would now neither fight themselves nor permit their rulers to organise any more effective body of troops in their stead. It is possible that the Sultan may have believed that a victory won over the enemies of Islam by the re-modelled forces of Egypt would facilitate the execution of his own plans of military reform; it is also possible that he may not have been unwilling to see his vassal's resources dissipated by a distant and hazardous enterprise. Not without some profound conviction of the urgency of the present need, not without some sinister calculation as to the means of dealing with an eventual rival in the future, was the offer of aggrandisement-if we may judge from the whole tenor of Sultan Mahmud's career and policy-made to the Pasha of Egypt by his jealous and far-seeing master. The Pasha was invited to assume the supreme command of the Ottoman forces by land and sea, and was promised the island of Crete in return for his co-operation against the Hellenic revolt. Messages to this effect reached Alexandria at the beginning of 1824. Mehemet, whose ambition had no limits, welcomed the proposals of his sovereign with ardour, and, while declining the command for himself, accepted it on behalf of Ibrahim, his adopted son.

[Turkish-Egyptian plans.]

[Egyptians conquer Crete, April, 1824.]

[Destruction of Psara, July, 1824.]

The most vigorous preparations for war were now made at Alexandria. The army was raised to 90,000 men, and new ships were added to the navy from English dockyards. A scheme was framed for the combined operation of the Egyptian and the Turkish forces which appeared to render the ultimate conquest of Greece certain. It was agreed that the island of Crete, which is not sixty miles distant from the southern extremity of the Morea, should be occupied by Ibrahim, and employed as his place of arms; that simultaneous or joint attacks should then be made upon the principal islands of the Ægæan; and that after the capture of these strongholds and the destruction of the maritime resources of the Greeks, Ibrahim's troops should pass over the narrow sea between Crete and the Morea, and complete their work by the reduction of the mainland, thus left destitute of all chance of succour from without. Crete, like Sicily, is a natural stepping-stone between Europe and Africa; and when once the assistance of Egypt was invoked by the Sultan, it was obvious that Crete became the position which above all others it was necessary for the Greeks to watch and to defend. But the wretched Government of Konduriottes was occupied with its domestic struggles. The appeal of the Cretans for protection remained unanswered, and in the spring of 1824 a strong Egyptian force landed on this island, captured its fortresses, and suppressed the resistance of the inhabitants with the most frightful cruelty. The base of operations had been won, and the combined attacks of the Egyptian and Turkish fleets upon the smaller islands followed. Casos, about thirty miles east of Crete, was surprised by the Egyptians, and its population exterminated. Psara was selected for the attack of the Turkish fleet. Since the beginning of the insurrection the Psariotes had been the scourge and terror of the Ottoman coasts. The services that they had rendered in the Greek navy had been priceless; and if there was one spot of Greek soil which ought to have been protected as long as a single boat's crew remained afloat, it was the little rock of Psara. Yet, in spite of repeated warnings, the Greek Government allowed the Turkish fleet to pass the Dardanelles unobserved, and some clumsy feints were enough to blind it to the real object of an expedition whose aim was known to all Europe. There were ample means for succouring the islanders, as subsequent events proved; but when the Turkish admiral, Khosrew, with 10,000 men on board, appeared before Psara, the Greek fleet was far away. The Psariotes themselves were over-confident. They trusted to their batteries on land, and believed their rocks to be impregnable. They were soon undeceived. While a corps of Albanians scaled the cliffs behind the town, the Turks gained a footing in front, and overwhelmed their gallant enemy by weight of numbers. No mercy was asked or given. Eight thousand of the Psarians were slain or carried away as slaves. Not more than one-third of the population succeeded in escaping to the neighbouring islands.  [370]

[Greek successes off the coast of Asia Minor, September, 1824.]

[Ibrahim reaches Crete. December, 1824.]

The first part of the Turko-Egyptian plan had thus been successfully accomplished, and if Khosrew had attacked Samos immediately after his first victory, this island would probably have fallen before help could arrive. But, like other Turkish commanders, Khosrew loved intervals of repose, and he now sailed off to Mytilene to celebrate the festival of Bairam. In the meantime the catastrophe of Psara had aroused the Hydriote Government to a sense of its danger. A strong fleet was sent across the Ægæan, and adequate measures were taken to defend Samos both by land and sea. The Turkish fleet was attacked with some success, and though Ibrahim with the Egyptian contingent now reached the coast of Asia Minor, the Greeks proved themselves superior to their adversaries combined. The operations of the Mussulman commanders led to no result; they were harassed and terrified by the Greek fireships; and when at length all hope of a joint conquest of Samos had been abandoned, and Ibrahim set sail for Crete to carry out his own final enterprise alone, he was met on the high seas by the Greeks, and driven back to the coast of Asia Minor. During the autumn of 1824 the disasters of the preceding months were to some extent retrieved, and the situation of the Egyptian fleet would have become one of some peril if the Greeks had maintained their guard throughout the winter. But they underrated the energy of Ibrahim, and surrendered themselves to the belief that he would not repeat the attempt to reach Crete until the following spring. Careless, or deluded by false information, they returned to Hydra, and left the seas unwatched. Ibrahim saw his opportunity, and, setting sail for Crete at the beginning of December, he reached it without falling in with the enemy.

[Ibrahim in the Morea, Feb., 1825.]

The snowy heights of Taygetus are visible on a clear winter's day from the Cretan coast; yet, with their enemy actually in view of them, the Greeks neglected to guard the passage to the Morea. On the 22nd of February, 1825, Ibrahim crossed the sea unopposed and landed five thousand men at Modon. He was even able to return to Crete and bring over a second contingent of superior strength before any steps were taken to hinder his movements. The fate of the mainland was now settled. Ibrahim marched from Modon upon Navarino, defeated the Greek forces on the way, and captured the garrison placed in the Island of Sphakteria-the scene of the first famous surrender of the Spartans-before the Greek fleet could arrive to relieve it. The forts of Navarino then capitulated, and Ibrahim pushed on his victorious march towards the centre of the Morea. It was in vain that the old chief Kolokotrones was brought from his prison at Hydra to take supreme command. The conqueror of Dramali was unable to resist the onslaught of Ibrahim's regiments, recruited from the fierce races of the Soudan, and fighting with the same arms and under the same discipline as the best troops in Europe. Kolokotrones was driven back through Tripolitza, and retired as the Russians had retired from Moscow, leaving a deserted capital behind him. Ibrahim gave his troops no rest; he hurried onwards against Nauplia, and on the 24th of June reached the summit of the mountain-pass that looks down upon the Argolic Gulf. "Ah, little island," he cried, as he saw the rock of Hydra stretched below him, "how long wilt thou escape me?" At Nauplia itself the Egyptian commander rode up to the very gates and scanned the defences, which he hoped to carry at the first assault. Here, however, a check awaited him. In the midst of general flight and panic, Demetrius Hypsilanti was again the undaunted soldier. He threw himself with some few hundreds of men into the mills of Lerna, and there beat back Ibrahim's vanguard when it attempted to carry this post by storm. The Egyptian recognised that with men like these in front of him Nauplia could be reduced only by a regular siege. He retired for a while upon Tripolitza, and thence sent out his harrying columns, slaughtering and devastating in every direction. It seemed to be his design not merely to exhaust the resources of his enemy but to render the Morea a desert, and to exterminate its population. In the very birthplace of European civilisation, it was said, this savage, who had already been nominated Pasha of the Morea, intended to extinguish the European race and name, and to found for himself upon the ashes of Greece a new barbaric state composed of African negroes and fellaheen. That such design had actually been formed was denied by the Turkish government in answer to official inquiries, and its existence was not capable of proof. But the brutality of one age is the stupidity of the next, and Ibrahim's violence recoiled upon himself. Nothing in the whole struggle between the Sultan and the Greeks gave so irresistible an argument to the Philhellenes throughout Europe, or so directly overcame the scruples of Governments in regard to an armed intervention in favour of Greece, as Ibrahim's alleged policy of extermination and re-settlement. The days were past when Europe could permit its weakest member to be torn from it and added to the Mohammedan world.

[Siege of Missolonghi, April, 1825-April, 1826.]

One episode of the deepest tragic interest yet remained in the Turko-Hellenic conflict before the Powers of Europe stepped in and struck with weapons stronger than those which had fallen from dying hands. The town of Missolonghi was now beleaguered by the Turks, who had invaded Western Greece while Ibrahim was overrunning the Morea. Missolonghi had already once been besieged without success; and, as in the case of Saragossa, the first deliverance appears to have inspired the townspeople with the resolution, maintained even more heroically at Missolonghi than at the Spanish city, to die rather than capitulate. From the time when Reschid, the Turkish commander, opened the second attack by land and sea in the spring of 1825, the garrison and the inhabitants met every movement of the enemy with the most obstinate resistance. It was in vain that Reschid broke through the defences with his artillery, and threw mass after mass upon the breaches which he made. For month after month the assaults of the Turks were uniformly repelled, until at length the arrival of a Hydriote squadron forced the Turkish fleet to retire from its position, and made the situation of Reschid himself one of considerable danger. And now, as winter approached, and the guerilla bands in the rear of the besiegers grew more and more active, the Egyptian army with its leader was called from the Morea to carry out the task in which the Turks had failed. The Hydriote sea-captains had departed, believing their presence to be no longer needed; and although they subsequently returned for a short time, their services were grudgingly rendered and ineffective. Ibrahim, settling down to his work at the beginning of 1826, conducted his operations with the utmost vigour, boasting that he would accomplish in fourteen days what the Turks could not effect in nine months. But his veteran soldiers were thoroughly defeated when they met the Greeks hand to hand; and the Egyptian, furious with his enemy, his allies, and his own officers, confessed that Missolonghi could only be taken by blockade. He now ordered a fleet of flat-bottomed boats to be constructed and launched upon the lagoons that lie between Missolonghi and the open sea. Missolonghi was thus completely surrounded; and when the Greek admirals appeared for the last time and endeavoured to force an entrance through the shallows, they found the besieger in full command of waters inaccessible to themselves, and after one unsuccessful effort abandoned Missolonghi to its fate. In the third week of April, 1826, exactly a year after the commencement of the siege, the supply of food was exhausted. The resolution, long made, that the entire population, men, women, and children, should fall by the enemy's sword rather than surrender, was now actually carried out. On the night of the 22nd of April all the Missolonghiots, with the exception of those whom age, exhaustion, or illness made unable to leave their homes, were drawn up in bands at the city gates, the women armed and dressed as men, the children carrying pistols. Preceded by a body of soldiers, they crossed the moat under Turkish fire. The attack of the vanguard carried everything before it, and a way was cut through the Turkish lines. But at this moment some cry of confusion was mistaken by those who were still on the bridges for an order to retreat. A portion of the non-combatants returned into the town, and with them the rearguard of the military escort. The leading divisions, however, continued their march forward, and would have escaped with the loss of some of the women and children, had not treachery already made the Turkish commander acquainted with the routes which they intended to follow. They had cleared the Turkish camp, and were expecting to meet the bands of Greek armatoli, who had promised to fall upon the enemy's rear, when, instead of friends, they encountered troop after troop of Ottoman cavalry and of Albanians placed in ambush along the road between Missolonghi and the mountains. Here, exhausted and surprised, they were cut down without mercy, and out of a body numbering several thousand not more than fifteen hundred men, with a few women and children, ultimately reached places of safety. Missolonghi itself was entered by the Turks during the sortie. The soldiers who had fallen back during the confusion on the bridges, proved that they had not acted from cowardice. They fought unflinchingly to the last, and three bands, establishing themselves in the three powder magazines of the town, set fire to them when surrounded by the Turks, and perished in the explosion Some thousands of women and children were captured around and within the town, or wandering on the mountains; but the Turks had few other prisoners. The men were dead or free.

[Fall of the Acropolis of Athens, June 5, 1827.]

From Missolonghi the tide of Ottoman conquest rolled eastward, and the Acropolis of Athens was in its turn the object of a long and arduous siege. The Government, which now held scarcely any territory on the mainland except Nauplia, where it was itself threatened by Ibrahim, made the most vigorous efforts to prevent the Acropolis from falling into Reschid's hands. All, however, was in vain. The English officers, Church and Cochrane, who were now placed at the head of the military and naval forces of Greece, failed ignominiously in the attacks which they made on Reschid's besieging army; and the garrison capitulated on June 5, 1827. But the time was past when the liberation of Greece could be prevented by any Ottoman victory. The heroic defence of the Missolonghiots had achieved its end. Greece had fought long enough to enlist the Powers of Europe on its side; and in the same month that Missolonghi fell the policy of non-intervention was definitely abandoned by those Governments which were best able to carry their intentions into effect. If the struggle had ended during the first three years of the insurrection, no hand would have been raised to prevent the restoration of the Sultan's rule. Russia then lay as if spell-bound beneath the diplomacy of the Holy Alliance; and although in the second year of the war the death of Castlereagh and the accession of Canning to power had given Greece a powerful friend instead of a powerful foe within the British Ministry, it was long before England stirred from its neutrality. Canning indeed made no secret of his sympathies for Greece, and of his desire to give the weaker belligerent such help as a neutral might afford; but when he took up office the time had not come when intervention would have been useful or possible. Changes in the policy of other great Powers and in the situation of the belligerents themselves were, he considered, necessary before the influence of England could be successfully employed in establishing peace in the East.

[First Russian project of joint intervention, 12 Jan., 1824.]

A vigorous movement of public opinion in favour of Greece made itself felt throughout Western Europe as the struggle continued; and the vivid and romantic interest excited over the whole civilised world by the death of Lord Byron in 1823, among the people whom he had come to free, probably served the Greek cause better than all that Byron could have achieved had his life been prolonged. In France and England, where public opinion had great influence on the action of the Government, as well as in Germany, where it had none whatever, societies were formed for assisting the Greeks with arms, stores, and money. The first proposal, however, for a joint intervention in favour of Greece came from St. Petersburg. The undisguised good-will of Canning towards the insurgents led the Czar's Government to anticipate that England itself might soon assume that championship of the Greek cause which Russia, at the bidding of Metternich and of Canning's predecessor, had up to that time declined. If the Greeks were to be befriended, it was intolerable that others should play the part of the patron. Accordingly, on the 12th of January, 1824, a note was submitted in the Czar's name to all the Courts of Europe, containing a plan for a settlement of the Greek question, which it was proposed that the great Powers of Europe should enforce upon Turkey either by means of an armed demonstration or by the threat of breaking off all diplomatic relations. According to this scheme, Greece, apart from the islands, was to be divided into three Principalities, each tributary to the Sultan and garrisoned by Turkish troops, but in other respects autonomous, like the Principalities of Moldavia and Wallachia. The islands were to retain their municipal organisation as before. In one respect this scheme was superior to all that have succeeded it, for it included in the territory of the Greeks both Crete and Epirus; in all other respects it was framed in the interest of Russia alone. Its object was simply to create a second group of provinces, like those on the Danube, which should afford Russia a constant opportunity for interfering with the Ottoman Empire, and which at the same time should prevent the Greeks from establishing an independent and self-supporting State. The design cannot be called insidious, for its object was so palpable that not a single politician in Europe was deceived by it; and a very simple ruse of Metternich's was enough to draw from the Russian Government an explicit declaration against the independence of Greece, which was described by the Czar as a mere chimera. But of all the parties concerned, the Greeks themselves were loudest in denounciation of the Russian plan. Their Government sent a protest against it to London, and was assured by Canning in reply that the support of this country should never be given to any scheme for disposing of the Greeks without their own consent. Elsewhere the Czar's note was received with expressions of politeness due to a Court which it might be dangerous to contradict; and a series of conferences was opened at St. Petersburg for the purpose of discussing propositions which no one intended to carry into execution. Though Canning ordered the British ambassador at St. Petersburg to dissociate himself from these proceedings, the conferences dragged on, with long adjournments, from the spring of 1824 to the summer of the following year.  [371]

[Discontent and conspiracies in Russia.]

In the meantime a strong spirit of discontent was rising in the Russian army and nation. The religious feeling no less than the pride of the people was deeply wounded by Alexander's refusal to aid the Greeks in their struggle, and by the pitiful results of his attempted diplomatic concert. Alone among the European nations the Russians understood the ecclesiastical character of the Greek insurrection, and owed nothing of their sympathy with it to the spell of classical literature and art. It is characteristic of the strength of the religious element in the political views of the Russian people, that the floods of the Neva which overwhelmed St. Petersburg in the winter of 1825 should have been regarded as a sign of divine anger at the Czar's inaction in the struggle between the Crescent and the Cross. But other causes of discontent were not wanting in Russia. Though Alexander had forgotten his promises to introduce constitutional rule, there were many, especially in the army, who had not done so. Officers who served in the invasion of France in 1815, and in the three years' occupation which followed it, returned from Western Europe with ideas of social progress and of constitutional rights which they could never have gathered in their own country. And when the bright hopes which had been excited by the recognition of these same ideas by the Czar passed away, and Russia settled down into the routine of despotism and corruption, the old unquestioning loyalty of the army was no longer proof against the workings of the revolutionary spirit. In a land where legal means of opposition to government and of the initiation of reform were wholly wanting, discontent was forced into its most dangerous form, that of military conspiracy. The army was honeycombed with secret societies. Both in the north and in the south of Russia men of influence worked among the younger officers, and gained a strong body of adherents to their design of establishing a constitution by force. The southern army contained the most resolute and daring conspirators. These men had definitely abandoned the hope of effecting any public reform as long as Alexander lived, and they determined to sacrifice the sovereign, as his father and others before him had been sacrificed, to the political necessities of the time. If the evidence subsequently given by those implicated in the conspiracy is worthy of credit, a definite plan had been formed for the assassination of the Czar in the presence of his troops at one of the great reviews intended to be held in the south of Russia in the autumn of 1825. On the death of the monarch a provisional government was at once to be established, and a constitution proclaimed.

[Death of the Czar, Dec. 1, 1825.]

Alexander, aware of the rising indignation of his people, and irritated beyond endurance by the failure of his diplomatic efforts, had dissolved the St. Petersburg Conferences in August, 1825, and declared that Russia would henceforth act according to its own discretion. He quitted St. Petersburg and travelled to the Black Sea, accompanied by some of the leaders of the war-party. Here, plunged in a profound melancholy, conscious that all his early hopes had only served to surround him with conspirators, and that his sacrifice of Russia's military interests to international peace had only rendered his country impotent before all Europe, he still hesitated to make the final determination between peace and war. A certain mystery hung over his movements, his acts, and his intentions. Suddenly, while all Europe waited for the signal that should end the interval of suspense, the news was sent out from a lonely port on the Black Sea that the Czar was dead. Alexander, still under fifty years of age, had welcomed the illness which carried him from a world of cares, and closed a career in which anguish and disappointment had succeeded to such intoxicating glory and such unbounded hope. Young as he still was for one who had reigned twenty-four years, Alexander was of all men the most life-weary. Power, pleasure, excitement, had lavished on him hours of such existence as none but Napoleon among all his contemporaries had enjoyed. They had left him nothing but the solace of religious resignation, and the belief that a Power higher than his own might yet fulfil the purposes in which he himself had failed. Ever in the midst of great acts and great events, he had missed greatness himself. Where he had been best was exactly where men inferior to himself considered him to have been worst-in his hopes; and these hopes he had himself abandoned and renounced. Strength, insight, unity of purpose, the qualities which enable men to mould events, appeared in him but momentarily or in semblance. For want of them the large and fair horizon of his earlier years was first obscured and then wholly blotted out from his view, till in the end nothing but his pietism and his generosity distinguished him from the politicians of repression whose instrument he had become.

[Military insurrection at St. Petersburg, Dec 26, 1825.]

The sudden death of Alexander threw the Russian Court into the greatest confusion, for it was not known who was to succeed him. The heir to the throne was his brother Constantine, an ignorant and brutal savage, who had just sufficient sense not to desire to be Czar of Russia, though he considered himself good enough to tyrannise over the Poles. Constantine had renounced his right to the crown some years before, but the renunciation had not been made public, nor had the Grand Duke Nicholas, Constantine's younger brother, been made aware that the succession was irrevocably fixed upon himself. Accordingly, when the news of Alexander's death reached St. Petersburg, and the document embodying Constantine's abdication was brought from the archives by the officials to whose keeping it had been entrusted, Nicholas refused to acknowledge it as binding, and caused the troops to take the oath of allegiance to Constantine, who was then at Warsaw. Constantine, on the other hand, proclaimed his brother emperor. An interregnum of three weeks followed, during which messages passed between Warsaw and St. Petersburg, Nicholas positively refusing to accept the crown unless by his elder brother's direct command. This at length arrived, and on the 26th of December Nicholas assumed the rank of sovereign. But the interval of uncertainty had been turned to good account by the conspirators at St. Petersburg. The oath already taken by the soldiers to Constantine enabled the officers who were concerned in the plot to denounce Nicholas as a usurper, and to disguise their real designs under the cloak of loyalty to the legitimate Czar. Ignorant of the very meaning of a constitution, the common soldiers mutinied because they were told to do so; and it is said that they shouted the word Constitution, believing it to be the name of Constantine's wife. When summoned to take the oath to Nicholas, the Moscow Regiment refused it, and marched off to the place in front of the Senate House, where it formed square, and repulsed an attack made upon it by the Cavalry of the Guard. Companies from other regiments now joined the mutineers, and symptoms of insurrection began to show themselves among the civil population. Nicholas himself did not display the energy of character which distinguished him through all his later life; on the contrary, his attitude was for some time rather that of resignation than of self-confidence. Whether some doubt as to the justice of his cause haunted him, or a trial like that to which he was now exposed was necessary to bring to its full strength the iron quality of his nature, it is certain that the conduct of the new Czar during these critical hours gave to those around him little indication of the indomitable will which was hence forth to govern Russia. Though the great mass of the army remained obedient, it was but slowly brought up to the scene of revolt. Officers of high rank were sent to harangue the insurgents, and one of these, General Miloradovitsch, a veteran of the Napoleonic campaigns, was mortally wounded while endeavouring to make himself heard. It was not until evening that the artillery was ordered into action, and the command given by the Czar to fire grape-shot among the insurgents. The effect was decisive. The mutineers fled before a fire which they were unable to return, and within a few minutes the insurrection was over. It had possessed no chief of any military capacity; its leaders were missing at the moment when a forward march or an attack on the palace of the Czar might have given them the victory; and among the soldiers at large there was not the least desire to take part in any movement against the established system of Russia. The only effect left by the conspiracy within Russia itself was seen in the rigorous and uncompromising severity with which Nicholas henceforward enforced the principle of autocratic rule. The illusions of the previous reign were at an end. A man with the education and the ideas of a drill-sergeant and the religious assurance of a Covenanter was on the throne; rebellion had done its worst against him; and woe to those who in future should deviate a hair's breadth from their duty of implicit obedience to the sovereign's all-sufficing power.  [372]

[Anglo-Russian Protocol, April 4, 1826.]

It has been stated, and with some probability of truth, that the military insurrection of 1825 disposed the new Czar to a more vigorous policy abroad. The conspirators, when on their trial, declared it to have been their intention to throw the army at once into an attack upon the Turks; and in so doing they would certainly have had the feeling of the nation on their side. Nicholas himself had little or no sympathy for the Greeks. They were a democratic people, and the freedom which they sought to gain was nothing but anarchy. "Do not speak of the Greeks," he said to the representative of a foreign power, "I call them the rebels." Nevertheless, little as Nicholas wished to serve the Greek democracy, both inclination and policy urged him to make an end of his predecessor's faint-hearted system of negotiation, and to bring the struggle in the East to a summary close. Canning had already, in conversation with the Russian ambassador at London, discussed a possible change of policy on the part of the two rival Courts. He now saw that time had come for establishing new relations between Great Britain and Russia, and for attempting that co-operation in the East which he had held to be impracticable during Alexander's reign. The Duke of Wellington was sent to St. Petersburg, nominally to offer the usual congratulations to the new sovereign, in reality to dissuade him from going to war, and to propose either the separate intervention of England or a joint intervention by England and Russia on behalf of Greece. The mission was successful. It was in vain that Metternich endeavoured to entangle the new Czar in the diplomatic web that had so long held his predecessor. The spell of the Holy Alliance was broken. Nicholas looked on the past influence of Austria on the Eastern Question only with resentment; he would hear of no more conferences of ambassadors; and on the 4th of April, 1826, a Protocol was signed at St. Petersburg, by which Great Britain and Russia fixed the conditions under which the mediation of the former Power was to be tendered to the Porte. Greece was to remain tributary to the Sultan; it was, however, to be governed by its own elected authorities, and to be completely independent in its commercial relations. The policy known in our own day as that of bag-and-baggage expulsion was to be carried out in a far more extended sense than that in which it has been advocated by more recent champions of the subject races of the East; the Protocol of 1826 stipulating for the removal not only of Turkish officials but of the entire surviving Turkish population of Greece. All property belonging to the Turks, whether on the continent or in the islands, was to be purchased by the Greeks.  [373]

Thus was the first step taken in the negotiations which ended in the establishment of Hellenic independence. The Protocol, which had been secretly signed, was submitted after some interval to the other Courts of Europe. At Vienna it was received with the utmost disgust. Metternich had at first declared the union of England and Russia to be an impossibility. When this union was actually established, no language was sufficiently strong to express his mortification and his spite. At one moment he declared that Canning was a revolutionist who had entrapped the young and inexperienced Czar into an alliance with European radicalism; at another, that England had made itself the cat's-paw of Russian ambition. Not till now, he protested, could Europe understand what it had lost in Castlereagh. Nor did Metternich confine himself to lamentations. While his representatives at Paris and Berlin spared no effort to excite the suspicion of those Courts against the Anglo-Russian project of intervention, the Austrian ambassador at London worked upon King George's personal hostility to Canning, and conspired against the Minister with that important section of the English aristocracy which was still influenced by the traditional regard for Austria. Berlin, however, was the only field where Metternich's diplomacy still held its own. King Frederick William had not yet had time to acquire the habit of submission to the young Czar Nicholas, and was therefore saved the pain of deciding which of two masters he should obey. In spite of his own sympathy for the Greeks, he declined to connect Prussia with the proposed joint-intervention, and remained passive, justifying this course by the absence of any material interests of Prussia in the East. Being neither a neighbour of the Ottoman Empire nor a maritime Power, Prussia had in fact no direct means of making its influence felt.

[Treaty between England, Russia and France, July, 1827.]

France, on whose action much more depended, was now governed wholly in the interests of the Legitimist party. Louis XVIII. had died in 1824, and the Count of Artois had succeeded to the throne, under the title of Charles X. The principles of the Legitimists would logically have made them defenders of the hereditary rights of the Sultan against his rebellious subjects; but the Sultan, unlike Ferdinand of Spain, was not a Bourbon nor even a Christian; and in a case where the legitimate prince was an infidel and the rebels were Christians, the conscience of the most pious Legitimist might well recoil from the perilous task of deciding between the divine rights of the Crown and the divine rights of the Church, and choose, in so painful an emergency, the simpler course of gratifying the national love of action. There existed, both among Liberals and among Ultramontanes, a real sympathy for Greece, and this interest was almost the only one in which all French political sections felt that they had something in common. Liberals rejoiced in the prospect of making a new free State in Europe; Catholics, like Charles X. himself, remembered Saint Louis and the Crusades; diplomatists understood the extreme importance of the impending breach between Austria and Russia, and of the opportunity of allying France with the latter Power. Thus the natural and disinterested impulse of the greater part of the public coincided exactly with the dictates of a far-seeing policy; and the Government, in spite of its Legitimist principles and of some assurances given to Metternich in person when he visited Paris in 1825, determined to accept the policy of the Anglo-Russian intervention in the East, and to participate in the active measures about to be taken by the two Powers. The Protocol of St. Petersburg formed the basis of a definitive treaty which was signed at London in July, 1827. By this act England, Russia, and France undertook to put an end to the conflict in the East, which, through the injury done to the commerce of all nations, had become a matter of European concern. The contending parties were to be summoned to accept the mediation of the Powers and to consent to an armistice. Greece was to be made autonomous, under the paramount sovereignty of the Sultan; the Mohammedan population of the Greek provinces was, as in the Protocol of St. Petersburg, to be entirely removed; and the Greeks were to enter upon possession of all Turkish property within their limits, paying an indemnity to the former owners. Each of the three contracting Governments pledged itself to seek no increase of territory in the East, and no special commercial advantages. In the secret articles of the treaty provisions were made for the case of the rejection by the Turks of the proposed offer of mediation. Should the armistice not be granted within one month, the Powers agreed that they would announce to each belligerent their intention to prevent further encounters, and that they would take the necessary steps for enforcing this declaration, without, however, taking part in hostilities themselves. Instructions in conformity with the Treaty were to be sent to the Admirals commanding the Mediterranean squadrons of the three Powers.  [374]

[Death of Canning, August, 1827.]

[Policy of Canning.]

Scarcely was the Treaty of London signed when Canning died. He had definitely broken from the policy of his predecessors, that policy which, for the sake of guarding against Russia's advance, had condemned the Christian races of the East to 1827. eternal subjection to the Turk, and bound up Great Britain with the Austrian system of resistance to the very principle and name of national independence. Canning was no blind friend to Russia. As keenly as any of his adversaries he appreciated the importance of England's interests in the East; of all English statesmen of that time he would have been the last to submit to any diminution of England's just influence or power. But, unlike his predecessors, he saw that there were great forces at work which, whether with England's concurrence or in spite of it, would accomplish that revolution in the East for which the time was now come; and he was statesman enough not to acquiesce in the belief that the welfare of England was in permanent and necessary antagonism to the moral interests of mankind and the better spirit of the age. Therefore, instead of attempting to maintain the integrity of the Ottoman Empire, or holding aloof and resorting to threats and armaments while Russia accomplished the liberation of Greece by itself, he united with Russia in this work, and relied on concerted action as the best preventive against the undue extension of Russia's influence in the East. In committing England to armed intervention, Canning no doubt hoped that the settlement of the Greek question arranged by the Powers would be peacefully accepted by the Sultan, and that a separate war between Russia and the Porte, on this or any other issue, would be averted. Neither of these hopes was realised. The joint-intervention had to be enforced by arms, and no sooner had the Allies struck their common blow than a war between Turkey and Russia followed. How far the course of events might have been modified had Canning's life not been cut short it is impossible to say; but whether his statesmanship might or might not have averted war on the Danube, the balance of results proved his policy to have been the right one. Greece was established as an independent State, to supply in the future a valuable element of resistance to Slavic preponderance in the Levant; and the encounter between Russia and Turkey, so long dreaded, produced none of those disastrous effects which had been anticipated from it. On the relative value of Canning's statesmanship as compared with that of his predecessors, the mind of England and of Europe has long been made up. He stands among those who have given to this country its claim to the respect of mankind. His monument, as well as his justification, is the existence of national freedom in the East; and when half a century later a British Government reverted to the principle of non-intervention, as it had been understood by Castlereagh, and declined to enter into any effective co-operation with Russia for the emancipation of Bulgaria, even then, when the precedent of Canning's action in 1827 stood in direct and glaring contradiction to the policy of the hour, no effective attempt was made by the leaders of the party to which Canning had belonged to impugn his authority, or to explain away his example. It might indeed be alleged that Canning had not explicitly resolved on the application of force; but those who could maintain that Canning would, like Wellington, have used the language of apology and regret when Turkish obstinacy had made it impossible to effect the object of his intervention by any other means, had indeed read the history of Canning's career in vain.  [375]

[Intervention of the Admirals, Sept., 1827.]

The death of Canning, which brought his rival, the Duke of Wellington, after a short interval to the head of affairs, caused at the moment no avowed change in the execution of his plans. In accordance with the provisions of the Treaty of London the mediation of the allied Powers was at once tendered to the belligerents, and an armistice demanded. The armistice was accepted by the Greeks; it was contemptuously refused by the Turks. In consequence of this refusal the state of war continued, as it would have been absurd to ask the Greeks to sit still and be massacred because the enemy declined to lay down his arms. The Turk being the party resisting the mediation agreed upon, it became necessary to deprive him of the power of continuing hostilities. Heavy reinforcements had just arrived from Egypt, and an expedition was on the point of sailing from Navarino, the gathering place of Ibrahim's forces, against Hydra, the capture of which would have definitely made an end of the Greek insurrection. Admiral Codrington, the commander of the British fleet, and the French Admiral De Rigny, were now off the coast of Greece. They addressed themselves to Ibrahim, and required from him a promise that he would make no movement until further orders should arrive from Constantinople. Ibrahim made this promise verbally on the 25th of September. A few days later, however, Ibrahim learnt that while he himself was compelled to be inactive, the Greeks, continuing hostilities as they were entitled to do, had won a brilliant naval victory under Captain Hastings within the Gulf of Corinth. Unable to control his anger, he sailed out from the harbour of Navarino, and made for Patras. Codrington, who had stationed his fleet at Zante, heard of the movement, and at once threw himself across the track of the Egyptian, whom he compelled to turn back by an energetic threat to sink his fleet. Had the French and Russian contingents been at hand, Codrington would have taken advantage of Ibrahim's sortie to cut him off from all Greek harbours, and to force him to return direct to Alexandria, thus peaceably accomplishing the object of the intervention. This, however, to the misfortune of Ibrahim's seamen, the English admiral could not do alone. Ibrahim re-entered Navarino, and there found the orders of the Sultan for which it had been agreed that he should wait. These orders were dictated by true Turkish infatuation. They bade Ibrahim continue the subjugation of the Morea with the utmost vigour, and promised him the assistance of Reschid Pasha, his rival in the siege of Missolonghi. Ibrahim, perfectly reckless of the consequences, now sent out his devastating columns again. No life, and nothing that could support life, was spared. Not only were the crops ravaged, but the fruit-trees, which are the permanent support of the country, were cut down at the roots. Clouds of fire and smoke from burning villages showed the English officers who approached the coast in what spirit the Turk met their proposals for a pacification. "It is supposed that if Ibrahim remained in Greece," wrote Captain Hamilton, "more than a third of its inhabitants would die of absolute starvation."

[Battle of Navarino, Oct. 20th, 1827.]

It became necessary to act quickly, the more so as the season was far advanced, and a winter blockade of Ibrahim's fleet was impossible. A message was sent to the Egyptian head-quarters, requiring that hostilities should cease, that the Morea should be evacuated, and the Turko-Egyptian fleet return to Constantinople and Alexandria. In answer to this message there came back a statement that Ibrahim had left Navarino for the interior of the country, and that it was not known where to find him. Nothing now remained for the admirals but to make their presence felt. On the 18th of October it was resolved that the English, French, and Russian fleets, which were now united, should enter the harbour of Navarino in battle order. The movement was called a demonstration, and in so far as the admirals had not actually determined upon making an attack, it was not directly a hostile measure; but every gun was ready to open fire, and it was well understood that any act of resistance on the part of the opposite fleet would result in hostilities. Codrington, as senior officer, took command of the allied squadron, and the instructions which he gave to his colleagues for the event of a general engagement concluded with Nelson's words, that no captain could do very wrong who placed his ship alongside that of an enemy.

Thus, ready to strike hard, the English admiral sailed into the harbour of Navarino at noon on October 20, followed by the French and the Russians. The allied fleet advanced to within pistol-shot of the Ottoman ships and there anchored. A little to the windward of the position assigned to the English corvette Dartmouth there lay a Turkish fire-ship. A request was made that this dangerous vessel might be removed to a safer distance; it was refused, and a boat's crew was then sent to cut its cable. The boat was received with musketry fire. This was answered by the Dartmouth and by a French ship, and the battle soon became general. Codrington, still desirous to avoid bloodshed, sent his pilot to Moharem Bey, who commanded in Ibrahim's absence, proposing to withhold fire on both sides. Moharem replied with cannon-shot, killing the pilot and striking Codrington's own vessel. This exhausted the patience of the English admiral, who forthwith made his adversary a mere wreck. The entire fleets on both sides were now engaged. The Turks had a superiority of eight hundred guns, and fought with courage. For four hours the battle raged at close quarters in the land-locked harbour, while twenty thousand of Ibrahim's soldiers watched from the surrounding hills the struggle in which they could take no part. But the result of the combat was never for a moment doubtful. The confusion and bad discipline of the Turkish fleet made it an easy prey. Vessel after vessel was sunk or blown to pieces, and before evening fell the work of the allies was done. When Ibrahim returned from his journey on the following day he found the harbour of Navarino strewed with wrecks and dead bodies. Four thousand of his seamen had fallen; the fleet which was to have accomplished the reduction of Hydra was utterly ruined.[376]

[Inaction of England after Navarino.]

Over all Greece it was at once felt that the nation was saved. The intervention of the Powers had been sudden and decisive beyond the most sanguine hopes; and though this intervention might be intended to establish something less than the complete independence of Greece, the violence of the first collision bade fair to carry the work far beyond the bounds originally assigned to it. The attitude of the Porte after the news of the battle of Navarino reached Constantinople was exactly that which its worst enemies might have desired. So far from abating anything in its resistance to the mediation of the three Powers, it declared the attack made upon its navy to be a crime and an outrage, and claimed satisfaction for it from the ambassadors of the Allied Powers. Arguments proved useless, and the united demand for an armistice with the Greeks having been finally and contemptuously refused, the ambassadors, in accordance with their instructions, quitted the Turkish capital (Dec. 8). Had Canning been still living, it is probable that the first blow of Navarino would have been immediately followed by the measures necessary to make the Sultan submit to the Treaty of London, and that the forces of Great Britain would have been applied with sufficient vigour to render any isolated action on the part of Russia both unnecessary and impossible. But at this critical moment a paralysis fell over the English Government. Canning's policy was so much his own, he had dragged his colleagues so forcibly with him in spite of themselves, that when his place was left empty no one had the courage either to fulfil or to reverse his intentions, and the men who succeeded him acted as if they were trespassers in the fortress which Canning had taken by storm. The very ground on which Wellington, no less than Canning, had justified the agreement made with Russia in 1826 was the necessity of preventing Russia from acting alone; and when Russian and Turkish ships had actually fought at Navarino, and war was all but formally declared, it became more imperative than ever that Great Britain should keep the most vigorous hold upon its rival, and by steady, consistent pressure let it be known to both Turks and Russians that the terms of the Treaty of London and no others must be enforced. To retire from action immediately after dealing the Sultan one dire, irrevocable blow, without following up this stroke or attaining the end agreed upon-to leave Russia to take up the armed compulsion where England had dropped it, and to win from its crippled adversary the gains of a private and isolated war-was surely the weakest of all possible policies that could have been adopted. Yet this was the policy followed by English Ministers during that interval of transition and incoherence that passed between Canning's death and the introduction of the Reform Bill.

[War between Russia and Turkey, April, 1828.]

By the Russian Government nothing was more ardently desired than a contest with Turkey, in which England and France, after they had destroyed the Turkish fleet, should be mere on-lookers, debarred by the folly of the Porte itself from prohibiting or controlling hostilities between it and its neighbour. There might indeed be some want of a pretext for war, since all the points of contention between Russia and Turkey other than those relating to Greece had been finally settled in Russia's favour by a Treaty signed at Akerman in October, 1826. But the spirit of infatuation had seized the Sultan, or a secret hope that the Western Powers would in the last resort throw over the Court of St. Petersburg led him to hurry on hostilities by a direct challenge to Russia. A proclamation which reads like the work of some frantic dervish, though said to have been composed by Mahmud himself, called the Mussulman world to arms. Russia was denounced as the instigator of the Greek rebellion, and the arch-enemy of Islam. The Treaty of Akerman was declared to have been extorted by compulsion and to have been signed only for the purpose of gaining time. "Russia has imparted its own madness to the other Powers and persuaded them to make an alliance to free the Rayah from his Ottoman master. But the Turk does not count his enemies. The law forbids the people of Islam to permit any injury to be done to their religion; and if all the unbelievers together unite against them, they will enter on the war as a sacred duty, and trust in God for protection." This proclamation was followed by a levy of troops and the expulsion of most of the Christian residents in Constantinople. Russia needed no other pretext. The fanatical outburst of the Sultan was treated by the Court of St. Petersburg as if it had been the deliberate expression of some civilised Power, and was answered on the 26th of April, 1828, by a declaration of war. In order to soften the effect of this step and to reap the full benefit of its subsisting relations with France and England, Russia gave a provisional undertaking to confine its operations as a belligerent to the mainland and the Black Sea, and within the Mediterranean to act still as one of the allied neutrals under the terms of the Treaty of London.

[Military condition of Turkey.]

The moment seized by Russia for the declaration of war was one singularly favourable to itself and unfortunate for its adversary. Not only had the Turkish fleet been destroyed by the neutrals, but the old Turkish force of the Janissaries had been destroyed by its own master, and the new-modelled regiments which were to replace it had not yet been organised. The Sultan had determined in 1826 to postpone his long-planned military reform no longer, and to stake everything on one bold stroke against the Janissaries. Troops enough were brought up from the other side of the Bosphorus to make Mahmud certain of victory. The Janissaries were summoned to contribute a proportion of their number to the regiments about to be formed on the European pattern; and when they proudly refused to do so and raised the standard of open rebellion they were cut to pieces and exterminated by Mahmud's Anatolian soldiers in the midst of Constantinople.  [377] The principal difficulty in the way of a reform of the Turkish army was thus removed and the work of reorganisation was earnestly taken in hand; but before there was time to complete it the enemy entered the field. Mahmud had to meet the attack of Russia with an army greatly diminished in number, and confused by the admixture of European and Turkish discipline. The resources of the empire were exhausted by the long struggle with Greece, and, above all, the destruction of the Janissaries had left behind it an exasperation which made the Sultan believe that rebellion might at any moment break out in his own capital. Nevertheless, in spite of its inherent weakness and of all the disadvantages under which it entered into war, Turkey succeeded in prolonging its resistance through two campaigns, and might, with better counsels, have tried the fortune of a third.

[Military condition of Russia.]

The actual military resources of Russia were in 1828 much below what they were believed to be by all Europe. The destruction of Napoleon's army in 1812 and the subsequent exploits of Alexander in the campaigns which ended in the capture of Paris had left behind them an impression of Russian energy and power which was far from corresponding with the reality, and which, though disturbed by the events of 1828, had by no means vanished at the time of the Crimean War. The courage and patience of the Russian soldier were certainly not over-rated; but the progress supposed to have been made in Russian military organisation since the campaign of 1799, when it was regarded in England and Austria as little above that of savages, was for the most part imaginary. The proofs of a radically bad system-scanty numbers, failing supplies, immense sickness-were never more conspicuous than in 1828. Though Russia had been preparing for war for at least seven years, scarcely seventy thousand soldiers could be collected on the Pruth. The general was Wittgenstein, one of the heroes of 1812, but now a veteran past effective work. Nicholas came to the camp to make things worse by headstrong interference. The best Russian officer, Paskiewitsch, was put in command of the forces about to operate in Asia Minor, and there, thrown on his own resources and free to create a system of his own, he achieved results in strong contrast to the failure of the Russian arms on the Danube.

[Campaign of 1828.]

In entering on the campaign of 1828, it was necessary for the Czar to avoid giving any unnecessary causes of anxiety to Austria, which had already made unsuccessful attempts to form a coalition against him. The line of operations was therefore removed as far as possible from the Austrian frontier; and after the Roumanian principalities had been peacefully occupied, the Danube was crossed at a short distance above the point where its mouths divide (June 7). The Turks had no intention of meeting the enemy in a pitched battle; they confined themselves to the defence of fortresses, the form of warfare to which, since the decline of the military art in Turkey, the patience and abstemiousness of the race best fit them. Ibraila and Silistria on the Danube, Varna and Shumla in the neighbourhood of the Balkans, were their principal strongholds; of these Ibraila was at once besieged by a considerable force, while Silistria was watched by a weak contingent, and the vanguard of the Russian army pushed on through the Dobrudscha towards the Black Sea, where, with the capture of the minor coast-towns, it expected to enter into communication with the fleet. The first few weeks of the campaign were marked by considerable successes. Ibraila capitulated on the 18th of June, and the military posts in the Dobrudscha fell one after another into the hands of the invaders, who met with no effective resistance in this district. But their serious work was only now beginning. The Russian army, in spite of its weakness, was divided into three parts, occupied severally in front of Silistria, Shumla, and Varna. At Shumla the mass of the Turkish army, under Omer Brionis, was concentrated. The force brought against it by the invader was inadequate to its task, and the attempts which were made to lure the Turkish army from its entrenched camp into the open field proved unsuccessful. The difficulties of the siege proved so great that Wittgenstein after a while proposed to abandon offensive operations at this point, and to leave a mere corps of observation before the enemy until Varna should have fallen. This, however, was forbidden by the Czar. As the Russians wasted away before Shumla with sickness and fatigue, the Turks gained strength, and on the 24th of September Omer broke out from his entrenchments and moved eastwards to the relief of Varna. Nicholas again over-ruled his generals, and ordered his cousin, Prince Eugene of Würtemberg, to attack the advancing Ottomans with the troops then actually at his disposal. Eugene did so, and suffered a severe defeat. A vigorous movement of the Turks would probably have made an end of the campaign, but Omer held back at the critical moment, and on the 10th of October Varna surrendered. This, however, was the only conquest made by the Russians. The season was too far advanced for them either to cross the Balkans or to push forward operations against the uncaptured fortresses. Shumla and Silistria remained in the hands of their defenders, and the Russians, after suffering enormous losses in proportion to the smallness of their numbers, withdrew to Varna and the Danube, to resume the campaign in the spring of the following year.  [378]

[Campaign of 1829.]

The spirits of the Turks and of their European friends were raised by the unexpected failure of the Czar's arms. Metternich resumed his efforts to form a coalition, and tempted French Ministers with the prospect of recovering the Rhenish provinces, but in vain. The Sultan began negotiations, but broke them off when he found that the events of the campaign had made no difference in the enemy's tone. The prestige of Russia was in fact at stake, and Nicholas would probably have faced a war with Austria and Turkey combined rather than have made peace without restoring the much-diminished reputation of his troops. The winter was therefore spent in bringing up distant reserves. Wittgenstein was removed from his command; the Czar withdrew from military operations in which he had done nothing but mischief; and Diebitsch, a Prussian by birth and training, was placed at the head of the army, untrammelled by the sovereign presence or counsels which had hampered his predecessor. The intention of the new commander was to cross the Balkans as soon as Silistria should have fallen, without waiting for the capture of Shumla. In pursuance of this design the fleet was despatched early in the spring of 1829 to seize a port beyond the mountain-range. Diebitsch then placed a corps in front of Silistria, and made his preparations for the southward march; but before any progress had been made in the siege the Turks themselves took the field. Reschid Pasha, now Grand Vizier, moved eastwards from Shumla at the beginning of May against the weak Russian contingent that still lay in winter quarters between that place and Varna. The superiority of his force promised him an easy victory; but after winning some unimportant successes, and advancing to a considerable distance from his stronghold, he allowed himself to be held at bay until Diebitsch, with the army of the Danube, was ready to fall upon his rear. The errors of the Turks had given to the Russian commander, who hastened across Bulgaria on hearing of his colleague's peril, the choice of destroying their army, or of seizing Shumla by a coup-de-main. Diebitsch determined upon attacking his enemy in the open field, and on the 10th of June Reschid's army, attempting to regain the roads to Shumla, was put to total rout at Kulewtscha. A fortnight later Silistria surrendered, and Diebitsch, reinforced by the troops that had besieged that fortress, was now able to commence his march across the Balkans.

[Crossing of the Balkans, July, 1829.]

Rumour magnified into hundreds of thousands the scanty columns which for the first time carried the Russian flag over the Balkan range. Resistance everywhere collapsed. The mountains were crossed without difficulty, and on the 19th of August the invaders appeared before Adrianople, which immediately surrendered. Putting on the boldest countenance in order to conceal his real weakness, Diebitsch now struck out right and left, and sent detachments both to the Euxine and the Ægæan coast. The fleet co-operated with him, and the ports of the Black Sea, almost as far south as the Bosphorus, fell into the invaders' hands. The centre of the army began to march upon Constantinople. If the Sultan had known the real numbers of the force which threatened his capital, a force not exceeding twenty thousand men, he would probably have recognised that his assailant's position was a more dangerous one than his own. Diebitsch had advanced into the heart of the enemy's country with a mere handful of men. Sickness was daily thinning his ranks; his troops were dispersed over a wide area from sea to sea; and the warlike tribes of Albania threatened to fall upon his communications from the west. For a moment the Sultan spoke of fighting upon the walls of Constantinople; but the fear of rebellion within his own capital, the discovery of conspiracies, and the disasters sustained by his arms in Asia, where Kars and Erzeroum had fallen into the enemy's hands, soon led him to make overtures of peace and to accept the moderate terms which the Russian Government, aware of its own difficulties, was willing to grant. It would have been folly for the Czar to stimulate the growing suspicion of England and to court the attack of Austria by prolonging hostilities; and although King Charles X. and the French Cabinet, reverting to the ideas of Tilsit, proposed a partition of the Ottoman Empire, and a general re-arrangement of the map of Europe which would have given Belgium and the Palatinate to France, the plan was originated too late to produce any effect.  [379] Russia had everything to lose and nothing to gain by a European war. It had reduced Turkey to submission, and might fairly hope to maintain its ascendency at Constantinople during coming years without making any of those great territorial changes which would have given its rivals a pretext for intervening on the Sultan's behalf. Under the guise of a generous forbearance the Czar extricated himself from a dangerous position with credit and advantage. As much had been won as could be maintained without hazard; and on the 14th of September peace was concluded in Adrianople.

[Treaty of Adrianople, Sept. 14, 1829.]

The Treaty of Adrianople gave Russia a slight increase of territory in Asia, incorporating with the Czar's dominions the ports of Anapa and Poti on the eastern coast of the Black Sea; but its most important provisions were those which confirmed and extended the Protectorate exercised by the Czar over the Danubian Principalities, and guaranteed the commercial rights of Russian subjects throughout the Ottoman Empire both by land and sea. In order more effectively to exclude the Sultan's influence from Wallachia and Moldavia, the office of Hospodar, hitherto tenable for seven years, was now made an appointment for life, and the Sultan specifically engaged to permit no interference on the part of his neighbouring Pashas with the affairs of these provinces. No fortified point was to be retained by the Turks on the left bank of the Danube; no Mussulman was to be permitted to reside within the Principalities; and those possessing landed estates there were to sell them within eighteen months. The Porte pledged itself never again to detain Russian ships of commerce coming from the Black Sea, and acknowledged that such an act would amount to an infraction of treaties justifying Russia in having recourse to reprisals. The Straits of Constantinople and the Dardanelles were declared free and open to the merchant ships of all Powers at peace with the Porte, upon the same conditions which were stipulated for vessels under the Russian flag. The same freedom of trade and navigation was recognised within the Black Sea. All treaties and conventions hitherto concluded between Turkey and Russia were recognised as in force, except in so far as modified by the present agreement. The Porte further gave its adhesion to the Treaty of London relating to Greece, and to an Act entered into by the Allied Powers in March, 1829, for regulating the Greek frontier. An indemnity in money was declared to be owing to Russia; and as the amount of this remained to be fixed by mutual agreement, the means were still left open to the Russian Government for exercising a gentle pressure at Constantinople, or for rewarding the compliance of the conquered.  [380]

[Capodistrias elected President of Greece, April, 1827.]

The war between Turkey and Russia, while it left the European frontier between the belligerents unchanged, exercised a two-fold influence upon the settlement of Greece. On the one hand, by exciting the fears and suspicions of Great Britain, it caused the Government of our own country, under the Duke of Wellington, to insist on the limitation of the Greek State to the narrowest possible area;  [381] on the other hand, by reducing Turkey itself almost to the condition of a Russian dependency, it led to the abandonment of the desire to maintain the Sultan's supremacy in any form over the emancipated provinces, and resulted in the establishment of an absolutely independent Hellenic kingdom. An important change had taken place within Greece itself just at the time when the allied Powers determined upon intervention. The parts of the local leaders were played out, and in April, 1827, Capodistrias, ex-Minister of Russia, was elected President for seven years. Capodistrias accepted the call. He was then, as he had been throughout the insurrection, at a distance from Greece; and before making his way thither, he visited the principal Courts of Europe, with the view of ascertaining what moral or financial support he should be likely to receive from them. His interview with the Czar Nicholas led to a clear statement by that sovereign of the conditions which he expected Capodistrias, in return for Russia's continued friendship, to fulfil. Greece was to be rescued from revolution: in other words, personal was to be substituted for popular government. The State was to remain tributary to the Sultan: that is, in both Greece and Turkey the door was to be kept open for Russia's interference. Whether Capodistrias had any intention of fulfilling the latter condition is doubtful. His love for Greece and his own personal ambition prevented his regard for Russia, strong though this might be, from making him the mere instrument of the Court of St. Petersburg; and while outwardly acquiescing in the Czar's decision that Greece should remain a tributary State, he probably resolved from the first to aim at establishing its complete independence. With regard to the Czar's demand that the system of local self-government should be superseded within Greece itself by one of autocratic rule, Capodistrias was in harmony with his patron. He had been the Minister of a centralised despotism himself. His experience was wholly that of the official of an absolute sovereign; and although Capodistrias had represented the more liberal tendencies of the Russian Court when it was a question of arguing against Metternich about the complete or the partial restoration of despotic rule in Italy, he had no real acquaintance and no real sympathy with the action of free institutions, and moved in the same circle of ideas as the autocratic reformers of the eighteenth century, of whom Joseph II. was the type.  [382]

[The Protocols of Nov., 1828, and March, 1829.]

The Turks were still masters of the Morea when Capodistrias reached Greece. The battle of Navarino had not caused Ibrahim to relax his hold upon the fortresses, and it was deemed necessary by the Allies to send a French army-corps to dislodge him from his position. This expeditionary force, under General Maison, landed in Greece in the summer of 1828, and Ibrahim, not wishing to fight to the bitter end, contented himself with burning Tripolitza to the ground and sowing it with salt, and then withdrew. The war between Turkey and Russia had now begun. Capodistrias assisted the Russian fleet in blockading the Dardanelles, and thereby gained for himself the marked ill-will of the British Government. At a conference held in London by the representatives of France, England, and Russia, in November, 1828, it was resolved that the operations of the Allies should be limited to the Morea and the islands. Capodistrias, in consequence of this decision, took the most vigorous measures for continuing the war against Turkey. What the allies refused to guarantee must be won by force of arms; and during the winter of 1829, while Russia pressed upon Turkey from the Danube, Capodistrias succeeded in reconquering Missolonghi and the whole tract of country immediately to the north of the Gulf of Corinth. The Porte, in prolonging its resistance after the November conference, played as usual into its enemy's hands. The negotiations at London were resumed in a spirit somewhat more favourable to Greece, and a Protocol was signed on the 22nd of March, 1829, extending the northern frontier of Greece up to a line drawn from the Gulf of Arta to the Gulf of Volo. Greece, according to this Protocol, was still to remain under the Sultan's suzerainty: its ruler was to be a hereditary prince belonging to one of the reigning European families, but not to any of the three allied Courts.  [383]

[Leopold accepts the Greek Crown, Feb., 1830.]

The mediation of Great Britain was now offered to the Porte upon the terms thus laid down, and for the fourteenth time its mediation was rejected. But the end was near at hand. Diebitsch crossed the Balkans, and it was in vain that the Sultan then proposed the terms which he had scouted in November. The Treaty of Adrianople enforced the decisions of the March Protocol. Greece escaped from a limitation of its frontier, which would have left both Athens and Missolonghi Turkish territory. The principle of the admission of the provinces north of the Gulf of Corinth within the Hellenic State was established, and nothing remained for the friends of the Porte but to cut down to the narrowest possible area the district which had been loosely indicated in the London Protocol. While Russia, satisfied with its own successes against the Ottoman Empire and anxious to play the part of patron of the conquered, ceased to interest itself in Greece, the Government of Great Britain contested every inch of territory proposed to be ceded to the new State, and finally induced the Powers to agree upon a boundary-line which did not even in letter fulfil the conditions of the treaty. Northern Acarnania and part of Ætolia were severed from Greece, and the frontier was drawn from the mouth of the river Achelous to a spot near Thermopylae. On the other hand, as Russian influence now appeared to be firmly established and likely to remain paramount at Constantinople, the Western Powers had no motive to maintain the Sultan's supremacy over Greece. This was accordingly by common consent abandoned; and the Hellenic Kingdom, confined within miserably narrow limits on the mainland, and including neither Crete nor Samos among its islands, was ultimately offered in full sovereignty to Prince Leopold of Saxe-Coburg, the widower of Charlotte, daughter of George IV. After some negotiations, in which Leopold vainly asked for a better frontier, he accepted the Greek crown on the 11th of February, 1830.

[Government of Capodistrias.]

In the meantime, Capodistrias was struggling hard to govern and to organise according to his own conceptions a land in which every element of anarchy, ruin, and confusion appeared to be arrayed against the restoration of civilised life. The country was devastated, depopulated, and in some places utterly barbarised. Out of a population of little more than a million, it was reckoned that three hundred thousand had perished during the conflict with the Turk. The whole fabric of political and social order had to be erected anew; and, difficult as this task would have been for the wisest ruler, it was rendered much more difficult by the conflict between Capodistrias' own ideal and the character of the people among whom he had to work. Communal or local self-government lay at the very root of Greek nationality. In many different forms this intense provincialism had maintained itself unimpaired up to the end of the war, in spite of national assemblies and national armaments. The Hydriote ship-owners, the Primates of the Morea, the guerilla leaders of the north, had each a type of life and a body of institutions as distinct as the dialects which they spoke or the saints whom they cherished in their local sanctuaries. If antagonistic in some respects to national unity, this vigorous local life had nevertheless been a source of national energy while Greece had still its independence to win; and now that national independence was won, it might well have been made the basis of a popular and effective system of self-government. But to Capodistrias, as to greater men of that age, the unity of the State meant the uniformity of all its parts; and, shutting his eyes to all the obstacles in his path, he set himself to create an administrative system as rigorously centralised as that which France had received from Napoleon. Conscious of his own intellectual superiority over his countrymen, conscious of his own integrity and of the sacrifice of all his personal wealth in his country's service, he put no measure on his expressions of scorn for the freebooters and peculators whom he believed to make up the Greek official world, and he both acted and spoke as if, in the literal sense of the words, all who ever came before him were thieves and robbers. The peasants of the mainland, who had suffered scarcely less from Klephts and Primates than from Turks, welcomed Capodistrias' levelling despotism, and to the end his name was popular among them; but among the classes which had supplied the leaders in the long struggle for independence, and especially among the ship-owners of the Archipelago, who felt the contempt expressed by Capodistrias for their seven years' efforts to be grossly unjust, a spirit of opposition arose which soon made it evident that Capodistrias would need better instruments than those which he had around him to carry out his task of remodelling Greece.

[Leopold renounces the crown, May, 1830.]

It was in the midst of this growing antagonism that the news reached Capodistrias that Leopold of Saxe-Coburg had been appointed King of Greece. The resolution made by the Powers in March, 1829, that the sovereign of Greece should belong to some reigning house, had perhaps not wholly destroyed the hopes of Capodistrias that he might become Prince or Hospodar of Greece himself. There were difficulties in the way of filling the throne, and these difficulties, after the appointment of Leopold, Capodistrias certainly did not seek to lessen. His subtlety, his command of the indirect methods of effecting a purpose, were so great and so habitual to him that there was little chance of his taking any overt step for preventing Leopold's accession to the crown; there appears, however, to be evidence that he repressed the indications of assent which the Greeks attempted to offer to Leopold; and a series of letters written by him to that prince was probably intended, though in the most guarded language, to give Leopold the impression that the task which awaited him was a hopeless one. Leopold himself, at the very time when he accepted the crown, was wavering in his purpose. He saw with perfect clearness that the territory granted to the Greek State was too small to secure either its peace or its independence. The severance of Acarnania and Northern Ætolia meant the abandonment of the most energetic part of the Greek inland population, and a probable state of incessant warfare upon the northern frontier; the relinquishment of Crete meant that Greece, bankrupt as it was, must maintain a navy to protect the south coast of the Morea from Turkish attack. These considerations had been urged upon the Powers by Leopold before he accepted the crown, and he had been induced for the moment to withdraw them. But he had never fully acquiesced in the arrangements imposed upon him: he remained irresolute for some months; and at last, whether led to this decision by the letters of Capodistrias or by some other influences, he declared the conditions under which he was called upon to rule Greece to be intolerable, and renounced the crown (May, 1830).  [384]

[Government and death of Capodistrias.]

Capodistrias thus found himself delivered from his rival, and again face to face with the task to which duty or ambition called him. The candidature of Leopold had embittered the relations between Capodistrias and all who confronted him in Greece, for it gave him the means of measuring their hostility to himself by the fervour of their addresses to this unknown foreigner. A dark shadow fell over his government. As difficulties thickened and resistance grew everywhere more determined, the President showed himself harsher and less scrupulous in the choice of his means. The men about him were untrustworthy; to crush them, he filled the offices of government with relatives and creatures of his own who were at once tyrannous and incapable. Thwarted and checked, he met opposition by imprisonment and measures of violence, suspended the law-courts, and introduced the espionage and the police-system of St. Petersburg. At length armed rebellion broke out, and while Miaoulis, the Hydriote admiral, blew up the best ships of the Greek navy to prevent them falling into the President's hands, the wild district of Maina, which had never admitted the Turkish tax-gatherer, refused to pay taxes to the Hellenic State. The revolt was summarily quelled by Capodistrias, and several members of the family of Mauromichalis, including the chief Petrobei, formerly feudal ruler of Maina, were arrested. Some personal insult, imaginary or real, was moreover offered by Capodistrias to this fallen foe, after the aged mother of Petrobei, who had lost sixty-four kinsmen in the war against the Turks, had begged for his release. The vendetta of the Maina was aroused. A son and a nephew of Petrobei laid wait for the President, and as he entered the Church of St. Spiridion at Nauplia on the 9th of October, 1831, a pistol-shot and a blow from a yataghan laid him dead on the ground. He had been warned that his life was sought, but had refused to make any change in his habits, or to allow himself to be attended by a guard.

[Otho King of Greece, Feb. 1, 1833.]

The death of Capodistrias excited sympathies and regrets which to a great extent silenced criticism upon his government, and which have made his name one of those most honoured by the Greek nation. His fall threw the country into anarchy. An attempt was made by his brother Augustine to retain autocratic power, but the result was universal dissension and the interference of the foreigner. At length the Powers united in finding a second sovereign for Greece, and brought the weary scene of disorder to a close. Prince Otho of Bavaria was sent to reign at Athens, and with him there came a group of Bavarian officials to whom the Courts of Europe persuaded themselves that the future of Greece might be safely entrusted. A frontier somewhat better than that which had been offered to Leopold was granted to the new sovereign, but neither Crete, Thessaly, nor Epirus was included within his kingdom. Thus hemmed in within intolerably narrow limits, while burdened with the expenses of an independent state, alike unable to meet the calls upon its national exchequer and to exclude the intrigues of foreign Courts, Greece offered during the next generation little that justified the hopes that had been raised as to its future. But the belief of mankind in the invigorating power of national independence is not wholly vain, nor, even under the most hostile conditions, will the efforts of a liberated people fail to attract the hope and the envy of those branches of its race which still remain in subjection. Poor and inglorious as the Greek kingdom was, it excited the restless longings not only of Greeks under Turkish bondage, but of the prosperous Ionian Islands under English rule; and in 1864 the first step in the expansion of the Hellenic kingdom was accomplished by the transfer of these islands from Great Britain to Greece. Our own day has seen Greece further strengthened and enriched by the annexation of Thessaly. The commercial and educational development of the kingdom is now as vigorous as that of any State in Europe: in agriculture and in manufacturing industry it still lingers far behind. Following the example of Cavour and the Sardinian statesmen who judged no cost too great in preparing for Italian union, the rulers of Greece burden the national finances with the support of an army and navy excessive in comparison both with the resources and with the present requirements of the State. To the ideal of a great political future the material progress of the land has been largely sacrificed. Whether, in the re-adjustment of frontiers which must follow upon the gradual extrusion of the Turk from Eastern Europe, Greece will gain from its expenditure advantages proportionate to the undoubted evils which it has involved, the future alone can decide.

CHAPTER XVI.

France before 1830-Reign of Charles X.-Ministry of Martignac-Ministry of Polignac-The Duke of Orleans-War in Algiers-The July Ordinances- Revolution of July-Louis Philippe King-Nature and Effects of the July Revolution-Affairs in Belgium-The Belgian Revolution-The Great Powers-Intervention, and Establishment of the Kingdom of Belgium-Affairs of Poland-Insurrection at Warsaw-War between Russia and Poland-Overthrow of the Poles: End of the Polish Constitution-Affairs of Italy- Insurrection in the Papal States-France and Austria-Austrian Intervention-Ancona occupied by the French-Affairs of Germany-Prussia; the Zollverein-Brunswick, Hanover, Saxony-The Palatinate-Reaction in Germany-Exiles in Switzerland; Incursion into Savoy-Dispersion of the Exiles-France under Louis Philippe: Successive Risings-Period of Parliamentary Activity-England after 1830: The Reform Bill.

When the Congress of Vienna re-arranged the map of Europe after Napoleon's fall, Lord Castlereagh expressed the opinion that no prudent statesman would forecast a duration of more than seven years for any settlement that might then be made. At the end of a period twice as long the Treaties of 1815 were still the public law of Europe. The grave had peacefully closed over Napoleon; the revolutionary forces of France had given no sign of returning life. As the Bourbon monarchy struck root, and the elements of opposition grew daily weaker in France, the perils that lately filled all minds appeared to grow obsolete, and the very Power against which the anti-revolutionary treaties of 1815 had been directed took its place, as of natural right, by the side of Austria and Russia in the struggle against revolution. The attack of Louis XVIII. upon the Spanish Constitutionalists marked the complete reconciliation of France with the Continental dynasties which had combined against it in 1815; and from this time the Treaties of Chaumont and Aix-la-Chapelle, though their provisions might be still unchallenged, ceased to represent the actual relations existing between the Powers. There was no longer a moral union of the Courts against a supposed French revolutionary State; on the contrary, when Eastern affairs reached their crisis, Russia detached itself from its Hapsburg ally, and definitely allied itself with France. If after the Peace of Adrianople any one Power stood isolated, it was Austria; and if Europe was threatened by renewed aggression, it was not under revolutionary leaders or with revolutionary watchwords, but as the result of an alliance between Charles X. and the Czar of Russia. After the Bourbon Cabinet had resolved to seek an extension of French territory at whatever sacrifice of the balance of power in the East, Europe could hardly expect that the Court of St. Petersburg would long reject the advantages offered to it. The frontiers of 1815 seemed likely to be obliterated by an enterprise which would bring Russia to the Danube and France to the Rhine. From this danger the settlement of 1815 was saved by the course of events that took place within France itself. The Revolution of 1830, insignificant in its immediate effects upon the French people, largely influenced the governments and the nations of Europe; and while within certain narrow limits it gave a stimulus to constitutional liberty, its more general result was to revive the union of the three Eastern Courts which had broken down in 1826, and to reunite the principal members of the Holy Alliance by the sense of a common interest against the Liberalism of the West.

[Government of Charles X., 1824-1827.]

In the person of Charles X. reaction and clericalism had ascended the French throne. The minister, Villèle, who had won power in 1820 as the representative of the Ultra-Royalists, had indeed learnt wisdom while in office, and down to the death of Louis XVIII. in 1824 he had kept in check the more violent section of his party. But he now retained his post only at the price of compliance with the Court, and gave the authority of his name to measures which his own judgment condemned. It was characteristic of Charles X. and of the reactionaries around him that out of trifling matters they provoked more exasperation than a prudent Government would have aroused by changes of infinitely greater importance. Thus in a sacrilege-law which was introduced in 1825 they disgusted all reasonable men by attempting to revive the barbarous mediæval punishment of amputation of the hand; and in a measure conferring some fractional rights upon the eldest son in cases of intestacy they alarmed the whole nation by a preamble declaring the French principle of the equal division of inheritances to be incompatible with monarchy. Coming from a Government which had thus already forfeited public confidence, a law granting the emigrants a compensation of £40,000,000 for their estates which had been confiscated during the Revolution excited the strongest opposition, although, apart from questions of equity, it benefited the nation by for ever setting at rest all doubt as to the title of the purchasers of the confiscated lands. The financial operations by which, in order to provide the vast sum allotted to the emigrants, the national debt was converted from a five per cent, to a three per cent, stock, alienated all stockholders and especially the powerful bankers of Paris. But more than any single legislative act, the alliance of the Government with the priestly order, and the encouragement given by it to monastic corporations, whose existence in France was contrary to law, offended the nation. The Jesuits were indicted before the law-courts by Montlosier, himself a Royalist and a member of the old noblesse. A vehement controversy sprang up between the ecclesiastics and their opponents, in which the Court was not spared. The Government, which had lately repealed the law of censorship, now restored it by edict. The climax of its unpopularity was reached; its hold upon the Chamber was gone, and the very measure by which Villèle, when at the height of his power, had endeavoured to give permanence to his administration, proved its ruin. He had abolished the system of partial renovation, by which one-fifth of the Chamber of Deputies was annually returned, and substituted for it the English system of septennial Parliaments with general elections. In 1827 King Charles, believing his Ministers to be stronger in the country than in the Chamber, exercised his prerogative of dissolution. The result was the total defeat of the Government, and the return of an assembly in which the Liberal opposition outnumbered the partisans of the Court by three to one. Villèle's Ministry now resigned. King Charles, unwilling to choose his successor from the Parliamentary majority, thought for a moment of violent resistance, but subsequently adopted other counsels, and, without sincerely intending to bow to the national will, called to office the Vicomte de Martignac, a member of the right centre, and the representative of a policy of conciliation and moderate reform (January 2, 1828).

[Ministry of Martignac, 1828-29.]

[Polignac Minister, Aug. 9, 1829.]

It was not the fault of this Minister that the last chance of union between the French nation and the elder Bourbon line was thrown away. Martignac brought forward a measure of decentralisation conferring upon the local authorities powers which, though limited, were larger than they had possessed at any time since the foundation of the Consulate; and he appealed to the Liberal sections of the Chamber to assist him in winning an instalment of self-government which France might well have accepted with satisfaction. But the spirit of opposition within the Assembly was too strong for a coalition of moderate men, and the Liberals made the success of Martignac's plan impossible by insisting on concessions which the Minister was unable to grant. The reactionists were ready to combine with their opponents. King Charles himself was in secret antagonism to his Minister, and watched with malicious joy his failure to control the majority in the Chamber. Instead of throwing all his influence on to the side of Martignac, and rallying all doubtful forces by the pronounced support of the Crown, he welcomed Martignac's defeat as a proof of the uselessness of all concessions, and dismissed the Minister from office, declaring that the course of events had fulfilled his own belief in the impossibility of governing in accord with a Parliament. The names of the Ministers who were now called to power excited anxiety and alarm not only in France but throughout the political circles of Europe. They were the names of men known as the most violent and embittered partisans of reaction; men whose presence in the councils of the King could mean nothing but a direct attack upon the existing Parliamentary system of France. At the head was Jules Polignac, then French ambassador at London, a man half-crazed with religious delusions, who had suffered a long imprisonment for his share in Cadoudal's attempt to kill Napoleon, and on his return to France in 1814 had refused to swear to the Charta because it granted religious freedom to non-Catholics. Among the subordinate members of the Ministry were General Bourmont, who had deserted to the English at Waterloo, and La Bourdonnaye, the champion of the reactionary Terrorists in 1816.  [385]

[Prospects in 1830. The Orleanists.]

The Ministry having been appointed immediately after the close of the session of 1829, an interval of several months passed before they were brought face to face with the Chambers. During this interval the prospect of a conflict with the Crown became familiar to the public mind, though no general impression existed that an actual change of dynasty was close at hand. The Bonapartists were without a leader, Napoleon's son, their natural head, being in the power of the Austrian Court; the Republicans were neither numerous nor well organised, and the fatal memories of 1793 still weighed upon the nation; the great body of those who contemplated resistance to King Charles X. looked only to a Parliamentary struggle, or, in the last resort, to the refusal of payment of taxes in case of a breach of the Constitution. There was, however, a small and dexterous group of politicians which, at a distance from all the old parties, schemed for the dethronement of the reigning branch of the House of Bourbon, and for the elevation of Louis Philippe, Duke of Orleans, to the throne. The chief of this intrigue was Talleyrand. Slighted and thwarted by the Court, the old diplomatist watched for the signs of a falling Government, and when the familiar omens met his view he turned to the quarter from which its successor was most likely to arise. Louis Philippe stood high in credit with all circles of Parliamentary Liberals. His history had been a strange and eventful one. He was the son of that Orleans who, after calling himself Égalité, and voting for the death of his cousin, Louis XVI., had himself perished during the Reign of Terror. Young Louis Philippe had been a member of the Jacobin Club, and had fought for the Republic at Jemappes. Then, exiled and reduced to penury, he had earned his bread by teaching mathematics in Switzerland, and had been a wanderer in the new as well as in the old world. After awhile his fortunes brightened. A marriage with the daughter of Ferdinand of Sicily restored him to those relations with the reigning houses of Europe which had been forfeited by his father, and inspired him with the hope of gaining a crown. During Napoleon's invasion of Spain he had caballed with politicians in that country who were inclined to accept a substitute for their absent sovereign; at another time he had entertained hopes of being made king of the Ionian Islands. After the peace of Paris, when the allied sovereigns and their ministers visited England, Louis Philippe was sent over by his father-in-law to intrigue among them against Murat, and in pursuance of this object he made himself acquainted not only with every foreign statesman then in London but with every leading English politician. He afterwards settled in France, and was reinstated in the vast possessions of the House of Orleans, which, though confiscated, had not for the most part been sold during the Revolution. His position at Paris under Louis XVIII. and Charles X. was a peculiar one. Without taking any direct part in politics or entering into any avowed opposition to the Court, he made his home, the Palais Royale, a gathering-place for all that was most distinguished in the new political and literary society of the capital; and while the Tuileries affected the pomp and the ceremoniousness of the old regime, the Duke of Orleans moved with the familiarity of a citizen among citizens. He was a clever, ready, sensible man, equal, as it seemed, to any practical task likely to come in his way, but in reality void of any deep insight, of any far-reaching aspiration, of any profound conviction. His affectation of a straightforward middle-class geniality covered a decided tendency towards intrigue and a strong love of personal power. Later events indeed gave rise to the belief that, while professing the utmost loyalty to Charles X., Louis Philippe had been scheming to oust him from his throne; but the evidence really points the other way, and indicates that, whatever secret hopes may have suggested themselves to the Duke, his strongest sentiment during the Revolution of 1830 was the fear of being driven into exile himself, and of losing his possessions. He was not indeed of a chivalrous nature; but when the Crown came in his way, he was guilty of no worse offence than some shabby evasions of promises.

[Meeting and Prorogation of the Chambers, March, 1830.]

Early in March, 1830, the French Chambers assembled after their recess. The speech of King Charles at the opening of the session was resolute and even threatening. It was answered by an address from the Lower House, requesting him to dismiss his Ministers. The deputation which presented this address was received by the King in a style that left no doubt as to his intentions, and on the following day the Chambers were prorogued for six months. It was known that they would not be permitted to meet again, and preparations for a renewed general election were at once made with the utmost vigour by both parties throughout France. The Court unsparingly applied all the means of pressure familiar to French governments; it moreover expected to influence public opinion by some striking success in arms or in diplomacy abroad. The negotiations with Russia for the acquisition of Belgium were still before the Cabinet, and a quarrel with the Dey of Algiers gave Polignac the opportunity of beginning a war of conquest in Africa. General Bourmont left the War Office, to wipe out the infamy still attaching to his name by a campaign against the Arabs; and the Government trusted that, even in the event of defeat at the elections, the nation at large would at the most critical moment be rallied to its side by an announcement of the capture of Algiers.

[Polignac's project.]

While the dissolution of Parliament was impending, Polignac laid before the King a memorial expressing his own views on the courses open to Government in case of the elections proving adverse. The Charta contained a clause which, in loose and ill-chosen language, declared it to be the function of the King "to make the regulations and ordinances necessary for the execution of the laws and for the security of the State." These words, which no doubt referred to the exercise of the King's normal and constitutional powers, were interpreted by Polignac as authorising the King to suspend the Constitution itself, if the Representative Assembly should be at variance with the King's Ministers. Polignac in fact entertained the same view of the relation between executive and deliberative bodies as those Jacobin directors who made the coup-d'état of Fructidor, 1797; and the measures which he ultimately adopted were, though in a softened form, those adopted by Barras and Laréveillère after the Royalist elections in the sixth year of the Republic. To suspend the Constitution was not, he suggested, to violate the Charta, for the Charta empowered the sovereign to issue the ordinances necessary for the security of the State; and who but the sovereign and his advisers could be the judges of this necessity? This was simple enough; there was nevertheless among Polignac's colleagues some doubt both as to the wisdom and as to the legality of his plans. King Charles who, with all his bigotry, was anxious not to violate the letter of the Charta, brooded long over the clause which defined the sovereign's powers. At length he persuaded himself that his Minister's interpretation was the correct one, accepted the resignation of the dissentients within the Cabinet, and gave his sanction to the course which Polignac recommended.  [386]

[Elections of 1830.]

The result of the general election, which took place in June, surpassed all the hopes of the Opposition and all the fears of the Court. The entire body of Deputies which had voted the obnoxious address to the Crown in March was returned, and the partisans of Government lost in addition fifty seats. The Cabinet, which had not up to this time resolved upon the details of its action, now deliberated upon several projects submitted to it, and, after rejecting all plans that might have led to a compromise, determined to declare the elections null and void, to silence the press, and to supersede the existing electoral system by one that should secure the mastery of the Government both at the polling-booths and in the Chamber itself. All this was to be done by Royal Edict, and before the meeting of the new Parliament. The date fixed for the opening of the Chambers had been placed as late as possible in order to give time to General Bourmont to win the victory in Africa from which the Court expected to reap so rich a harvest of prestige. On the 9th of July news arrived that Algiers had fallen. The announcement, which was everywhere made with the utmost pomp, fell flat on the country. The conflict between the Court and the nation absorbed all minds, and the rapturous congratulations of Bishops and Prefects scarcely misled even the blind côterie of the Tuileries. Public opinion was no doubt with the Opposition; King Charles, however, had no belief that the populace of Paris, which alone was to be dreaded as a fighting body, would take up arms on behalf of the middle-class voters and journalists against whom his Ordinances were to be directed. The populace neither read nor voted: why should it concern itself with constitutional law? Or why, in a matter that related only to the King and the Bourgeoisie, should it not take part with the King against this new and bastard aristocracy which lived on others' labour? Politicians who could not fight were troublesome only when they were permitted to speak and to write. There was force enough at the King's command to close the gates of the Chamber of Deputies, and to break up the printing-presses of the journals; and if King Louis XVI. had at last fallen by the hands of men of violence, it was only because he had made concessions at first to orators and politicians. Therefore, without dreaming that an armed struggle would be the immediate result of their action, King Charles and Polignac determined to prevent the meeting of the Chamber, and to publish, a week before the date fixed for its opening, the Edicts which were to silence the brawl of faction and to vindicate monarchical government in France.

[The Ordinances, July 26, 1830.]

Accordingly, on the 26th of July, a series of Ordinances appeared in the Moniteur, signed by the King and counter-signed by the Ministers. The first Ordinance forbade the publication of any journal without royal permission; the second dissolved the Chamber of Deputies; the third raised the property-qualification of voters, established a system of double-election, altered the duration of Parliaments, and re-enacted the obsolete clause of the Charta confining the initiative in all legislation to the Government. Other Ordinances convoked a Chamber to be elected under the new rules, and called to the Council of State a number of the most notorious Ultra-Royalists and fanatics in France. Taken together, the Ordinances left scarcely anything standing of the Constitutional and Parliamentary system of the day. The blow fell first on the press, and the first step in resistance was taken by the journalists of Paris, who, under the leadership of the young Thiers, editor of the National, published a protest declaring that they would treat the Ordinances as illegal, and calling upon the Chambers and nation to join in this resistance. For a while the journalists seemed likely to stand alone. Paris at large remained quiet, and a body of the recently elected Deputies, to whom the journalists appealed as representatives of the nation, proved themselves incapable of any action or decision whatsoever. It was not from these timid politicians, but from a body of obscure Republicans, that the impulse proceeded which overthrew the Bourbon throne. Unrepresented in Parliament and unrepresented in the press, there were a few active men who had handed down the traditions of 1792, and who, in sympathy with the Carbonari and other conspirators abroad, had during recent years founded secret societies in Paris, and enlisted in the Republican cause a certain number of workmen, of students, and of youths of the middle classes. While the journalists discussed legal means of resistance, and the Deputies awaited events, the Republican leaders met and determined upon armed revolt. They were assisted, probably without direct concert, by the printing firms and other employers of labour, who, in view of the general suspension of the newspapers, closed their establishments on the morning of July 27, and turned their workmen into the streets.

[July 27.]

[July 28.]

Thus on the day after the appearance of the Edicts the aspect of Paris changed. Crowds gathered, and revolutionary cries were raised. Marmont, who was suddenly ordered to take command of the troops, placed them around the Tuileries, and captured two barricades which were erected in the neighbourhood; but the populace was not yet armed, and no serious conflict took place. In the evening Lafayette reached Paris, and the revolution had now a real, though not an avowed, leader. A body of his adherents met during the night at the office of the National, and, in spite of Thiers' resistance, decided upon a general insurrection. Thiers himself, who desired nothing but a legal and Parliamentary attack upon Charles X., quitted Paris to await events. The men who had out-voted him placed themselves in communication with all the district committees of Paris, and began the actual work of revolt by distributing arms. On the morning of Wednesday, July 28th, the first armed bands attacked and captured the arsenals and several private depôts of weapons and ammunition. Barricades were erected everywhere. The insurgents swelled from hundreds to thousands, and, converging on the old rallying-point of the Commune of Paris, they seized the Hôtel de Ville, and hoisted the tricolor flag on its roof. Marmont wrote to the King, declaring the position to be most serious, and advising concession; he then put his troops in motion, and succeeded, after a severe conflict, in capturing several points of vantage, and in expelling the rebels from the Hôtel de Ville.

[July 29.]

In the meantime the Deputies, who were assembled at the house of one of their number in pursuance of an agreement made on the previous day, gained sufficient courage to adopt a protest declaring that in spite of the Ordinances they were still the legal representatives of the nation. They moreover sent a deputation to Marmont, begging him to put a stop to the fighting, and offering their assistance in restoring order if the King would withdraw his Edicts. Marmont replied that he could do nothing without the King's command, but he despatched a second letter to St. Cloud, urging compliance. The only answer which he received was a command to concentrate his troops and to act in masses. The result of this was that the positions which had been won by hard fighting were abandoned before evening, and that the troops, famished and exhausted, were marched back through the streets of Paris to the Tuileries. On the march some fraternised with the people, others were surrounded and disarmed. All eastern Paris now fell into the hands of the insurgents; the middle-class, as in 1789 and 1792, remained inactive, and allowed the contest to be decided by the populace and the soldiery. Messages from the capital constantly reached St. Cloud, but the King so little understood his danger and so confidently reckoned on the victory of the troops in the Tuileries that he played whist as usual during the evening; and when the Duc de Mortemart, French Ambassador at St. Petersburg, arrived at nightfall, and pressed for an audience, the King refused to receive him until the next morning. When morning came, the march of the insurgents against the Tuileries began. Position after position fell into their hands. The regiments stationed in the Place Vendôme abandoned their commander, and marched off to place themselves at the disposal of the Deputies. Marmont ordered the Swiss Guard, which had hitherto defended the Louvre, to replace them; and in doing so he left the Louvre for a moment without any garrison. The insurgents saw the building empty, and rushed into it. From the windows they commanded the Court of the Tuileries, where the troops in reserve were posted; and soon after mid-day all was over. A few isolated battalions fought and perished, but the mass of the soldiery with their commander fell back upon the Place de la Concorde, and then evacuated Paris.  [387]

The Duke of Orleans was all this time in hiding. He had been warned that the Court intended to arrest him, and, whether from fear of the Court or of the populace, he had secreted himself at a hunting-lodge in his woods, allowing none but his wife and his sister to know where he was concealed. His partisans, of whom the rich and popular banker, Laffitte, was the most influential among the Deputies, were watching for an opportunity to bring forward his name; but their chances of success seemed slight. The Deputies at large wished only for the withdrawal of the Ordinances, and were wholly averse from a change of dynasty. It was only through the obstinacy of King Charles himself, and as the result of a series of accidents, that the Crown passed from the elder Bourbon line. King Charles would not hear of withdrawing the Ordinances until the Tuileries had actually fallen; he then gave way and charged the Duc de Mortemart to form a new Ministry, drawn from the ranks of the Opposition. But instead of formally repealing the Edicts by a public Decree, he sent two messengers to Paris to communicate his change of purpose to the Deputies by word of mouth. The messengers betook themselves to the Hôtel de Ville, where a municipal committee under Lafayette had been installed; and, when they could produce no written authority for their statements, they were referred by this committee to the general body of Deputies, which was now sitting at Laffitte's house. The Deputies also demanded a written guarantee. Laffitte and Thiers spoke in favour of the Duke of Orleans, but the Assembly at large was still willing to negotiate with Charles X., and only required the presence of the Duc de Mortemart himself, and a copy of the Decree repealing the Ordinances.

[July 30.]

It was now near midnight. The messengers returned to St. Cloud, and were not permitted to deliver their intelligence until the King awoke next morning. Charles then signed the necessary document, and Mortemart set out for Paris; but the night's delay had given the Orleanists time to act, and before the King was up Thiers had placarded the streets of Paris with a proclamation extolling Orleans as the prince devoted to the cause of the Revolution, as the soldier of Jemappes, and the only constitutional King now possible. Some hours after this manifesto had appeared the Deputies again assembled at Laffitte's house, and waited for the appearance of Mortemart. But they waited in vain. Mortemart's carriage was stopped on the road from St. Cloud, and he was compelled to make his way on foot by a long circuit and across a score of barricades. When he approached Laffitte's house, half dead with heat and fatigue, he found that the Deputies had adjourned to the Palais Bourbon, and, instead of following them, he ended his journey at the Luxemburg, where the Peers were assembled. His absence was turned to good account by the Orleanists. At the morning session the proposition was openly made to call Louis Philippe to power; and when the Deputies reassembled in the afternoon and the Minister still failed to present himself, it was resolved to send a body of Peers and Deputies to Louis Philippe to invite him to come to Paris and to assume the office of Lieutenant-General of the kingdom. No opposition was offered to this proposal in the House of Peers, and a deputation accordingly set out to search for Louis Philippe at his country house at Neuilly. The prince was not to be found; but his sister, who received the deputation, undertook that he should duly appear in Paris. She then communicated with her brother in his hiding-place, and induced him, in spite of the resistance of his wife, to set out for the capital. He arrived at the Palais Royale late on the night of the 30th. Early the next morning he received a deputation from the Assembly, and accepted the powers which they offered him. A proclamation was then published, announcing to the Parisians that in order to save the country from anarchy and civil war the Duke of Orleans had assumed the office of Lieutenant-General of the kingdom.

[The Hôtel de Ville.]

But there existed another authority in Paris beside the Assembly of Representatives, and one that was not altogether disposed to permit Louis Philippe and his satellites to reap the fruits of the people's victory. Lafayette and the Municipal Committee, which occupied the Hôtel de Ville, had transformed themselves into a provisional government, and sat surrounded by the armed mob which had captured the Tuileries two days before. No single person who had fought in the streets had risked his life for the sake of making Louis Philippe king; in so far as the Parisians had fought for any definite political idea, they had fought for the Republic. It was necessary to reconcile both the populace and the provisional government to the assumption of power by the new Regent; and with this object Louis Philippe himself proceeded to the Hôtel de Ville, accompanied by an escort of Deputies and Peers. It was a hazardous moment when he entered the crowd on the Place de Grève; but Louis Philippe's readiness of speech stood him in good stead, and he made his way unhurt through the throng into the building, where Lafayette received him. Compliments and promises were showered upon this veteran of 1789, who presently appeared on a balcony and embraced Louis Philippe, while the Prince grasped the tricolor flag, the flag which had not waved in Paris since 1815. The spectacle was successful. The multitude shouted applause; and the few determined men who still doubted the sincerity of a Bourbon and demanded the proclamation of the Republic were put off with the promise of an ultimate appeal to the French people.

[Charles X.]

In the meantime Charles X. had withdrawn to Rambouillet, accompanied by the members of his family and by a considerable body of troops. Here the news reached him that Orleans had accepted from the Chambers the office of Lieutenant-General. It was a severe blow to the old king, who, while others doubted of Louis Philippe's loyalty, had still maintained his trust in this prince's fidelity. For a moment he thought of retiring beyond the Loire and risking a civil war; but the troops now began to disperse, and Charles, recognising that his cause was hopeless, abdicated together with the Dauphin in favour of his grandson the young Chambord, then called Duc de Bordeaux. He wrote to Louis Philippe, appointing him, as if on his own initiative, Lieutenant-General of the kingdom, and required him to proclaim Henry V. king, and to undertake the government during the new sovereign's minority. It is doubtful whether Louis Philippe had at this time formed any distinct resolve, and whether his answer to Charles X. was inspired by mere good nature or by conscious falsehood; for while replying officially that he would lay the king's letter before the Chambers, he privately wrote to Charles X. that he would retain his new office only until he could safely place the Duc de Bordeaux upon the throne. Having thus soothed the old man's pride, Louis Philippe requested him to hasten his departure from the neighbourhood of Paris; and when Charles ignored the message, he sent out some bands of the National Guard to terrify him into flight. This device succeeded, and the royal family, still preserving the melancholy ceremonial of a court, moved slowly through France towards the western coast. At Cherbourg they took ship and crossed to England, where they were received as private persons. Among the British nation at large the exiled Bourbons excited but little sympathy. They were, however, permitted to take up their abode in the palace of Holyrood, and here Charles X. resided for two years. But neither the climate nor the society of the Scottish capital offered any attraction to the old and failing chief of a fallen dynasty. He sought a more congenial shelter in Austria, and died at Goritz in November, 1836.

[Louis Philippe made King, Aug. 7.]

The first public notice of the abdication of King Charles was given by Louis Philippe in the Chamber of Deputies, which was convoked by him, as Lieutenant-General of the Kingdom, on the 3rd of August. In addressing the Deputies, Louis Philippe stated that he had received a letter containing the abdication both of the King and of the Dauphin, but he uttered no single word regarding the Duc de Bordeaux, in whose favour both his grandfather and his uncle had renounced their rights. Had Louis Philippe mentioned that the abdications were in fact conditional, and had he declared himself protector of the Duc de Bordeaux during his minority, there is little doubt that the legitimate heir would have been peaceably accepted both by the Chamber and by Paris. Louis Philippe himself had up to this time done nothing that was inconsistent with the assumption of a mere Regency; the Chamber had not desired a change of dynasty; and, with the exception of Lafayette, the men who had actually made the Revolution bore as little goodwill to an Orleanist as to a Bourbon monarchy. But from the time when Louis Philippe passed over in silence the claims of the grandson of Charles X., his own accession to the throne became inevitable. It was left to an obscure Deputy to propose that the crown should be offered to Louis Philippe, accompanied by certain conditions couched in the form of modifications of the Charta. The proposal was carried in the Chamber on the 7th of August, and the whole body of representatives marched to the Palais Royale to acquaint the prince with its resolution. Louis Philippe, after some conventional expressions of regret, declared that he could not resist the call of his country. When the Lower Chamber had thus disposed of the crown, the House of Peers, which had proved itself a nullity throughout the crisis, adopted the same resolution, and tendered its congratulations in a similar fashion. Two days later Louis Philippe took the oath to the Charta as modified by the Assembly, and was proclaimed King of the French.

[Nature of the Revolution of 1830.]

Thus ended a revolution, which, though greeted with enthusiasm at the time, has lost much of its splendour and importance in the later judgment of mankind. In comparison with the Revolution of 1789, the movement which overthrew the Bourbons in 1830 was a mere flutter on the surface. It was unconnected with any great change in men's ideas, and it left no great social or legislative changes behind it. Occasioned by a breach of the constitution on the part of the Executive Government, it resulted mainly in the transfer of administrative power from one set of politicians to another: the alterations which it introduced into the constitution itself were of no great importance. France neither had an absolute Government before 1830, nor had it a popular Government afterwards. Instead of a representative of divine right, attended by guards of nobles and counselled by Jesuit confessors, there was now a citizen-king, who walked about the streets of Paris with an umbrella under his arm and sent his sons to the public schools, but who had at heart as keen a devotion to dynastic interests as either of his predecessors, and a much greater capacity for personal rule. The bonds which kept the entire local administration of France in dependence upon the central authority were not loosened; officialism remained as strong as ever; the franchise was still limited to a mere fraction of the nation. On the other hand, within the administration itself the change wrought by the July Revolution was real and lasting. It extinguished the political power of the clerical interest. Not only were the Bishops removed from the House of Peers, but throughout all departments of Government the influence of the clergy, which had been so strong under Charles X., vanished away. The State took a distinctly secular colour. The system of public education was regulated with such police-like exclusiveness that priests who insisted upon opening schools of their own for Catholic teaching were enabled to figure as champions of civil liberty and of freedom of opinion against despotic power. The noblesse lost whatever political influence it had regained during the Restoration. The few surviving Regicides who had been banished in 1815 were recalled to France, among them the terrorist Barrère, who was once more returned to the Assembly. But the real winners in the Revolution of 1830 were not the men of extremes, but the middle-class of France. This was the class which Louis Philippe truly represented; and the force which for eighteen years kept Louis Philippe on the throne was the middle-class force of the National Guard of Paris. Against this sober, prosaic, unimaginative power there struggled the hot and restless spirit which had been let loose by the overthrow of the Bourbon dynasty, and which, fired at once with the political ideal of a Republic, with dreams of the regeneration of Europe by French armies, and with the growing antagonism between the labouring class and the owners of property, threatened for awhile to overthrow the newly-constituted monarchy in France, and to plunge Europe into war. The return of the tricolor flag, the long-silenced strains of the Republic and the Empire, the sense of victory with which men on the popular side witnessed the expulsion of the dynasty which had been forced upon France after Waterloo, revived that half-romantic military ardour which had undertaken the liberation of Europe in 1792. France appeared once more in the eyes of enthusiasts as the deliverer of nations. The realities of the past epoch of French military aggression, its robberies, its corruption, the execrations of its victims, were forgotten; and when one people after another took up the shout of liberty that was raised in Paris, and insurrections broke out in every quarter of Europe, it was with difficulty that Louis Philippe and the few men of caution about him could prevent the French nation from rushing into war.

[Affairs in Belgium.]

The State first affected by the events of July was the kingdom of the Netherlands. The creation of this kingdom, in which the Belgian provinces formerly subject to Austria were united with Holland to serve as an effective barrier against French aggression on the north, had been one of Pitt's most cherished schemes, and it had been carried into effect ten years after his death by the Congress of Vienna. National and religious incongruities had been little considered by the statesmen of that day, and at the very moment of union the Catholic bishops of Belgium had protested against a constitution which gave equal toleration to all religions under the rule of a Protestant King. The Belgians had been uninterruptedly united with France for the twenty years preceding 1814; the French language was not only the language of their literature, but the spoken language of the upper classes; and though the Flemish portion of the population was nearly related to the Dutch, this element had not then asserted itself with the distinctness and energy which it has since developed. The antagonism between the northern and the southern Netherlands, though not insuperable, was sufficiently great to make a harmonious union between the two countries a work of difficulty, and the Government of The Hague had not taken the right course to conciliate its opponents. The Belgians, though more numerous, were represented by fewer members in the National Assembly than the Dutch. Offices were filled by strangers from Holland; finance was governed by a regard for Dutch interests; and the Dutch language was made the official language for the whole kingdom. But the chief grievances were undoubtedly connected with the claims of the clerical party in Belgium to a monopoly of spiritual power and the exclusive control of education. The one really irreconcilable enemy of the Protestant House of Orange was the Church; and the governing impulse in the conflicts which preceded the dissolution of the kingdom of the Netherlands in 1830 sprang from the same clerical interest which had thrown Belgium into revolt against the Emperor Joseph forty years before. There was again seen the same strange phenomenon of a combination between the Church and a popular or even revolutionary party. For the sake of an alliance against a constitution distasteful to both, the clergy of Belgium accepted the democratic principles of the political Opposition, and the Opposition consented for a while to desist from their attacks upon the Papacy. The contract was faithfully observed on both sides until the object for which it was made was attained.  [388]

[Belgian Revolution, August, 1830.]

For some months before the Revolution of July, 1830, the antagonism between the Belgians and their Government had been so violent that no great shock from outside was necessary to produce an outbreak. The convulsions of Paris were at once felt at Brussels, and on the 25th of August the performance of a revolutionary opera in that city gave the signal for the commencement of insurrection. From the capital the rebellion spread from town to town throughout the southern Netherlands. The King summoned the Estates General, and agreed to the establishment of an administration for Belgium separate from that of Holland: but the storm was not allayed; and the appearance of a body of Dutch troops at Brussels was sufficient to dispel the expectation of a peaceful settlement. Barricades were erected; a conflict took place in the streets; and the troops, unable to carry the city by assault, retired to the outskirts and kept up a desultory attack for several days. They then withdrew, and a provisional government, which was immediately established, declared the independence of Belgium. For a moment there appeared some possibility that the Crown Prince of Holland, who had from the first assumed the part of mediator, might be accepted as sovereign of the newly-formed State; but the growing violence of the insurrection, the activity of French emissaries and volunteers, and the bombardment of Antwerp by the Dutch soldiers who garrisoned its citadel, made an end of all such hopes. Belgium had won its independence, and its connection with the House of Orange could be re-established only by force of arms.

[France and the Belgian Revolution.]

[France and England.]

The accomplishment of this revolution in one of the smallest Continental States threatened to involve all Europe in war. Though not actually effected under the auspices of a French army, it was undoubtedly to some extent effected in alliance with the French revolutionary party. It broke up a kingdom established by the European Treaties of 1814; and it was so closely connected with the overthrow of the Bourbon monarchy as to be scarcely distinguishable from those cases in which the European Powers had pledged themselves to call their armies into the field. Louis Philippe, however, had been recognised by most of the European Courts as the only possible alternative to a French Republic; and a general disposition existed to second any sincere effort that should be made by him to prevent the French nation from rushing into war. This was especially the case with England; and it was to England that Louis Philippe turned for co-operation in the settlement of the Belgian question. Louis Philippe himself had every possible reason for desiring to keep the peace. If war broke out, France would be opposed to all the Continental Powers together. Success was in the last degree improbable; it could only be hoped for by a revival of the revolutionary methods and propaganda of 1793; and failure, even for a moment, would certainly cost him his throne, and possibly his life. His interest no less than his temperament made him the strenuous, though concealed, opponent of the war-party in the Assembly; and he found in the old diplomatist who had served alike under the Bourbons, the Republic, and the Empire, an ally thoroughly capable of pursuing his own wise though unpopular policy of friendship and co-operation with England. Talleyrand, while others were crying for a revenge for Waterloo, saw that the first necessity for France was to rescue it from its isolation; and as at the Congress of Vienna he had detached Austria and England from the two northern Courts, so now, before attempting to gain any extension of territory, he sought to make France safe against the hostility of the Continent by allying it with at least one great Power. Russia had become an enemy instead of a friend. The expulsion of the Bourbons had given mortal offence to the Czar Nicholas, and neither Austria nor Prussia was likely to enter into close relations with a Government founded upon revolution. England alone seemed a possible ally, and it was to England that the French statesman of peace turned in the Belgian crisis. Talleyrand, now nearly eighty years old, came as ambassador to London, where he had served in 1792. He addressed himself to Wellington and to the new King, William IV., assuring them that, under the Government of Louis Philippe, France would not seek to use the Belgian revolution for its own aggrandisement; and, with his old aptness in the invention of general principles to suit a particular case, he laid down the principle of non-intervention as one that ought for the future to govern the policy of Europe. His efforts were successful. So complete an understanding was established between France and England on the Belgian question, that all fear of an armed intervention of the Eastern Courts on behalf of the King of Holland, which would have rendered a war with France inevitable, passed away. The regulation of Belgian affairs was submitted to a Conference at London. Hostilities were stopped, and the independence of the new kingdom was recognised in principle by the Conference before the end of the year. A Protocol defining the frontiers of Belgium and Holland, and apportioning to each State its share in the national debt, was signed by the representatives of the Powers in January, 1831.  [389]

[Leopold elected King, June 4.]

Thus far, a crisis which threatened the peace of Europe had been surmounted with unexpected ease. But the first stage of the difficulty alone was passed; it still remained for the Powers to provide a king for Belgium, and to gain the consent of the Dutch and Belgian Governments to the territorial arrangements drawn up for them. The Belgians themselves, with whom a connection with France was popular, were disposed to elect as their sovereign the Duc de Nemours, second son of Louis Philippe; and although Louis Philippe officially refused his sanction to this scheme, which in the eyes of all Europe would have turned Belgium into a French dependency, he privately encouraged its prosecution after a Bonapartist candidate, the son of Eugène Beauharnais, had appeared in the field. The result was that the Duc de Nemours was elected king on the 3rd of February, 1831. Against this appointment the Conference of the Powers at London had already pronounced its veto, and the British Government let it be understood that it would resist any such extension of French influence by force. Louis Philippe now finally refused the crown for his son, and, the Bonapartist candidate being withdrawn, the two rival Powers agreed in recommending Prince Leopold of Saxe-Coburg, on the understanding that, if elected King of Belgium, he should marry a daughter of Louis Philippe. The Belgians fell in with the advice given them, and elected Leopold on the 4th of June. He accepted the crown, subject to the condition that the London Conference should modify in favour of Belgium some of the provisions relating to the frontiers and to the finances of the new State which had been laid down by the Conference, and which the Belgian Government had hitherto refused to accept.

[Settlement of the Belgian frontier.]

The difficulty of arranging the Belgian frontier arose principally from the position of the Grand Duchy of Luxemburg. This territory, though subject to Austria before the French Revolution, had always been treated as distinct from the body of the Austrian Netherlands. When, at the peace of 1814, it was given to the King of Holland in substitution for the ancient possessions of his family at Nassau, its old character as a member of the German federal union was restored to it, so that the King of Holland in respect of this portion of his dominions became a German prince, and the fortress of Luxemburg, the strongest in Europe after Gibraltar, was liable to occupation by German troops. The population of the Duchy had, however, joined the Belgians in their revolt, and, with the exception of the fortress itself, the territory had passed into possession of the Belgian Government. In spite of this actual overthrow of Dutch rule, the Conference of London had attached such preponderating importance to the military and international relations of Luxemburg that it had excluded the whole of the Duchy from the new Belgian State, and declared it still to form part of the dominions of the King of Holland. The first demand of Leopold was for the reversal or modification of this decision, and the Powers so far gave way as to substitute for the declaration of January a series of articles, in which the question of Luxemburg was reserved for future settlement. The King of Holland had assented to the January declaration; on hearing of its abandonment, he took up arms, and threw fifty thousand men into Belgium. Leopold appealed to France for assistance, and a French army immediately crossed the frontier. The Dutch now withdrew, and the French in their turn were recalled, after Leopold had signed a treaty undertaking to raze the fortifications of five towns on his southern border. The Conference again took up its work, and produced a third scheme, in which the territory of Luxemburg was divided between Holland and Belgium. This was accepted by Belgium, and rejected by Holland. The consequence was that a treaty was made between Leopold and the Powers; and at the beginning of 1832 the kingdom of Belgium, as defined by the third award of the Conference, was recognised by all the Courts, Lord Palmerston on behalf of England resolutely refusing to France even the slightest addition of territory, on the ground that, if annexations once began, all security for the continuance of peace would be at an end. On this wise and firm policy the concert of Europe in the establishment of the Belgian kingdom was successfully maintained; and it only remained for the Western Powers to overcome the resistance of the King of Holland, who still held the citadel of Antwerp and declined to listen either to reason or authority. A French army corps was charged with the task of besieging the citadel; an English fleet blockaded the river Scheldt. After a severe bombardment the citadel surrendered. Hostilities ceased, and negotiations for a definitive settlement recommenced. As, however, the Belgians were in actual occupation of all Luxemburg with the exception of the fortress, they had no motive to accelerate a settlement which would deprive them of part of their existing possessions; on the other hand, the King of Holland held back through mere obstinacy. Thus the provisional state of affairs was prolonged for year after year, and it was not until April, 1839, that the final Treaty of Peace between Belgium and Holland was executed.

[Affairs of Poland.]

The consent of the Eastern Powers to the overthrow of the kingdom of the United Netherlands, and to the establishment of a State based upon a revolutionary movement, would probably have been harder to gain if in the autumn of 1830 Russia had been free to act with all its strength. But at this moment an outbreak took place in Poland, which required the concentration of all the Czar's forces within his own border. The conflict was rather a war of one armed nation against another than the insurrection of a people against its government. Poland-that is to say, the territory which had formerly constituted the Grand Duchy of Warsaw-had, by the treaties of 1814, been established as a separate kingdom, subject to the Czar of Russia, but not forming part of the Russian Empire. It possessed an administration and an army of its own, and the meetings of its Diet gave to it a species of parliamentary government to which there was nothing analogous within Russia proper. During the reign of Alexander the constitutional system of Poland had, on the whole, been respected; and although the real supremacy of an absolute monarch at St. Petersburg had caused the Diet to act as a body in opposition to the Russian Government, the personal connection existing between Alexander and the Poles had prevented any overt rebellion during his own life-time. But with the accession of Nicholas all such individual sympathy passed away, and the hard realities of the actual relation between Poland and the Court of Russia came into full view. In the conspiracies of 1825 a great number of Poles were implicated. Eight of these persons, after a preliminary inquiry, were placed on trial before the Senate at Warsaw, which, in spite of strong evidence of their guilt, acquitted them. Pending the decision, Nicholas declined to convoke the Diet: he also stationed Russian troops in Poland, and violated the constitution by placing Russians in all branches of the administration. Even without these grievances the hostility of the mass of the Polish noblesse to Russia would probably have led sooner or later to insurrection. The peasantry, ignorant and degraded, were but instruments in the hands of their territorial masters. In so far as Poland had rights of self-government, these rights belonged almost exclusively to the nobles, or landed proprietors, a class so numerous that they have usually been mistaken in Western Europe for the Polish nation itself. The so-called emancipation of the serfs, effected by Napoleon after wresting the Grand Duchy of Warsaw from Prussia in 1807, had done little for the mass of the population; for, while abolishing the legal condition of servitude, Napoleon had given the peasant no vestige of proprietorship in his holding, and had consequently left him as much at the mercy of his landlord as he was before. The name of freedom appears in fact to have worked actual injury to the peasant; for in the enjoyment of a pretended power of free contract he was left without that protection of the officers of State which, under the Prussian regime from 1795 to 1807, had shielded him from the tyranny of his lord. It has been the fatal, the irremediable bane of Poland that its noblesse, until too late, saw no country, no right, no law, outside itself. The very measures of interference on the part of the Czar which this caste resented as unconstitutional were in part directed against the abuse of its own privileges; and although in 1830 a section of the nobles had learnt the secret of their country's fall, and were prepared to give the serf the real emancipation of proprietorship, no universal impulse worked in this direction, nor could the wrong of ages be undone in the tumult of war and revolution.

[Insurrection at Warsaw, Nov. 29.]

A sharp distinction existed between the narrow circle of the highest aristocracy of Poland and the mass of the poor and warlike noblesse. The former, represented by men like Czartoryski, the friend of Alexander I. and ex-Minister of Russia, understood the hopelessness of any immediate struggle with the superior power, and advocated the politic development of such national institutions as were given to Poland by the constitution of 1815, institutions which were certainly sufficient to preserve Poland from absorption by Russia, and to keep alive the idea of the ultimate establishment of its independence. It was among the lesser nobility, among the subordinate officers of the army and the population of Warsaw itself, who jointly formed the so-called democratic party, that the spirit of revolt was strongest. Plans for an outbreak had been made during the Turkish war of 1828; but unhappily this opportunity, which might have been used with fatal effect against Russia, was neglected, and it was left for the French Revolution of 1830 to kindle an untimely and ineffective flame. The memory of Napoleon's campaigns and the wild voices of French democracy filled the patriots at Warsaw with vain hopes of a military union with western Liberalism, and overpowered the counsels of men who understood the state of Europe better. Revolt broke out on the 29th of November, 1830. The Polish regiments in Warsaw joined the insurrection, and the Russian troops, under the Grand Duke Constantine, withdrew from the capital, where their leader had narrowly escaped with his life.  [390]

[Attempted negotiation with the Czar.]

The Government of Poland had up to this time been in the hands of a Council nominated by the Czar as King of Poland, and controlled by instructions from a secretary at St. Petersburg. The chief of the Council was Lubecki, a Pole devoted to the Emperor Nicholas. On the victory of the insurrection at Warsaw, the Council was dissolved and a provisional Government installed. Though the revolt was the work of the so-called democratic party, the influence of the old governing families of the highest aristocracy was still so great that power was by common consent placed in their hands. Czartoryski became president, and the policy adopted by himself and his colleagues was that of friendly negotiation with Russia. The insurrection of November was treated not as the beginning of a national revolt, but as a mere disturbance occasioned by unconstitutional acts of the Government. So little did the committee understand the character of the Emperor Nicholas, as to imagine that after the expulsion of his soldiers and the overthrow of his Ministers at Warsaw he would peaceably make the concessions required of him, and undertake for the future faithfully to observe the Polish constitution. Lubecki and a second official were sent to St. Petersburg to present these demands, and further (though this was not seriously intended) to ask that the constitution should be introduced into all the Russian provinces which had once formed part of the Polish State. The reception given to the envoys at the frontier was of an ominous character. They were required to describe themselves as officers about to present a report to the Czar, inasmuch as no representatives of rebels in arms could be received into Russia. Lubecki appears now to have shaken the dust of Poland off his feet; his colleague pursued his mission, and was admitted to the Czar's presence. Nicholas, while expressing himself in language of injured tenderness, and disclaiming all desire to punish the innocent with the guilty, let it be understood that Poland had but two alternatives, unconditional submission or annihilation. The messenger who in the meanwhile carried back to Warsaw the first despatches of the envoy reported that the roads were already filled with Russian regiments moving on their prey.

[Diebitsch invades Poland, Feb. 1831.]

Six weeks of precious time were lost through the illusion of the Polish Government that an accommodation with the Emperor Nicholas was possible. Had the insurrection at Warsaw been instantly followed by a general levy and the invasion of Lithuania, the resources of this large province might possibly have been thrown into the scale against Russia. Though the mass of the Lithuanian population, in spite or several centuries of union with Poland, had never been assimilated to the dominant race, and remained in language and creed more nearly allied to the Russians than the Poles, the nobles formed an integral part of the Polish nation, and possessed sufficient power over their serfs to drive them into the field to fight for they knew not what. The Russian garrisons in Lithuania were not strong, and might easily have been overpowered by a sudden attack. When once the population of Warsaw had risen in arms against Nicholas, the only possibility of success lay in the extension of the revolt over the whole of the semi-Polish provinces, and in a general call to arms. But beside other considerations which disinclined the higher aristocracy at Warsaw to extreme measures, they were influenced by a belief that the Powers of Europe might intervene on behalf of the constitution of the Polish kingdom as established by the treaty of Vienna; while, if the struggle passed beyond the borders of that kingdom, it would become a revolutionary movement to which no Court could lend its support. It was not until the envoy returned from St. Petersburg bearing the answer of the Emperor Nicholas that the democratic party carried all before it, and all hopes of a peaceful compromise vanished away. The Diet then passed a resolution declaring that the House of Romanoff had forfeited the Polish crown, and preparations began for a struggle for life or death with Russia. But the first moments when Russia stood unguarded and unready had been lost beyond recall. Troops had thronged westwards into Lithuania; the garrisons in the fortresses had been raised to their full strength; and in February, 1831, Diebitsch took up the offensive, and crossed the Polish frontier with a hundred and twenty thousand men.

[Campaign in Poland, 1831.]

[Capture of Warsaw, Sept. 8, 1831.]

The Polish army, though far inferior in numbers to the enemy which it had to meet, was no contemptible foe. Among its officers there were many who had served in Napoleon's campaigns; it possessed, however, no general habituated to independent command; and the spirit of insubordination and self-will, which had wrought so much ruin in Poland, was still ready to break out when defeat had impaired the authority of the nominal chiefs. In the first encounters the advancing Russian army was gallantly met; and, although the Poles were forced to fall back upon Warsaw, the losses sustained by Diebitsch were so serious that he had to stay his operations and to wait for reinforcements. In March the Poles took up the offensive and surprised several isolated divisions of the enemy; their general, however, failed to push his advantages with the necessary energy and swiftness; the junction of the Russians was at length effected, and on the 26th of May the Poles were defeated after obstinate resistance in a pitched battle at Ostrolenka. Cholera now broke out in the Russian camp. Both Diebitsch and the Grand Duke Constantine were carried off in the midst of the campaign, and some months more were added to the struggle of Poland, hopeless as this had now become. Incursions were made into Lithuania and Podolia, but without result. Paskiewitch, the conqueror of Kars, was called up to take the post left vacant by the death of his rival. New masses of Russian troops came in place of those who had perished in battle and in the hospitals; and while the Governments of Western Europe lifted no hand on behalf of Polish independence, Prussia, alarmed lest the revolt should spread into its own Polish provinces, assisted the operations of the Russian general by supplying stores and munition of war. Blow after blow fell upon the Polish cause. Warsaw itself became the prey of disorder, intrigue, and treachery; and at length the Russian army made its entrance into the capital, and the last soldiers of Poland laid down their arms, or crossed into Prussian or Austrian territory. The revolt had been rashly and unwisely begun: its results were fatal and lamentable. The constitution of Poland was abolished; it ceased to be a separate kingdom, and became a province of the Russian Empire. Its defenders were exiles over the face of Europe or forgotten in Siberia. All that might have been won by the gradual development of its constitutional liberties without breach with the Czar's sovereignty was sacrificed. The future of Poland, like that of Russia itself, now depended on the enlightenment and courage of the Imperial Government, and on that alone. The very existence of a Polish nationality and language seemed for a while to be threatened by the measures of repression that followed the victory of 1831: and if it be true that Russian autocracy has at length done for the Polish peasants what their native masters during centuries of ascendency refused to do, this emancipation would probably not have come the later for the preservation of some relics of political independence, nor would it have had the less value if unaccompanied by the proscription of so great a part of that class which had once been held to constitute the Polish nation.  [391]

[Insurrection in the Papal States, Feb., 1831.]

During the conflict on the banks of the Vistula, the attitude of the Austrian Government had been one of watchful neutrality. Its own Polish territory was not seriously menaced with disturbance, for in a great part of Galicia the population, being of Ruthenian stock and belonging to the Greek Church, had nothing in common with the Polish and Catholic noblesse of their province, and looked back upon the days of Polish dominion as a time of suffering and wrong. Austria's danger in any period of European convulsion lay as yet rather on the side of Italy than on the East, and the vigour of its policy in that quarter contrasted with the equanimity with which it watched the struggle of its Slavic neighbours. Since the suppression of the Neapolitan constitutional movement in 1821, the Carbonari and other secret societies of Italy had lost nothing of their activity. Their head-quarters had been removed from Southern Italy to the Papal States, and the numerous Italian exiles in France and elsewhere kept up a busy communication at once with French revolutionary leaders like Lafayette and with the enemies of the established governments in Italy itself. The death of Pope Pius VIII., on November 30, 1830, and the consequent paralysis of authority within the Ecclesiastical States, came at an opportune moment; assurances of support arrived from Paris; and the Italian leaders resolved upon a general insurrection throughout the minor Principalities on the 5th of February, 1831. Anticipating the signal, Menotti, chief of a band of patriots at Modena, who appears to have been lured on by the Grand Duke himself, assembled his partisans on February 3. He was overpowered and imprisoned; but the outbreak of the insurrection in Bologna, and its rapid extension over the northern part of the Papal States, soon caused the Grand Duke to fly to Austrian territory, carrying his prisoner Menotti with him, whom he subsequently put to death. The new Pope, Gregory XVI., had scarcely been elected when the report reached him that Bologna had declared the temporal power of the Papacy to be at an end. Uncertain of the character of the revolt, he despatched Cardinal Benvenuti northwards, to employ conciliation or force as occasion might require. The Legate fell into the hands of the insurgents; the revolt spread southwards; and Gregory, now hopeless of subduing it by the forces at his own command, called upon Austria for assistance.  [392]

[Attitude of France.]

The principle which, since the Revolution of July, the government of France had repeatedly laid down as the future basis of European politics was that of non-intervention. It had disclaimed any purpose of interfering with the affairs of its neighbours, and had required in return that no foreign intervention should take place in districts which, like Belgium and Savoy, adjoined its own frontier. But there existed no real unity of purpose in the councils of Louis Philippe. The Ministry had one voice for the representatives of foreign powers, another for the Chamber of Deputies, and another for Lafayette and the bands of exiles and conspirators who were under his protection. The head of the government at the beginning of 1831 was Laffitte, a weak politician, dominated by revolutionary sympathies and phrases, but incapable of any sustained or resolute action, and equally incapable of resisting Louis Philippe after the King had concluded his performance of popular leader, and assumed his real character as the wary and self-seeking chief of a reigning house. Whether the actual course of French policy would be governed by the passions of the streets or by the timorousness of Louis Philippe was from day to day a matter of conjecture. The official answer given to the inquiries of the Austrian ambassador as to the intentions of France in case of an Austrian intervention in Italy was, that such intervention might be tolerated in Parma and Modena, which belonged to sovereigns immediately connected with the Hapsburgs, but that if it was extended to the Papal States war with France would be probable, and if extended to Piedmont, certain. On this reply Metternich, who saw Austria's own dominion in Italy once more menaced by the success of an insurrectionary movement, had to form his decision. He could count on the support of Russia in case of war; he knew well the fears of Louis Philippe, and knew that he could work on these fears both by pointing to the presence of the young Louis Bonaparte and his brother with the Italian insurgents as evidence of the Bonapartist character of the movement, and by hinting that in the last resort he might himself let loose upon France Napoleon's son, the Duke of Reichstadt, now growing to manhood at Vienna, before whom Louis Philippe's throne would have collapsed as speedily as that of Louis XVIII. in 1814. Where weakness existed, Metternich was quick to divine it and to take advantage of it. He rightly gauged Louis Philippe. Taking at their true value the threats of the French Government, he declared that it was better for Austria to fall, if necessary, by war than by revolution; and, resolving at all hazards to suppress the Roman insurrection, he gave orders to the Austrian troops to enter the Papal States.

[Austrians suppress Roman revolt, March, 1831.]

[Casimir Perier, March, 1831.]

The military resistance which the insurgents could offer to the advance of the Pope's Austrian deliverers was insignificant, and order was soon restored. But all Europe expected the outbreak of war between Austria and France. The French ambassador at Constantinople had gone so far as to offer the Sultan an offensive and defensive alliance, and to urge him to make preparations for an attack upon both Austria and Russia on their southern frontiers. A despatch from the ambassador reached Paris describing the warlike overtures he had made to the Porte. Louis Philippe saw that if this despatch reached the hands of Laffitte and the war party in the Council of Ministers the preservation of peace would be almost impossible. In concert with Sebastiani, the Foreign Minister, he concealed the despatch from Laffitte. The Premier discovered the trick that had been played upon him, and tendered his resignation. It was gladly accepted by Louis Philippe. Laffitte quitted office, begging pardon of God and man for the part that he had taken in raising Louis Philippe to the throne. His successor was Casimir Perier, a man of very different mould; resolute, clear-headed, and immovably true to his word; a constitutional statesman of the strictest type, intolerant of any species of disorder, and a despiser of popular movements, but equally proof against royal intrigues, and as keen to maintain the constitutional system of France against the Court on one side and the populace on the other as he was to earn for France the respect of foreign powers by the abandonment of a policy of adventure, and the steady adherence to the principles of international obligation which he had laid down. Under his firm hand the intrigues of the French Government with foreign revolutionists ceased; it was felt throughout Europe that peace was still possible, and that if war was undertaken by France it would be undertaken only under conditions which would make any moral union of all the great Powers against France impossible. The Austrian expedition into the Papal States had already begun, and the revolutionary Government had been suppressed; the most therefore that Casimir Perier could demand was that the evacuation of the occupied territory should take place as soon as possible, and that Austria should add its voice to that of the other Powers in urging the Papal Government to reform its abuses. Both demands were granted. For the first time Austria appeared as the advocate of something like a constitutional system. A Conference held at Rome agreed upon a scheme of reforms to be recommended to the Pope; the prospects of peace grew daily fairer; and in July, 1831, the last Austrian soldiers quitted the Ecclesiastical States.  [393]

[Second Austrian intervention, Jan., 1832.]

[French occupy Ancona, February, 1832.]

It now remained to be seen whether Pope Gregory and his cardinals had the intelligence and good-will necessary for carrying out the reforms on the promise of which France had abstained from active intervention. If any such hopes existed they were doomed to speedy disappointment. The apparatus of priestly maladministration was restored in all its ancient deformity. An amnesty which had been promised by the Legate Benvenuti was disregarded, and the Pope set himself to strengthen his authority by enlisting new bands of ruffians and adventurers under the standard of St. Peter. Again insurrection broke out, and again at the Pope's request the Austrians crossed the frontier (January, 1832). Though their appearance was fatal to the cause of liberty, they were actually welcomed as protectors in towns which had been exposed to the tender mercies of the Papal condottieri. There was no disorder, no severity, where the Austrian commandants held sway; but their mere presence in central Italy was a threat to European peace; and Casimir Perier was not the man to permit Austria to dominate in Italy at its will. Without waiting for negotiations, he despatched a French force to Ancona, and seized this town before the Austrians could approach it. The rival Powers were now face to face in Italy; but Perier had no intention of forcing on war if his opponent was still willing to keep the peace. Austria accepted the situation, and made no attempt to expel the French from the position they had seized. Casimir Perier, now on his death-bed, defended the step that he had taken against the remonstrances of ambassadors and against the protests of the Pope, and declared the presence of the French at Ancona to be no incentive to rebellion, but the mere assertion of the rights of a Power which had as good a claim to be in central Italy as Austria itself. Had his life been prolonged, he would probably have insisted upon the execution of the reforms which the Powers had urged upon the Papal government, and have made the occupation of Ancona an effectual means for reaching this end. But with his death the wrongs of the Italians themselves and the question of a reformed government in the Papal States gradually passed out of sight. France and Austria jealously watched one another on the debatable land; the occupation became a mere incident of the balance of power, and was prolonged for year after year, until, in 1838, the Austrians having finally withdrawn all their troops, the French peacefully handed over the citadel of Ancona to the Holy See.

[Prussia in 1830.]

[The Zollverein, 1828-1836.]

The arena in which we have next to follow the effects of the July Revolution, in action and counter-action, is Germany. It has been seen that in the southern German States an element of representative government, if weak, yet not wholly ineffective, had come into being soon after 1815, and had survived the reactionary measures initiated by the conference of Ministers at Carlsbad. In Prussia the promises of King Frederick William to his people had never been fulfilled. Years had passed since exaggerated rumours of conspiracy had served as an excuse for withholding the Constitution. Hardenberg had long been dead; the foreign policy of the country had taken a freer tone; the rigours of the police-system had departed; but the nation remained as completely excluded from any share in the government as it had been before Napoleon's fall. It had in fact become clear that during the lifetime of King Frederick William things must be allowed to remain in their existing condition; and the affection of the people for their sovereign, who had been so long and so closely united with Prussia in its sufferings and in its glories, caused a general willingness to postpone the demand for constitutional reform until the succeeding reign. The substantial merits of the administration might moreover have reconciled a less submissive people than the Prussians to the absolute government under which they lived. Under a wise and enlightened financial policy the country was becoming visibly richer. Obstacles to commercial development were removed, communications opened; and finally, by a series of treaties with the neighbouring German States, the foundations were laid for that Customs-Union which, under the name of the Zollverein, ultimately embraced almost the whole of non-Austrian Germany. As one Principality after another attached itself to the Prussian system, the products of the various regions of Germany, hitherto blocked by the frontier dues of each petty State, moved freely through the land, while the costs attending the taxation of foreign imports, now concentrated upon the external line of frontier, were enormously diminished. Patient, sagacious, and even liberal in its negotiations with its weaker neighbours, Prussia silently connected with itself through the ties of financial union States which had hitherto looked to Austria as their natural head. The semblance of political union was carefully avoided, but the germs of political union were nevertheless present in the growing community of material interests. The reputation of the Prussian Government, no less than the welfare of the Prussian people, was advanced by each successive step in the extension of the Zollverein; and although the earlier stages alone had been passed in the years before 1830, enough had already been done to affect public opinion; and the general sense of material progress combined with other influences to close Prussia to the revolutionary tendencies of that year.

[Insurrections in Brunswick and Cassel.]

[Constitutions in Hanover and Saxony, 1830-1833.]

There were, however, other States in northern Germany which had all the defects of Prussian autocracy without any of its redeeming qualities. In Brunswick and in Hesse Cassel despotism existed in its most contemptible form; the violence of a half-crazy youth in the one case, and the caprices of an obstinate dotard in the other, rendering authority a mere nuisance to those who were subject to it. Here accordingly revolution broke out. The threatened princes had made themselves too generally obnoxious or ridiculous for any hand to be raised in their defence. Their disappearance excited no more than the inevitable lament from Metternich; and in both States systems of representative government were introduced by their successors. In Hanover and in Saxony agitation also began in favour of Parliamentary rule. The disturbance that arose was not of a serious character, and it was met by the Courts in a conciliatory spirit. Constitutions were granted, the liberty of the Press extended, and trial by jury established. On the whole, the movement of 1830, as it affected northern Germany, was rationally directed and salutary in its results. Changes of real value were accomplished with a sparing employment of revolutionary means, and, in the more important cases, through the friendly co-operation of the sovereigns with their subjects. It was not the fault of those who had asked for the same degree of liberty in northern Germany which the south already possessed, that Germany at large again experienced the miseries of reaction and repression which had afflicted it ten years before.

[Movement in the Palatinate.]

Like Belgium and the Rhenish Provinces, the Bavarian Palatinate had for twenty years been incorporated with France. Its inhabitants had grown accustomed to the French law and French institutions, and had caught something of the political animation which returned to France after Napoleon's fall. Accordingly when the government of Munich, alarmed by the July Revolution, showed an inclination towards repressive measures, the Palatinate, severed from the rest of the Bavarian monarchy and in immediate contact with France, became the focus of a revolutionary agitation. The Press had already attained some activity and some influence in this province; and although the leaders of the party of progress were still to a great extent Professors, they had so far advanced upon the patriots of 1818 as to understand that the liberation of the German people was not to be effected by the lecturers and the scholars of the Universities. The design had been formed of enlisting all classes of the public on the side of reform, both by the dissemination of political literature and by the establishment of societies not limited, as in 1818, to academic circles, but embracing traders as well as soldiers and professional men. Even the peasant was to be reached and instructed in his interests as a citizen. It was thought that much might be effected by associating together all the Oppositions in the numerous German Parliaments; but a more striking feature of the revolutionary movement which began in the Palatinate, and one strongly distinguishing it from the earlier agitation of Jena and Erfurt, was its cosmopolitan character. France in its triumph and Poland in its death-struggle excited equal interest and sympathy. In each the cause of European liberty appeared to be at stake. The Polish banner was saluted in the Palatinate by the side of that of united Germany; and from that time forward in almost every revolutionary movement of Europe, down to the insurrection of the Commune of Paris in 1871, Polish exiles have been active both in the organisation of revolt and in the field.

[Reaction in Germany.]

Until the fall of Warsaw, in September, 1831, the German governments, uncertain of the course which events might take in Europe, had shown a certain willingness to meet the complaints of their subjects, and had in especial relaxed the supervision exercised over the press. The fall of Warsaw, which quieted so many alarms, and made the Emperor Nicholas once more a power outside his own dominions, inaugurated a period of reaction in Germany. The Diet began the campaign against democracy by suppressing various liberal newspapers, and amongst them the principal journal of the Palatinate. It was against this movement of regression that the agitation in the Palatinate and elsewhere was now directed. A festival, or demonstration, was held at the Castle of Hambach, near Zweibrücken, at which a body of enthusiasts called upon the German people to unite against their oppressors, and some even urged an immediate appeal to arms (May 27, 1832). Similar meetings, though on a smaller scale, were held in other parts of Germany. Wild words abounded, and the connection of the German revolutionists with that body of opponents of all established governments which had its council-chamber at Paris and its head in Lafayette was openly avowed. Weak and insignificant as the German demagogues were, their extravagance gave to Metternich and to the Diet sufficient pretext for revising the reactionary measures of 1819. Once more the subordination of all representative bodies to the sovereign's authority was laid down by the Diet as a binding principle for every German state. The refusal of taxes by any legislature was declared to be an act of rebellion which would be met by the armed intervention of the central Powers. All political meetings and associations were forbidden; the Press was silenced; the introduction of German books printed abroad was prohibited, and the Universities were again placed under the watch of the police (July, 1832).  [394]

[Attempt at Frankfort, April, 1833.]

If among the minor sovereigns of Germany there were some who, as in Baden, sincerely desired the development of free institutions, the authority exercised by Metternich and his adherents in reaction bore down all the resistance that these courts could offer, and the hand of despotism fell everywhere heavily upon the party of political progress. The majority of German Liberals, not yet prepared for recourse to revolutionary measures, submitted to the pressure of the times, and disclaimed all sympathy with illegal acts; a minority, recognising that nothing was now to be gained by constitutional means, entered into conspiracies, and determined to liberate Germany by force. One insignificant group, relying upon the armed co-operation of Polish bands in France, and deceived by promises of support from some Würtemberg soldiers, actually rose in insurrection at Frankfort. A guard-house was seized, and a few soldiers captured; but the citizens of Frankfort stood aloof, and order was soon restored (April, 1833). It was not to be expected that the reactionary courts should fail to draw full advantage from this ill-timed outbreak of their enemies. Prussian troops marched into Frankfort, and Metternich had no difficulty in carrying through the Diet a decree establishing a commission to superintend and to report upon the proceedings instituted against political offenders throughout Germany. For several years these investigations continued, and the campaign against the opponents of government was carried on with various degrees of rigour in the different states. About two thousand persons altogether were brought to trial: in Prussia thirty-nine sentences of death were pronounced, but not executed. In the struggle against revolution the forces of monarchy had definitely won the victory. Germany again experienced, as it had in 1819, that the federal institutions which were to have given it unity existed only for the purposes of repression. The breach between the nation and its rulers, in spite of the apparent failure of the democratic party, remained far deeper and wider than it had been before; and although Metternich, victor once more over the growing restlessness of the age, slumbered on for another decade in fancied security, the last of his triumphs had now been won, and the next uprising proved how blind was that boasted statesmanship which deemed the sources of danger exhausted when once its symptoms had been driven beneath the surface.

[Conspirators and exiles.]

[Dispersion of the Swiss exiles, 1834.]

In half the states of Europe there were now bodies of exasperated, uncompromising men, who devoted their lives to plotting against governments, and who formed, in their community of interest and purpose, a sort of obverse of the Holy Alliance, a federation of kings' enemies, a league of principle and creed, in which liberty and human right stood towards established rule as light to darkness. As the grasp of authority closed everywhere more tightly upon its baffled foes, more and more of these men passed into exile. Among them was the Genoese Mazzini, who, after suffering imprisonment in 1831, withdrew to Marseilles, and there, in combination with various secret societies, planned an incursion into the Italian province of Savoy. It was at first intended that this enterprise should be executed simultaneously with the German rising at Frankfort. Delays, however, arose, and it was not until the beginning of the following year that the little army, which numbered more Poles than Italians, was ready for its task. The incursion was made from Geneva in February, 1834, and ended disastrously.  [395] Mazzini returned to Switzerland, where hundreds of exiles, secure under the shelter of the Republic, devised schemes of attack upon the despots of Europe, and even rioted in honour of freedom in the streets of the Swiss cities which protected them. The effect of the revolutionary movement of the time in consolidating the alliance of the three Eastern Powers, so rudely broken by the Greek War of Liberation, now came clearly into view. The sovereigns of Russia and Austria had met at Münchengrätz in Bohemia in the previous autumn, and, in concert with Prussia, had resolved upon common principles of action if their intervention should be required against disturbers of order. Notes were now addressed from every quarter to the Swiss Government, requiring the expulsion of all persons concerned in enterprises against the peace of neighbouring States. Some resistance to this demand was made by individual cantons; but the extravagance of many of the refugees themselves alienated popular sympathy, and the greater part of them were forced to quit Switzerland and to seek shelter in England or in America. With the dispersion of the central band of exiles the open alliance which had existed between the revolutionists of Europe gradually passed away. The brotherhood of the kings had proved a stern reality, the brotherhood of the peoples a delusive vision. Mazzini indeed, who up to this time had scarcely emerged from the rabble of revolutionary leaders, was yet to prove how deeply the genius, the elevation, the fervour of one man struggling against the powers of the world may influence the history of his age; but the fire that purified the fine gold charred and consumed the baser elements; and of those who had hoped the most after 1830, many now sank into despair, or gave up their lives to mere restless agitation and intrigue.

[Difficulties of Louis Philippe.]

[Insurrections, 1832-1834.]

[Repressive Laws, Sept., 1835.]

It was in France that the revolutionary movement was longest maintained. During the first year of Louis Philippe's rule the opposition to his government was inspired not so much by Republicanism as by a wild and inconsiderate sympathy with the peoples who were fighting for liberty elsewhere, and by a headstrong impulse to take up arms on their behalf. The famous decree of the Convention in 1792, which promised the assistance of France to every nation in revolt against its rulers, was in fact the true expression of what was felt by a great part of the French nation in 1831; and in the eyes of these enthusiasts it was the unpardonable offence of Louis Philippe against the honour of France that he allowed Poland and Italy to succumb without drawing his sword against their conquerors. That France would have had to fight the three Eastern Powers combined, if it had allied itself with those in revolt against any one of the three, passed for nothing among the clamorous minority in the Chamber and among the orators of Paris. The pacific policy of Casimir Perier was misunderstood; it passed for mere poltroonery, when in fact it was the only policy that could save France from a recurrence of the calamities of 1815. There were other causes for the growing unpopularity of the King and of his Ministers, but the first was their policy of peace. As the attacks of his opponents became more and more bitter, the government of Casimir Perier took more and more of a repressive character. Disappointment at the small results produced in France itself by the Revolution of July worked powerfully in men's minds. The forces that had been set in motion against Charles X. were not to be laid at rest at the bidding of those who had profited by them, and a Republican party gradually took definite shape and organisation. Tumult succeeded tumult. In the summer of 1832 the funeral of General Lamarque, a popular soldier, gave the signal for insurrection at Paris. There was severe fighting in the streets; the National Guard, however, proved true to the king, and shared with the army in the honours of its victory. Repressive measures and an unbroken series of prosecutions against seditious writers followed this first armed attack upon the established government. The bitterness of the Opposition, the discontent of the working classes, far surpassed anything that had been known under Charles X. The whole country was agitated by revolutionary societies and revolutionary propaganda. Disputes between masters and workmen, which, in consequence of the growth of French manufacturing industry, now became both frequent and important, began to take a political colour. Polish and Italian exiles connected their own designs with attacks to be made upon the French Government from within; and at length, in April, 1834, after the passing of a law against trades-unions, the working classes of Lyons, who were on strike against their employers, were induced to rise in revolt. After several days' fighting the insurrection was suppressed. Simultaneous outbreaks took place at St. Etienne, Grenoble, and many other places in the south and centre of France; and on a report of the success of the insurgents reaching Paris, the Republic was proclaimed and barricades were erected. Again civil war raged in the streets, and again the forces of Government gained the victory. A year more passed, during which the investigations into the late revolt and the trial of a host of prisoners served rather to agitate than to reassure the public mind; and in the summer of 1835 an attempt was made upon the life of the King so terrible and destructive in its effects as to amount to a public calamity. An infernal machine composed of a hundred gun-barrels was fired by a Corsican named Fieschi, as the King with a large suite was riding through the streets of Paris on the anniversary of the Revolution of July. Fourteen persons were killed on the spot, among whom was Mortier, one of the oldest of the marshals of France; many others were fatally or severely injured. The King, however, with his three sons, escaped unhurt, and the repressive laws that followed this outrage marked the close of open revolutionary agitation in France. Whether in consequence of the stringency of the new laws, or of the exhaustion of a party discredited in public estimation by the crimes of a few of its members and the recklessness of many more, the constitutional monarchy of Louis Philippe now seemed to have finally vanquished its opponents. Repeated attempts were made on the life of the King, but they possessed for the most part little political significance. Order was welcome to the nation at large; and though in the growth of a socialistic theory and creed of life which dates from this epoch there lay a danger to Governments greater than any purely political, Socialism was as yet the affair of thinkers rather than of active workers either in the industrial or in the Parliamentary world. The Government had beaten its enemies outside the Chamber. Within the Chamber, the parties of extremes ceased to exercise any real influence. Groups were formed, and rival leaders played against one another for office; but they were separated by no far-reaching differences of aim, and by no real antagonism of constitutional principle. During the succeeding years of Louis Philippe's reign there was little visible on the surface but the normal rivalry of parties under a constitutional monarchy. The middle-class retained its monopoly of power: authority, centralised as before, maintained its old prestige in France, and softened opposition by judicious gifts of office and emolument. Revolutionary passion seemed to have died away: and the triumphs or reverses of party-leaders in the Chamber of Deputies succeeded to the harassing and doubtful conflict between Government and insurrection.

[The English Reform movement.]

The near coincidence in time between the French Revolution of 1830 and the passing of the English Reform Bill is apt to suggest to those who look for the operation of wide general causes in history that the English Reform movement should be viewed as a part of the great current of political change which then traversed the continent of Europe. But on a closer examination this view is scarcely borne out by facts, and the coincidence of the two epochs of change appears to be little more than accidental. The general unity that runs through the history of the more advanced continental states is indeed stronger than appears to a superficial reader of history; but this correspondence of tendency does not always embrace England; on the contrary, the conditions peculiar to England usually preponderate over those common to England and other countries, exhibiting at times more of contrast than of similarity, as in the case of the Napoleonic epoch, when the causes which drew together the western half of the continent operated powerfully to exclude our own country from the current influences of the time, and made the England of 1815, in opinion, in religion, and in taste much more insular than the England of 1780. The revolution which overthrew Charles X. did no doubt encourage and stimulate the party of Reform in Great Britain; but, unlike the Belgian, the German, and the Italian movements, the English Reform movement would unquestionably have run the same course and achieved the same results even if the revolt against the ordinances of Charles X. had been successfully repressed, and the Bourbon monarchy had maintained itself in increased strength and reputation. A Reform of Parliament had been acknowledged to be necessary forty years before. Pitt had actually proposed it in 1785, and but for the outbreak of the French Revolution would probably have carried it into effect before the close of the last century. The development of English manufacturing industry which took place between 1790 and 1830, accompanied by the rapid growth of towns and the enrichment of the urban middle class, rendered the design of Pitt, which would have transferred the representation of the decayed boroughs to the counties alone, obsolete, and made the claims of the new centres of population too strong to be resisted. In theory the representative system of the country was completely transformed; but never was a measure which seemed to open the way to such boundless possibilities of change so thoroughly safe and so thoroughly conservative. In spite of the increased influence won by the wealthy part of the commercial classes, the House of Commons continued to be drawn mainly from the territorial aristocracy. Cabinet after Cabinet was formed with scarcely a single member included in it who was not himself a man of title, or closely connected with the nobility: the social influence of rank was not diminished; and although such measures as the Reform of Municipal Corporations attested the increased energy of the Legislature, no party in the House of Commons was weaker than that which supported the democratic demands for the Ballot and for Triennial Parliaments, nor was the repeal of the Corn Laws seriously considered until famine had made it inevitable. That the widespread misery which existed in England after 1832, as the result of the excessive increase of our population and the failure alike of law and of philanthropy to keep pace with the exigencies of a vast industrial growth, should have been so quietly borne, proves how great was the success of the Reform Bill as a measure of conciliation between Government and people. But the crowning justification of the changes made in 1832, and the complete and final answer to those who had opposed them as revolutionary, was not afforded until 1848, when, in the midst of European convulsion, the monarchy and the constitution of England remained unshaken. Bold as the legislation of Lord Grey appeared to men who had been brought up amidst the reactionary influences dominant in England since 1793, the Reform Bill belongs not to the class of great creative measures which have inaugurated new periods in the life of nations, but to the class of those which, while least affecting the general order of society, have most contributed to political stability and to the avoidance of revolutionary change.

CHAPTER XVII.

France and England after 1830-Affairs of Portugal-Don Miguel-Don Pedro invades Portugal-Ferdinand of Spain-The Pragmatic Sanction-Death of Ferdinand: Regency of Christina-The Constitution-Quadruple Alliance- Miguel and Carlos expelled from Portugal-Carlos enters Spain-The Basque Provinces-Carlist War: Zumalacarregui-The Spanish Government seeks French assistance, which is refused-Constitution of 1837-End of the War-Regency of Espartero-Isabella Queen-Affairs of the Ottoman Empire-Ibrahim invades Syria; his victories-Rivalry of France and Russia at Constantinople-Peace of Kutaya and Treaty of Unkiar Skelessi-Effect of this Treaty-France and Mehemet Ali-Commerce of the Levant-Second War between Mehemet and the Porte-Ottoman disasters-The Policy of the Great Powers-Quadruple Treaty without France-Ibrahim expelled from Syria-Final Settlement-Turkey after 1840-Attempted reforms of Reschid Pasha.

[France and England after 1830.]

Alliances of opinion usually cover the pursuit on one or both sides of some definite interest; and to this rule the alliance which appeared to be springing up between France and England after the changes of 1830 was no exception. In the popular view, the bond of union between the two States was a common attachment to principles of liberty; and on the part of the Whig statesmen who now governed England this sympathy with free constitutional systems abroad was certainly a powerful force: but other motives than mere community of sentiment combined to draw the two Governments together, and in the case of France these immediate interests greatly outweighed any abstract preference for a constitutional ally. Louis Philippe had an avowed and obstinate enemy in the Czar of Russia, who had been his predecessor's friend: the Court of Vienna tolerated usurpers only where worse mischief would follow from attacking them; Prussia had no motive for abandoning the connexions which it had maintained since 1815. As the union between the three Eastern Courts grew closer in consequence of the outbreak of revolution beyond the borders of France, a good understanding with Great Britain became more and more obviously the right policy for Louis Philippe; on the other hand, the friendship of France seemed likely to secure England from falling back into that isolated position which it had occupied when the Holy Alliance laid down the law to Europe, and averted the danger to which the Ottoman Empire, as well as the peace of the world, had been exposed by the combination of French with Russian schemes of aggrandizement. If Canning, left without an ally in Europe, had called the new world into existence to redress the balance of the old, his Whig successors might well look with some satisfaction on that shifting of the weights which had brought over one of the Great Powers to the side of England, and anticipate, in the concert of the two great Western States, the establishment of a permanent force in European politics which should hold in check the reactionary influences of Vienna and St. Petersburg. To some extent these views were realised. A general relation of friendliness was recognised as subsisting between the Governments of Paris and London, and in certain European complications their intervention was arranged in common. But even here the element of mistrust was seldom absent; and while English Ministers jealously watched each action of their neighbour, the French Government rarely allowed the ties of an informal alliance to interfere with the prosecution of its own views. Although down to the close of Louis Philippe's reign the good understanding between England and France was still nominally in existence, all real confidence had then long vanished; and on more than one occasion the preservation of peace between the two nations had been seriously endangered.

[Affairs of Portugal, 1826-1830.]

It was in the establishment of the kingdom of Belgium that the combined action of France and England produced its first and most successful result. A second demand was made upon the Governments of the two constitutional Powers by the conflicts which agitated the Spanish Peninsula, and which were stimulated in the general interests of absolutism by both the Austrian and the Russian Court. The intervention of Canning in 1826 on behalf of the constitutional Regency of Portugal against the foreign supporters of Don Miguel, the head of the clerical and reactionary party, had not permanently restored peace to that country. Miguel indeed accepted the constitution, and, after betrothing himself to the infant sovereign, Donna Maria, who was still with her father Pedro, in Brazil, entered upon the Regency which his elder brother had promised to him. But his actions soon disproved the professions of loyalty to the constitution which he had made; and after dissolving the Cortes, and re-assembling the mediæval Estates, he caused himself to be proclaimed King (June, 1828). A reign of terror followed. The constitutionalists were completely crushed. Miguel's own brutal violence gave an example to all the fanatics and ruffians who surrounded him; and after an unsuccessful appeal to arms, those of the adherents of Donna Maria and the constitution who escaped from imprisonment or execution took refuge in England or in the Azore islands, where Miguel had not been able to establish his authority. Though Miguel was not officially recognised as Sovereign by most of the foreign Courts, his victory was everywhere seen with satisfaction by the partisans of absolutism; and in Great Britain, where the Duke of Wellington was still in power, the precedent of Canning's intervention was condemned, and a strict neutrality maintained. Not only was all assistance refused to Donna Maria, but her adherents who had taken refuge in England were prevented from making this country the basis of any operations against the usurper.

[Invasion of Portugal by Pedro. July, 1832.]

Such was the situation of Portuguese affairs when the events of 1830 brought an entirely new spirit into the foreign policy of both England and France. Miguel, however, had no inclination to adapt his own policy to the change of circumstances; on the contrary, he challenged the hostility of both governments by persisting in a series of wanton attacks upon English and French subjects resident at Lisbon. Satisfaction was demanded, and exacted by force. English and French squadrons successively appeared in the Tagus. Lord Palmerston, now Foreign Secretary in the Ministry of Earl Grey, was content with obtaining a pecuniary indemnity for his countrymen, accompanied by a public apology from the Portuguese Government: the French admiral, finding some difficulty in obtaining redress, carried off the best ships of Don Miguel's navy.  [396] A weightier blow was, however, soon to fall upon the usurper. His brother, the Emperor Pedro, threatened with revolution in Brazil, resolved to return to Europe and to enforce the rights of his daughter to the throne of Portugal. Pedro arrived in London in July, 1831, and was permitted by the Government to raise troops and to secure the services of some of the best naval officers of this country. The gathering place of his forces was Terceira, one of the Azore islands, and in the summer of 1832 a sufficiently strong body of troops was collected to undertake the reconquest of Portugal. A landing was made at Oporto, and this city fell into the hands of Don Pedro without resistance. Miguel, however, now marched against his brother, and laid siege to Oporto. For nearly a year no progress was made by either side; at length the arrival of volunteers from various countries, among whom was Captain Charles Napier, enabled Pedro to divide his forces and to make a new attack on Portugal from the south. Napier, in command of the fleet, annihilated the navy of Don Miguel off St. Vincent; his colleague, Villa Flor, landed and marched on Lisbon. The resistance of the enemy was overcome, and on the 28th of July, 1833, Don Pedro entered the capital. But the war was not yet at an end, for Miguel's cause was as closely identified with the interests of European absolutism as that of his brother was with constitutional right, and assistance both in troops and money continued to arrive at his camp. The struggle threatened to prove a long and obstinate one, when a new turn was given to events in the Peninsula by the death of Ferdinand, King of Spain.

[Death of Ferdinand, Sept., 1833.]

Since the restoration of absolute Government in Spain in 1823, Ferdinand, in spite of his own abject weakness and ignorance, had not given complete satisfaction to the fanatics of the clerical party. Some vestiges of statesmanship, some sense of political necessity, as well as the influence of foreign counsellors, had prevented the Government of Madrid from completely identifying itself with the monks and zealots who had first risen against the constitution of 1820, and who now sought to establish the absolute supremacy of the Church. The Inquisition had not been restored, and this alone was enough to stamp the King as a renegade in the eyes of the ferocious and implacable champions of mediæval bigotry. Under the name of Apostolicals, these reactionaries had at times broken into open rebellion. Their impatience had, however, on the whole been restrained by the knowledge that in the King's brother and heir, Don Carlos, they had an adherent whose devotion to the priestly cause was beyond suspicion, and who might be expected soon to ascend the throne. Ferdinand had been thrice married; he was childless; his state of health miserable; and his life likely to be a short one. The succession to the throne of Spain had moreover, since 1713, been governed by the Salic Law, so that even in the event of Ferdinand leaving female issue Don Carlos would nevertheless inherit the crown. These confident hopes were rudely disturbed by the marriage of the King with his cousin Maria Christina of Naples, followed by an edict, known as the Pragmatic Sanction, repealing the Salic Law which had been introduced with the first Bourbon, and restoring the ancient Castilian custom under which women were capable of succeeding to the crown. A daughter, Isabella, was shortly afterwards born to the new Queen. On the legality of the Pragmatic Sanction the opinions of publicists differed; it was judged, however, by Europe at large not from the point of view of antiquarian theory, but with direct reference to its immediate effect. The three Eastern Courts emphatically condemned it, as an interference with established monarchical right, and as a blow to the cause of European absolutism through the alliance which it would almost certainly produce between the supplanters of Don Carlos and the Liberals of the Spanish Peninsula.  [397] To the clerical and reactionary party at Madrid, it amounted to nothing less than a sentence of destruction, and the utmost pressure was brought to bear upon the weak and dying King with the object of inducing him to undo the alleged wrong which he had done to his brother. In a moment of prostration Ferdinand revoked the Pragmatic Sanction; but, subsequently, regaining some degree of strength, he re-enacted it, and appointed Christina Regent during the continuance of his illness. Don Carlos, protesting against the violation of his rights, had betaken himself to Portugal, where he made common cause with Miguel. His adherents had no intention of submitting to the change of succession. Their resentment was scarcely restrained during Ferdinand's life-time, and when, in September, 1833, his long-expected death took place, and the child Isabella was declared Queen under the Regency of her mother, open rebellion broke out, and Carlos was proclaimed King in several of the northern provinces.

[The Regency and the Carlists.]

[Quadruple Treaty, April 22, 1834.]

[Miguel and Carlos removed, May, 1834.]

For the moment the forces of the Regency seemed to be far superior to those of the insurgents, and Don Carlos failed to take advantage of the first outburst of enthusiasm and to place himself at the head of his followers. He remained in Portugal, while Christina, as had been expected, drew nearer to the Spanish Liberals, and ultimately called to power a Liberal minister, Martinez de la Rosa, under whom a constitution was given to Spain by Royal Statute (April 10, 1834). At the same time negotiations were opened with Portugal and with the Western Powers, in the hope of forming an alliance which should drive both Miguel and Carlos from the Peninsula. On the 22nd of April, 1834, a Quadruple Treaty was signed at London, in which the Spanish Government undertook to send an army into Portugal against Miguel, the Court of Lisbon pledging itself in return to use all the means in its power to expel Don Carlos from Portuguese territory. England engaged to co-operate by means of its fleet. The assistance of France, if it should be deemed necessary for the attainment of the objects of the Treaty, was to be rendered in such manner as should be settled by common consent. In pursuance of the policy of the Treaty, and even before the formal engagement was signed, a Spanish division under General Rodil crossed the frontier and marched against Miguel. The forces of the usurper were defeated. The appearance of the English fleet and the publication of the Treaty of Quadruple Alliance rendered further resistance hopeless, and on the 22nd of May Miguel made his submission, and in return for a large pension renounced all rights to the crown, and undertook to quit the Peninsula for ever. Don Carlos, refusing similar conditions, went on board an English ship, and was conducted to London.  [398]

[Carlos appears in Spain.]

With respect to Portugal, the Quadruple Alliance had completely attained its object; and in so far as the Carlist cause was strengthened by the continuance of civil war in the neighbouring country, this source of strength was no doubt withdrawn from it. But in its effect upon Don Carlos himself the action of the Quadruple Alliance was worse than useless. While fulfilling the letter of the Treaty, which stipulated for the expulsion of the two pretenders from the Peninsula, the English Admiral had removed Carlos from Portugal, where he was comparatively harmless, and had taken no effective guarantee that he should not re-appear in Spain itself and enforce his claim by arms. Carlos had not been made a prisoner of war; he had made no promises and incurred no obligations; nor could the British Government, after his arrival in this country, keep him in perpetual restraint. Quitting England after a short residence, he travelled in disguise through France, crossed the Pyrenees, and appeared on the 10th of July, 1834, at the headquarters of the Carlist insurgents in Navarre.

[The Basque Provinces.]

In the country immediately below the western Pyrenees, the so-called Basque Provinces, lay the chief strength of the Carlist rebellion. These provinces, which were among the most thriving and industrious parts of Spain, might seem by their very superiority an unlikely home for a movement which was directed against everything favourable to liberty, tolerance, and progress in the Spanish kingdom. But the identification of the Basques with the Carlist cause was due in fact to local, not to general, causes; and in fighting to impose a bigoted despot upon the Spanish people, they were in truth fighting to protect themselves from a closer incorporation with Spain. Down to the year 1812, the Basque provinces had preserved more than half of the essentials of independence. Owing to their position on the French frontier, the Spanish monarchy, while destroying all local independence in the interior of Spain, had uniformly treated the Basques with the same indulgence which the Government of Great Britain has shown to the Channel Islands, and which the French monarchy, though in a less degree, showed to the frontier province of Alsace in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. The customs-frontier of the north of Spain was drawn to the south of these districts. The inhabitants imported what they pleased from France without paying any duties; while the heavy import-dues levied at the border of the neighbouring Spanish provinces gave them the opportunity of carrying on an easy and lucrative system of smuggling. The local administration remained to a great extent in the hands of the people themselves; each village preserved its active corporate life; and the effect of this survival of a vigorous local freedom was seen in the remarkable contrast described by travellers between the aspect of the Basque districts and that of Spain at large. The Fueros, or local rights, as the Basques considered them, were in reality, when viewed as part of the order of the Spanish State, a series of exceptional privileges; and it was inevitable that the framers of the Constitution of 1812, in their attempt to create a modern administrative and political system doing justice to the whole of the nation, should sweep away the distinctions which had hitherto marked off one group of provinces from the rest of the community. The continuance of war until the return of Ferdinand, and the overthrow of the Constitution, prevented the plans of the Cortes from being at that time carried into effect; but the revolution of 1820 brought them into actual operation, and the Basques found themselves, as a result of the victory of Liberal principles, compelled to pay duties on their imports, robbed of the profits of their smuggling, and supplanted in the management of their local affairs by an army of officials from Madrid. They had gained by the Constitution little that they had not possessed before, and their losses were immediate, tangible, and substantial. The result was, that although the larger towns, like Bilbao, remained true to modern ideas, the country districts, led chiefly by priests, took up arms on behalf of the absolute monarchy, assisted the French in the restoration of despotism in 1823, and remained the permanent enemies of the constitutional cause.  [399] On the death of Ferdinand they declared at once for Don Carlos, and rose in rebellion against the Government of Queen Christina, by which they considered the privileges of the Basque Provinces and the interests of Catholic orthodoxy to be alike threatened.

[Carlist victories, 1834-5.]

There was little in the character of Don Carlos to stimulate the loyalty even of his most benighted partizans. Of military and political capacity he was totally destitute, and his continued absence in Portugal when the conflict had actually begun proved him to be wanting in the natural impulses of a brave man. It was, however, his fortune to be served by a soldier of extraordinary energy and skill; and the first reverses of the Carlists were speedily repaired, and a system of warfare organised which made an end of the hopes of easy conquest with which the Government of Christina had met the insurrection. Fighting in a worthless cause, and commanding resources scarcely superior to those of a brigand chief, the Carlist leader, Zumalacarregui, inflicted defeat after defeat upon the generals who were sent to destroy him. The mountainous character of the country and the universal hostility of the inhabitants made the exertions of a regular soldiery useless against the alternate flights and surprises of men who knew every mountain track, and who gained information of the enemy's movements from every cottager. Terror was added by Zumalacarregui to all his other methods for demoralising his adversary. In the exercise of reprisals he repeatedly murdered all his prisoners in cold blood, and gave to the war so savage a character that foreign Governments at last felt compelled to urge upon the belligerents some regard for the usages of the civilised world. The appearance of Don Carlos himself in the summer of 1834 raised still higher the confidence already inspired by the victories of his general. It was in vain that the old constitutionalist soldier, Mina, who had won so great a name in these provinces in 1823, returned after long exile to the scene of his exploits. Enfeebled and suffering, he was no longer able to place himself at the head of his troops, and he soon sought to be relieved from a hopeless task. His successor, the War Minister Valdes, took the field announcing his determination to act upon a new system, and to operate with his troops in mass instead of pursuing the enemy's bands with detachments. The result of this change of tactics was a defeat more ruinous and complete than had befallen any of Valdes' predecessors. He with difficulty withdrew the remainder of his army from the insurgent provinces; and the Carlist leader master of the open country up to the borders of Castile, prepared to cross the Ebro and to march upon Madrid.  [400]

[Request to France for assistance, May, 1835.]

The Ministers of Queen Christina, who had up till this time professed themselves confident in their power to deal with the insurrection, could now no longer conceal the real state of affairs. Valdes himself declared that the rebellion could not be subdued without foreign aid; and after prolonged discussion in the Cabinet it was determined to appeal to France for armed assistance. The flight of Don Carlos from England had already caused an additional article to be added to the Treaty of the Quadruple Alliance, in which France undertook so to watch the frontier of the Pyrenees that no reinforcements or munition of war should reach the Carlists from that side, while England promised to supply the troops of Queen Christina with arms and stores, and, if necessary, to render assistance with a naval force (18th August, 1834). The foreign supplies sent to the Carlists had thus been cut off both by land and sea; but more active assistance seemed indispensable if Madrid was to be saved from falling into the enemy's hands. The request was made to Louis Philippe's Government to occupy the Basque Provinces with a corps of twelve thousand men. Reasons of weight might be addressed to the French Court in favour of direct intervention. The victory of Don Carlos would place upon the throne of Spain a representative of all those reactionary influences throughout Europe which were in secret or in open hostility to the House of Orleans, and definitely mark the failure of that policy which had led France to combine with England in expelling Don Miguel from Portugal. On the other hand, the experience gained from earlier military enterprises in Spain might well deter even bolder politicians than those about Louis Philippe from venturing upon a task whose ultimate issues no man could confidently forecast. Napoleon had wrecked his empire in the struggle beyond the Pyrenees not less than in the march to Moscow: and the expedition of 1823, though free from military difficulties, had exposed France to the humiliating responsibility for every brutal act of a despotism which, in the very moment of its restoration, had scorned the advice of its restorers. The constitutional Government which invoked French assistance might, moreover, at any moment give place to a democratic faction which already harassed it within the Cortes, and which, in its alliance with the populace in many of the great cities, threatened to throw Spain into anarchy, or to restore the ill-omened constitution of 1812. But above all, the attitude of the three Eastern Powers bade the ruler of France hesitate before committing himself to a military occupation of Spanish territory. Their sympathies were with Don Carlos, and the active participation of France in the quarrel might possibly call their opposing forces into the field and provoke a general war. In view of the evident dangers arising out of the proposed intervention, the French Government, taking its stand on that clause of the Quadruple Treaty which provided that the assistance of France should be rendered in such manner as might be agreed upon by all the parties to the Treaty, addressed itself to Great Britain, inquiring whether this country would undertake a joint responsibility in the enterprise and share with France the consequences to which it might give birth. Lord Palmerston in reply declined to give the assurance required. He stated that no objection would be raised by the British Government to the entry of French troops into Spain, but that such intervention must be regarded as the work of France alone, and be undertaken by France at its own peril. This answer sufficed for Louis Philippe and his Ministers. The Spanish Government was informed that the grant of military assistance was impossible, and that the entire public opinion of France would condemn so dangerous an undertaking. As a proof of goodwill, permission was given to Queen Christina to enrol volunteers both in England and France. Arms were supplied; and some thousands of needy or adventurous men ultimately made their way from our own country as well as from France, to earn under Colonel De Lacy Evans and other leaders a scanty harvest of profit or renown.

[Continuance of the war.]

The first result of the rejection of the Spanish demand for the direct intervention of France was the downfall of the Minister by whom this demand had been made. His successor, Toreno, though a well-known patriot, proved unable to stem the tide of revolution that was breaking over the country. City after city set up its own Junta, and acted as if the central government had ceased to exist. Again the appeal for help was made to Louis Philippe, and now, not so much to avert the victory of Don Carlos as to save Spain from anarchy and from the constitution of 1812. Before an answer could arrive, Toreno in his turn had passed away. Mendizabal, a banker who had been entrusted with financial business at London, and who had entered into friendly relations with Lord Palmerston, was called to office, as a politician acceptable to the democratic party, and the advocate of a close connection with England rather than with France. In spite of the confident professions of the Minister, and in spite of some assistance actually rendered by the English fleet, no real progress was made in subduing the Carlists, or in restoring administrative and financial order. The death of Zumalacarregui, who was forced by Don Carlos to turn northwards and besiege Bilbao instead of marching upon Madrid immediately after his victories, had checked the progress of the rebellion at a critical moment; but the Government, distracted and bankrupt, could not use the opportunity which thus offered itself, and the war soon blazed out anew not only in the Basque Provinces but throughout the north of Spain. For year after year the monotonous struggle continued, while Cortes succeeded Cortes and faction supplanted faction, until there remained scarcely an officer who had not lost his reputation or a politician who was not useless and discredited.

[Constitution of 1837.]

[End of the war, Sept., 1839.]

The Queen Regent, who from the necessities of her situation had for awhile been the representative of the popular cause, gradually identified herself with the interests opposed to democratic change; and although her name was still treated with some respect, and her policy was habitually attributed to the misleading advice of courtiers, her real position was well understood at Madrid, and her own resistance was known to be the principal obstacle to the restoration of the Constitution of 1812. It was therefore determined to overcome this resistance by force; and on the 13th of August, 1836, a regiment of the garrison of Madrid, won over by the Exaltados, marched upon the palace of La Granja, invaded the Queen's apartments, and compelled her to sign an edict restoring the Constitution of 1812 until the Cortes should establish that or some other. Scenes of riot and murder followed in the capital. Men of moderate opinions, alarmed at the approach of anarchy, prepared to unite with Don Carlos. King Louis Philippe, who had just consented to strengthen the French legion by the addition of some thousands of trained soldiers, now broke entirely from the Spanish connection, and dismissed his Ministers who refused to acquiesce in this change of policy. Meanwhile the Eastern Powers and all rational partisans of absolutism besought Don Carlos to give those assurances which would satisfy the wavering mass among his opponents, and place him on the throne without the sacrifice of any right that was worth preserving. It seemed as if the opportunity was too clear to be misunderstood; but the obstinacy and narrowness of Don Carlos were proof against every call of fortune. Refusing to enter into any sort of engagement, he rendered it impossible for men to submit to him who were not willing to accept absolutism pure and simple. On the other hand, a majority of the Cortes, whose eyes were now opened to the dangers around them, accepted such modifications of the Constitution of 1812 that political stability again appeared possible (June, 1837). The danger of a general transference of all moderate elements in the State to the side of Don Carlos was averted; and, although the Carlist armies took up the offensive, menaced the capital, and made incursions into every part of Spain, the darkest period of the war was now over; and when, after undertaking in person the march upon Madrid, Don Carlos swerved aside and ultimately fell back in confusion to the Ebro, the suppression of the rebellion became a certainty. General Espartero, with whom such distinction remained as was to be gathered in this miserable war, forced back the adversary step by step, and carried fire and sword into the Basque Provinces, employing a system of devastation which alone seemed capable of exhausting the endurance of the people. Reduced to the last extremity, the Carlist leaders turned their arms against one another. The priests excommunicated the generals, and the generals shot the priests; and finally, on the 14th September, after the surrender of almost all his troops to Espartero, Don Carlos crossed the French frontier, and the conflict which during six years had barbarised and disgraced the Spanish nation, reached its close.

[End of the Regency, Isabella, Queen, Nov., 1843.]

The triumph of Queen Christina over her rivals was not of long duration. Confronted by a strong democratic party both in the Cortes and in the country, she endeavoured in vain to govern by the aid of Ministers of her own choice. Her popularity had vanished away. The scandals of her private life gave just offence to the nation, and fatally weakened her political authority. Forced by insurrection to bestow office on Espartero, as the chief of the Progressist party, she found that the concessions demanded by this general were more than she could grant, and in preference to submitting to them she resigned the Regency, and quitted Spain (Oct., 1840). Espartero, after some interval, was himself appointed Regent by the Cortes. For two years he maintained himself in power, then in his turn he fell before the combined attack of his political opponents and the extreme men of his own party, and passed into exile. There remained in Spain no single person qualified to fill the vacant Regency, and in default of all other expedients the young princess Isabella, who was now in her fourteenth year, was declared of full age, and placed on the throne (Nov., 1843). Christina returned to Madrid. After some rapid changes of Ministry, a more durable Government was formed from the Moderado party under General Narvaez; and in comparison with the period that had just ended, the first few years of the new reign were years of recovery and order.

[War between Mehemet Ali and the Porte, 1832.]

The withdrawal of Louis Philippe from his engagements after the capitulation of Maria Christina to the soldiery at La Granja in 1836 had diminished the confidence placed in the King by the British Ministry; but it had not destroyed the relations of friendship existing between the two Governments. Far more serious causes of difference arose out of the course of events in the East, and the extension of the power of Mehemet Ali, Viceroy of Egypt. The struggle between Mehemet and his sovereign, long foreseen, broke out in the year 1832. After the establishment of the Hellenic Kingdom, the island of Crete had been given to Mehemet in return for his services to the Ottoman cause by land and sea. This concession, however, was far from satisfying the ambition of the Viceroy, and a quarrel with Abdallah, Pasha of Acre, gave him the opportunity of throwing an army into Palestine without directly rebelling against his sovereign (Nov., 1831). Ibrahim, in command of his father's forces, laid siege to Acre; and had this fortress at once fallen, it would probably have been allowed by the Sultan to remain in its conqueror's hands as an addition to his own province, since the Turkish army was not ready for war, and it was no uncommon thing in the Ottoman Empire for one provincial governor to possess himself of territory at the expense of another. So obstinate, however, was the defence of Acre that time was given to the Porte to make preparations for war; and in the spring of 1832, after the issue of a proclamation declaring Mehemet and his son to be rebels, a Turkish army led by Hussein Pasha entered Syria.

[Ibrahim conquers Syria and Asia Minor.]

Ibrahim, while the siege of Acre was proceeding, had overrun the surrounding country. He was now in possession of all the interior of Palestine, and the tribes of Lebanon had joined him in the expectation of gaining relief from the burdens of Turkish misgovernment. The fall of Acre, while the relieving army was still near Antioch, enabled him to throw his full strength against his opponent in the valley of the Orontes. It was the intention of the Turkish general, whose forces, though superior in number, had not the European training of Ibrahim's regiments, to meet the assault of the Egyptians in an entrenched camp near Hama. The commander of the vanguard, however, pushed forward beyond this point, and when far in advance of the main body of the army was suddenly attacked by Ibrahim at Homs. Taken at a moment of complete disorder, the Turks were put to the rout. Their overthrow and flight so alarmed the general-in-chief that he determined to fall back upon Aleppo, leaving Antioch and all the valley of the Orontes to the enemy. Aleppo was reached, but the governor, won over by Ibrahim, closed the gates of the city against the famishing army, and forced Hussein to continue his retreat to the mountains which form the barrier between Syria and Cilicia. Here, at the pass of Beilan, he was attacked by Ibrahim, outmanoeuvred, and forced to retreat with heavy loss (July 29). The pursuit was continued through the province of Cilicia. Hussein's army, now completely demoralised, made its escape to the centre of Asia Minor; the Egyptian, after advancing as far as Mount Taurus and occupying the passes in this range, took up his quarters in the conquered country in order to refresh his army and to await reinforcements. After two months' halt he renewed his march, crossed Mount Taurus and occupied Konieh, the capital of this district. Here the last and decisive blow was struck. A new Turkish army, led by Reschid Pasha, Ibrahim's colleague in the siege of Missolonghi, advanced from the north. Against his own advice, Reschid was compelled by orders from Constantinople to risk everything in an engagement. He attacked Ibrahim at Konieh on the 21st of December, and was completely defeated. Reschid himself was made a prisoner; his army dispersed; the last forces of the Sultan were exhausted, and the road to the Bosphorus lay open before the Egyptian invader.

[Russian aid offered to the Sultan.]

[Peace of Kutaya, April, 1833.]

In this extremity the Sultan looked around for help; nor were offers of assistance wanting. The Emperor Nicholas had since the Treaty of Adrianople assumed the part of the magnanimous friend; his belief was that the Ottoman Empire might by judicious management and without further conquest be brought into a state of habitual dependence upon Russia; and before the result of the battle of Konieh was known General Muravieff had arrived at Constantinople bringing the offer of Russian help both by land and sea, and tendering his own personal services in the restoration of peace. Mahmud had to some extent been won over by the Czar's politic forbearance in the execution of the Treaty of Adrianople. His hatred of Mehemet Ali was a consuming passion; and in spite of the general conviction both of his people and of his advisers that no possible concession to a rebellious vassal could be so fatal as the protection of the hereditary enemy of Islam, he was disposed to accept the Russian tender of assistance. As a preliminary, Muravieff was sent to Alexandria with permission to cede Acre to Mehemet Ali, if in return the Viceroy would make over his fleet to the Sultan. These were conditions on which no reasonable man could have expected that Mehemet would make peace; and the intention of the Russian Court probably was that Muravieff's mission should fail. The envoy soon returned to Constantinople announcing that his terms were rejected. Mahmud now requested that Russian ships might be sent to the Bosphorus, and to the dismay of the French and English embassies a Russian squadron appeared before the capital. Admiral Roussin, the French ambassador, addressed a protest to the Sultan and threatened to leave Constantinople. His remonstrances induced Mahmud to consent to some more serious negotiation being opened with Mehemet Ali. A French envoy was authorised to promise the Viceroy the governorship of Tripoli in Syria as well as Acre; his overtures, however, were not more acceptable than those of Muravieff, and Mehemet openly declared that if peace were not concluded on his own terms within six weeks, he should order Ibrahim, who had halted at Kutaya, to continue his march on the Bosphorus. Thoroughly alarmed at this threat, and believing that no Turkish force could keep Ibrahim out of the capital, Mahmud applied to Russia for more ships and also for troops. Again Admiral Roussin urged upon the Sultan that if Syria could be reconquered only by Russian forces it was more than lost to the Porte. His arguments were supported by the Divan, and with such effect that a French diplomatist was sent to Ibrahim with power to negotiate for peace on any terms. Preliminaries were signed at Kutaya under French mediation on the 10th of April, 1833, by which the Sultan made over to his vassal not only the whole of Syria but the province of Adana which lies between Mount Taurus and the Mediterranean. After some delay these Preliminaries were ratified by Mahmud; and Ibrahim, after his dazzling success both in war and in diplomacy, commenced the evacuation of northern Anatolia.

[Treaty of Unkiar Skelessi, July, 1833.]

For the moment it appeared that French influence had decisively prevailed at Constantinople, and that the troops of the Czar had been summoned from Sebastopol only to be dismissed with the ironical compliments of those who were most anxious to get rid of them. But this was not really the case. Whether the fluctuations in the Sultan's policy had been due to mere fear and irresolution, or whether they had to some extent proceeded from the desire to play off one Power against another, it was to Russia, not France, that his final confidence was given. The soldiers of the Czar were encamped by the side of the Turks on the eastern shore of the Bosphorus; his ships lay below Constantinople. Here on the 8th of July a Treaty was signed at the palace of Unkiar Skelessi,  [401] in which Russia and Turkey entered into a defensive alliance of the most intimate character, each Power pledging itself to render assistance to the other, not only against the attack of an external enemy, but in every event where its peace and security might be endangered. Russia undertook, in cases where its support should be required, to provide whatever amount of troops the Sultan should consider necessary both by sea and land, the Porte being charged with no part of the expense beyond that of the provisioning of the troops. The duration of the Treaty was fixed in the first instance for eight years. A secret article, which, however, was soon afterwards published, declared that, in order to diminish the burdens of the Porte, the Czar would not demand the material help to which the Treaty entitled him; while, in substitution for such assistance, the Porte undertook, when Russia should be at war, to close the Dardanelles to the war-ships of all nations.

[Effect of this Treaty.]

By the Treaty of Unkiar Skelessi, Russia came nearer than it has at any time before or since to that complete ascendency at Constantinople which has been the modern object of its policy. The success of its diplomatists had in fact been too great; for, if the abstract right of the Sultan to choose his own allies had not yet been disputed by Europe at large, the clause in the Treaty which related to the Dardanelles touched the interests of every Power which possessed a naval station in the Mediterranean. By the public law of Europe the Black Sea, which until the eighteenth century was encompassed entirely by the Sultan's territory, formed no part of the open waters of the world, but a Turkish lake to which access was given through the Dardanelles only at the pleasure of the Porte. When, in the eighteenth century, Russia gained a footing on the northern shore of the Euxine, this carried with it no right to send war-ships through the straits into the Mediterranean, nor had any Power at war with Russia the right to send a fleet into the Black Sea otherwise than by the Sultan's consent. The Treaty of Unkiar Skelessi, in making Turkey the ally of Russia against all its enemies, converted the entrance to the Black Sea into a Russian fortified post, from behind which Russia could freely send forth its ships of war into the Mediterranean, while its own ports and arsenals remained secure against attack. England and France, which were the States whose interests were principally affected, protested against the Treaty, and stated they reserved to themselves the right of taking such action in regard to it as occasion might demand. Nor did the opposition rest with the protests of diplomatists. The attention both of the English nation and of its Government was drawn far more than hitherto to the future of the Ottoman Empire. Political writers exposed with unwearied vigour, and not without exaggeration, the designs of the Court of St. Petersburg in Asia as well as in Europe; and to this time, rather than to any earlier period, belongs the first growth of that strong national antagonism to Russia which found its satisfaction in the Crimean War, and which has by no means lost its power at the present day.

[France and Mehemet Ali.]

In desiring to check the extension of Russia's influence in the Levant, Great Britain and France were at one. The lines of policy, however, followed by these two States were widely divergent. Great Britain sought to maintain the Sultan's power in its integrity; France became in an increasing degree the patron and the friend of Mehemet Ali. Since the expedition of Napoleon to Egypt in 1798, which was itself the execution of a design formed in the reign of Louis XVI., Egypt had largely retained its hold on the imagination of the leading classes in France. Its monuments, its relics of a mighty past, touched a livelier chord among French men of letters and science than India has at any time found among ourselves; and although the hope of national conquest vanished with Napoleon's overthrow, Egypt continued to afford a field of enterprise to many a civil and military adventurer. Mehemet's army and navy were organised by French officers; he was surrounded by French agents and men of business; and after the conquest of Algiers had brought France on to the southern shore of the Mediterranean, the advantages of a close political relation with Egypt did not escape the notice of statesmen who saw in Gibraltar and Malta the most striking evidences of English maritime power. Moreover the personal fame of Mehemet strongly affected French opinion. His brilliant military reforms, his vigorous administration, and his specious achievements in finance created in the minds of those who were too far off to know the effects of his tyranny the belief that at the hands of this man the East might yet awaken to new life. Thus, from a real conviction of the superiority of Mehemet's rule over that of the House of Osman no less than from considerations of purely national policy, the French Government, without any public or official bond of union, gradually became the acknowledged supporters of the Egyptian conqueror, and connected his interests with their own.

[Rule of Mehemet and Ibrahim.]

Sultan Mahmud had ratified the Preliminaries of Kutaya with wrath in his heart; and from this time all his energies were bent upon the creation of a force which should wrest back the lost provinces and take revenge upon his rebellious vassal. As eager as Mehemet himself to reconstruct his form of government upon the models of the West, though far less capable of impressing upon his work the stamp of a single guiding will, thwarted moreover by the jealous interference of Russia whenever his reforms seemed likely to produce any important result, he nevertheless succeeded in introducing something of European system and discipline into his army under the guidance of foreign soldiers, among whom was a man then little known, but destined long afterwards to fill Europe with his fame, the Prussian staff-officer Moltke. On the other side Mehemet and Ibrahim knew well that the peace was no more than an armed truce, and that what had been won by arms could only be maintained by constant readiness to meet attack. Under pressure of this military necessity, Ibrahim sacrificed whatever sources of strength were open to him in the hatred borne by his new subjects to the Turkish yoke, and in their hopes of relief from oppression under his own rule. Welcomed at first as a deliverer, he soon proved a heavier task-master than any who had gone before him. The conscription was rigorously enforced; taxation became more burdensome; the tribes who had enjoyed a wild independence in the mountains were disarmed and reduced to the level of their fellow-subjects. Thus the discontent which had so greatly facilitated the conquest of the border-provinces soon turned against the conqueror himself, and one uprising after another shook Ibrahim's hold upon Mount Lebanon and the Syrian desert. The Sultan watched each outbreak against his adversary with grim joy, impatient for the moment when the re-organisation of his own forces should enable him to re-enter the field and to strike an overwhelming blow.

[The commerce of the Levant.]

With all its characteristics of superior intelligence in the choice of means, the system of Mehemet All was in its end that of the genuine Oriental despot. His final object was to convert as many as possible of his subjects into soldiers, and to draw into his treasury the profits of the labour of all the rest. With this aim he gradually ousted from their rights of proprietorship the greater part of the land-owners of Egypt, and finally proclaimed the entire soil to be State-domain, appropriating at prices fixed by himself the whole of its produce. The natural commercial intercourse of his dominions gave place to a system of monopolies carried on by the Government itself. Rapidly as this system, which was introduced into the newly-conquered provinces, filled the coffers of Mehemet Ali, it offered to the Sultan, whose paramount authority was still acknowledged, the means of inflicting a deadly injury upon him by a series of commercial treaties with the European Powers, granting to western traders a free market throughout the Ottoman Empire. Resistance to such a measure would expose Mehemet to the hostility of the whole mercantile interest of Europe; submission to it would involve the loss of a great part of that revenue on which his military power depended. It was probably with this result in view, rather than from any more obvious motive, that in the year 1838 the Sultan concluded a new commercial Treaty with England, which was soon followed by similar agreements with other States.

[Campaign of Nissib, June, 1839.]

The import of the Sultan's commercial policy was not lost upon Mehemet, who had already determined to declare himself independent. He saw that war was inevitable, and bade Ibrahim collect his forces in the neighbourhood of Aleppo, while the generals of the Sultan massed on the upper Euphrates the troops that had been successfully employed in subduing the wild tribes of Kurdistan. The storm was seen to be gathering, and the representatives of foreign Powers urged the Sultan, but in vain, to refrain from an enterprise which might shatter his empire. Mahmud was now a dying man. Exhausted by physical excess and by the stress and passion of his long reign, he bore in his heart the same unquenchable hatreds as of old; and while assuring the ambassadors of his intention to maintain the peace, he despatched a letter to his commander-in-chief, without the knowledge of any single person, ordering him to commence hostilities. The Turkish army crossed the frontier on the 23rd of May, 1839. In the operations which followed, the advice and protests of Moltke and the other European officers at head-quarters were persistently disregarded. The Turks were outmanoeuvred and cut off from their communications, and on the 24th of June the onslaught of Ibrahim swept them from their position at Nissib in utter rout. The whole of their artillery and stores fell into the hands of the enemy: the army dispersed. Mahmud did not live to hear of the catastrophe. Six days after the battle of Nissib was fought, and while the messenger who bore the news was still in Anatolia, he expired, leaving the throne to his son, Abdul Medjid, a youth of sixteen. Scarcely had the new Sultan been proclaimed when it became known that the Admiral, Achmet Fewzi, who had been instructed to attack the Syrian coast, had sailed into the port of Alexandria, and handed over the Turkish fleet to Mehemet Ali himself.

[Relations of the Powers to Mehemet.]

[Quadruple Treaty without France. July, 1840.]

The very suddenness of these disasters, which left the Ottoman Empire rulerless and without defence by land or sea, contributed ultimately to its preservation, inasmuch as it impelled the Powers to combined action, which, under less urgent pressure, would probably not have been attainable. On the announcement of the exorbitant conditions of peace demanded by Mehemet, the ambassadors addressed a collective note to the Divan, requesting that no answer might be made until the Courts had arrived at some common resolution. Soon afterwards the French and English fleets appeared at the Dardanelles, nominally to protect Constantinople against the attack of the Viceroy, in reality to guard against any sudden movement on the part of Russia. This display of force was, however, not necessary, for the Czar, in spite of some expressions to the contrary, had already convinced himself that it was impossible to act upon the Treaty of Unkiar Skelessi and to make the protectorate of Turkey the affair of Russia alone. The tone which had been taken by the English Government during the last preceding years proved that any attempt to exercise exclusive power at Constantinople would have been followed by war with Great Britain, in which most, if not all, of the European Powers would have stood on the side of the latter. Abandoning therefore the hope of attaining sole control, the Russian Government addressed itself to the task of widening as far as possible the existing divergence between England and France. Nor was this difficult. The Cabinet of the Tuileries desired to see Mehemet Ali issue with increased strength from the conflict, or even to establish his dynasty at Constantinople in place of the House of Osman. Lord Palmerston, always jealous and suspicious of Louis Philippe, refused to believe that the growth of Russian power could be checked by dividing the Ottoman Empire, or that any system of Eastern policy could be safely based on the personal qualities of a ruler now past his seventieth year.  [402] He had moreover his own causes of discontent with Mehemet. The possibility of establishing an overland route to India either by way of the Euphrates or of the Red Sea had lately been engaging the attention of the English Government, and Mehemet had not improved his position by raising obstacles to either line of passage. It was partly in consequence of the hostility of Mehemet, who was now master of a great part of Arabia, and of his known devotion to French interests, that the port of Aden in the Red Sea was at this time occupied by England. If, while Russia accepted the necessity of combined European action and drew nearer to its rival, France persisted in maintaining the claim of the Viceroy to extended dominion, the exclusion of France from the European concert was the only possible result. There was no doubt as to the attitude of the remaining Powers. Metternich, whether from genuine pedantry, or in order to avoid the expression of those fears of Russia which really governed his Eastern policy, repeated his threadbare platitudes on the necessity of supporting legitimate dynasties against rebels, and spoke of the victor of Konieh and Nissib as if he had been a Spanish constitutionalist or a recalcitrant German professor. The Court of Berlin followed in the same general course. In all Europe Mehemet Ali had not a single ally, with the exception of the Government of Louis Philippe. Under these circumstances it was of little avail to the Viceroy that his army stood on Turkish soil without a foe before it, and that the Sultan's fleet lay within his own harbour of Alexandria. The intrigues by which he hoped to snatch a hasty peace from the inexperience of the young Sultan failed, and he learnt in October that no arrangement which he might make with the Porte without the concurrence of the Powers would be recognised as valid. In the meantime Russia was suggesting to the English Government one project after another for joint military action with the object of driving Mehemet from Syria and restoring this province to the Porte; and at the beginning of the following year it was determined on Metternich's proposition that a Conference should forthwith be held in London for the settlement of Eastern affairs. The irreconcilable difference between the intentions of France and those of the other Powers at once became evident. France proposed that all Syria and Egypt should be given in hereditary dominion to Mehemet Ali, with no further obligation towards the Porte than the payment of a yearly tribute. The counter-proposal of England was that Mehemet, recognising the Sultan's authority, should have the hereditary government of Egypt alone, that he should entirely withdraw from all Northern Syria, and hold Palestine only as an ordinary governor appointed by the Porte for his lifetime. To this proposition all the Powers with the exception of France gave their assent. Continued negotiation only brought into stronger relief the obstinacy of Lord Palmerston, and proved the impossibility of attaining complete agreement. At length, when it had been discovered that the French Cabinet was attempting to conduct a separate mediation, the Four Powers, without going through the form of asking for French sanction, signed on the 15th of July a Treaty with the Sultan pledging themselves to enforce upon Mehemet Ali the terms arranged. The Sultan undertook in the first instance to offer Mehemet Egypt in perpetuity and southern Syria for his lifetime. If this offer was not accepted within ten days, Egypt alone was to be offered. If at the end of twenty days Mehemet still remained obstinate, that offer in its turn was to be withdrawn, and the Sultan and the Allies were to take such measures as the interests of the Ottoman Empire might require.  [403]

[Warlike spirit in France, 1840.]

The publication of this Treaty, excluding France as it did from the concert of Europe, produced a storm of indignation at Paris. Thiers, who more than any man had by his writings stimulated the spirit of aggressive warfare among the French people and revived the worship of Napoleon, was now at the head of the Government. His jealousy for the prestige of France, his comparative indifference to other matters when once the national honour appeared to be committed, his sanguine estimate of the power of his country, rendered him a peculiarly dangerous Minister at the existing crisis. It was not the wrongs or the danger of Mehemet Ali, but the slight offered to France, and the revived League of the Powers which had humbled it in 1814, that excited the passion of the Minister and the nation. Syria was forgotten; the cry was for the recovery of the frontier of the Rhine, and for revenge for Waterloo. New regiments were enrolled, the fleet strengthened, and the long-delayed fortification of Paris begun. Thiers himself probably looked forward to a campaign in Italy, anticipating that successfully conducted by Napoleon III. in 1859, rather than to an attack upon Prussia; but the general opinion both in France itself and in other states was that, if war should break out, an invasion of Germany was inevitable. The prospect of this invasion roused in a manner little expected the spirit of the German people. Even in the smaller states, and in the Rhenish provinces themselves, which for twenty years had shared the fortunes of France, and in which the introduction of Prussian rule in 1814 had been decidedly unpopular, a strong national movement carried everything before it; and the year 1840 added to the patriotic minstrelsy of Germany a war-song, written by a Rhenish citizen, not less famous than those of 1813 and 1870.  [404] That there were revolutionary forces smouldering throughout Europe, from which France might in a general war have gained some assistance, the events of 1848 sufficiently proved; but to no single Government would a revolutionary war have been fraught with more imminent peril than to that of France itself, and to no one was this conviction more habitually present than to King Louis Philippe. Relying upon his influence within the Chamber of Deputies, itself a body representing the wealth and the caution rather than the hot spirit of France, the King refused to read at the opening of the session in October the speech drawn up for him by Thiers, and accepted the consequent resignation of the Ministry. Guizot, who was ambassador in London, and an advocate for submission to the will of Europe, was called to office, and succeeded after long debate in gaining a vote of confidence from the Chamber. Though preparations for war continued, a policy of peace was now assured. Mehemet Ali was left to his fate; and the stubborn assurance of Lord Palmerston, which had caused so much annoyance to the English Ministry itself, received a striking justification in the face of all Europe.

[Ibrahim expelled from Syria, Sept.-Nov., 1840.]

[Final settlement, Feb., 1841.]

[The Dardanelles.]

The operations of the Allies against Mehemet Ali had now begun. While Prussia kept guard on the Rhine, and Russia undertook to protect Constantinople against any forward movement of Ibrahim, an Anglo-Austrian naval squadron combined with a Turkish land-force in attacking the Syrian coast-towns. The mountain-tribes of the interior were again in revolt. Arms supplied to them by the Allies, and the insurrection soon spread over the greater part of Syria. Ibrahim prepared for an obstinate defence, but his dispositions were frustrated by the extension of the area of conflict, and he was unable to prevent the coast-towns from falling one after another into the hands of the Allies. On the capture of Acre by Sir Charles Napier he abandoned all hope of maintaining himself any longer in Syria, and made his way with the wreck of his army towards the Egyptian frontier. Napier had already arrived before Alexandria, and there executed a convention with the Viceroy, by which the latter, abandoning all claim upon his other provinces, and undertaking to restore the Turkish fleet, was assured of the hereditary possession of Egypt. The convention was one which the English admiral had no authority to conclude, but it contained substantially the terms which the Allies intended to enforce; and after Mehemet had made a formal act of submission to the Sultan, the hereditary government of Egypt was conferred upon himself and his family by a decree published by the Sultan and sanctioned by the Powers. This compromise had been proposed by the French Government after the expiry of the twenty days named in the Treaty of July, and immediately before the fall of M. Thiers, but Palmerston would not then listen to any demand made under open or implied threats of war. Since that time a new and pacific Ministry had come into office; it was no part of Palmerston's policy to keep alive the antagonism between England and France; and he readily accepted an arrangement which, while it saved France from witnessing the total destruction of an ally, left Egypt to a ruler who, whatever his faults, had certainly shown a greater capacity for government than any Oriental of that age. It remained for the Powers to place upon record some authoritative statement of the law recognised by Europe with regard to the Bosphorus and Dardanelles. Russia had already virtually consented to the abrogation of the Treaty of Unkiar Skelessi. It now joined with all the other Powers, including France, in a declaration that the ancient rule of the Ottoman Empire which forbade the passage of these straits to the war-ships of all nations, except when the Porte itself should be at war, was accepted by Europe at large. Russia thus surrendered its chance of gaining by any separate arrangement with Turkey the permanent right of sending its fleets from the Black Sea into the Mediterranean, and so becoming a Mediterranean Power. On the other hand, Sebastopol and the arsenals of the Euxine remained safe against the attack of any maritime Power, unless Turkey itself should take up arms against the Czar. Having regard to the great superiority of England over Russia at sea, and to the accessibility and importance of the Euxine coast towns, it is an open question whether the removal of all international restrictions upon the passage of the Bosphorus and Dardanelles would not be more to the advantage of England than of its rival. This opinion, however, had not been urged before the Crimean War, nor has it yet been accepted in our own country.

[Turkey after 1840.]

[Legislation of Reschid.]

The conclusion of the struggle of 1840 marked with great definiteness the real position which the Ottoman Empire was henceforth to occupy in its relations to the western world. Rescued by Europe at large from the alternatives of destruction at the hands of Ibrahim or complete vassalage under Russia, the Porte entered upon the condition nominally of an independent European State, really of a State existing under the protection of Europe, and responsible to Europe as well for its domestic government as for its alliances and for the conduct of its foreign policy. The necessity of conciliating the public opinion of the West was well understood by the Turkish statesman who had taken the leading part in the negotiations which freed the Porte from dependence upon Russia. Reschid Pasha, the younger, Foreign Minister at the accession of the new Sultan, had gained in an unusual degree the regard and the confidence of the European Ministers with whom, as a diplomatist, he had been brought into contact. As the author of a wide system of reforms, it was his ambition so to purify and renovate the internal administration of the Ottoman Empire that the contrasts which it presented to the civilised order of the West should gradually disappear, and that Turkey should become not only in name but in reality a member of the European world. Stimulated no doubt by the achievements of Mehemet Ali, and anxious to win over to the side of the Porte the interest which Mehemet's partial adoption of European methods and ideas had excited on his behalf, Reschid in his scheme of reform paid an ostentatious homage to the principles of western administration and law, proclaiming the security of person and property, prohibiting the irregular infliction of punishment, recognising the civil rights of Christians and Jews, and transferring the collection of taxes from the provincial governors to the officers of the central authority. The friends of the Ottoman State, less experienced then than now in the value of laws made in a society where there exists no power that can enforce them, and where the agents of government are themselves the most lawless of all the public enemies, hailed in Reschid's enlightened legislation the opening of a new epoch in the life of the Christian and Oriental races subject to the Sultan. But the fall of the Minister before a palace-intrigue soon proved on how slight a foundation these hopes were built. Like other Turkish reformers, Reschid had entered upon a hopeless task; and the name of the man who was once honoured as the regenerator of a great Empire is now almost forgotten.

CHAPTER XVIII.

Europe during the Thirty-years' Peace-Italy and Austria-Mazzini-The House of Savoy-Gioberti-Election of Pius IX.-Reforms expected- Revolution at Palermo-Agitation in Northern Italy-Lombardy-State of the Austrian Empire-Growth of Hungarian National Spirit-The Magyars and Slavs-Transylvania-Parties among the Magyars-Kossuth-The Slavic National Movements in Austria-The Government enters on Reform in Hungary-Policy of the Opposition-The Rural System of Austria- Insurrection in Galicia: the Nobles and the Peasants-Agrarian Edict-Public Opinion in Vienna-Prussia-Accession and Character of King Frederick William IV.-Convocation of the United Diet-Its Debates and Dissolution-France-The Spanish Marriages-Reform Movement-Socialism- Revolution of February-End of the Orleanist Monarchy.

The characteristic of Continental history during the second quarter of this century is the sense of unrest. The long period of European peace which began in 1815 was not one of internal repose; the very absence of those engrossing and imperious interests which belong to a time of warfare gave freer play to the feelings of discontent and the vague longings for a better political order which remained behind after the convulsions of the revolutionary epoch and the military rule of Napoleon had passed away. During thirty years of peace the breach had been widening between those Governments which still represented the system of 1815, and the peoples over whom they ruled. Ideas of liberty, awakenings of national sense, were far more widely diffused in Europe than at the time of the revolutionary war. The seed then prematurely forced into an atmosphere of storm and reaction had borne its fruit: other growths, fertilised or accelerated by Western Liberalism, but not belonging to the same family, were springing up in unexpected strength, and in regions which had hitherto lain outside the movement of the modern world. New forces antagonistic to Government had come into being, penetrating an area unaffected by the constitutional struggles of the Mediterranean States, or by the weaker political efforts of Germany. In the homes of the Magyar and the Slavic subjects of Austria, so torpid throughout the agitation of an earlier time, the passion of nationality was every hour gaining new might. The older popular causes, vanquished for the moment by one reaction after another, had silently established a far stronger hold on men's minds. Working, some in exile and conspiracy, others through such form of political literature as the jealousy of Governments permitted, the leaders of the democratic movement upon the Continent created a power before which the established order at length succumbed. They had not created, nor was it possible under the circumstances that they should create, an order which was capable of taking its place.

[Italy. 1831-1848.]

Italy, rather than France, forms the central figure in any retrospect of Europe immediately before 1848 in which the larger forces at work are not obscured by those for the moment more prominent. The failure of the insurrection of 1831 had left Austria more visibly than before master over the Italian people even in those provinces in which Austria was not nominally sovereign. It had become clear that no effort after reform could be successful either in the Papal States or in the kingdom of Naples so long as Austria held Lombardy and Venice. The expulsion of the foreigner was therefore not merely the task of those who sought to give the Italian race its separate and independent national existence, it was the task of all who would extinguish oppression and misgovernment in any part of the Italian peninsula. Until the power of Austria was broken, it was vain to take up arms against the tyranny of the Duke of Modena or any other contemptible oppressor. Austria itself had twice taught this lesson; and if the restoration of Neapolitan despotism in 1821 could be justified by the disorderly character of the Government then suppressed, the circumstances attending the restoration of the Pope's authority in 1831 had extinguished Austria's claim to any sort of moral respect; for Metternich himself had united with the other European Courts in declaring the necessity for reforms in the Papal Government, and of these reforms, though a single earnest word from Austria would have enforced their execution, not one had been carried into effect. Gradually, but with increasing force as each unhappy year passed by, the conviction gained weight among all men of serious thought that the problem to be faced was nothing less than the destruction of the Austrian yoke. Whether proclaimed as an article of faith or veiled in diplomatic reserve, this belief formed the common ground among men whose views on the immediate future of Italy differed in almost every other particular.

[Mazzini.]

Three main currents of opinion are to be traced in the ferment of ideas which preceded the Italian revolution of 1848. At a time not rich in intellectual or in moral power, the most striking figure among those who are justly honoured as the founders of Italian independence is perhaps that of Mazzini. Exiled during nearly the whole of his mature life, a conspirator in the eyes of all Governments, a dreamer in the eyes of the world, Mazzini was a prophet or an evangelist among those whom his influence led to devote themselves to the one cause of their country's regeneration. No firmer faith, no nobler disinterestedness, ever animated the saint or the patriot; and if in Mazzini there was also something of the visionary and the fanatic, the force with which he grasped the two vital conditions of Italian revival-the expulsion of the foreigner and the establishment of a single national Government-proves him to have been a thinker of genuine political insight. Laying the foundation of his creed deep in the moral nature of man, and constructing upon this basis a fabric not of rights but of duties, he invested the political union with the immediateness, the sanctity, and the beauty of family life. With him, to live, to think, to hope, was to live, to think, to hope for Italy; and the Italy of his ideal was a Republic embracing every member of the race, purged of the priestcraft and the superstition which had degraded the man to the slave, indebted to itself alone for its independence, and consolidated by the reign of equal law. The rigidity with which Mazzini adhered to his own great project in its completeness, and his impatience with any bargaining away of national rights, excluded him from the work of those practical politicians and men of expedients who in 1859 effected with foreign aid the first step towards Italian union; but the influence of his teaching and his organisation in preparing his countrymen for independence was immense; and the dynasty which has rendered to United Italy services which Mazzini thought impossible, owes to this great Republican scarcely less than to its ablest friends.

[Hopes of Piedmont.]

Widely separated from the school of Mazzini in temper and intention was the group of politicians and military men, belonging mostly to Piedmont, who looked to the sovereign and the army of this State as the one hope of Italy in its struggle against foreign rule. The House of Savoy, though foreign in its origin, was, and had been for centuries, a really national dynasty. It was, moreover, by interest and traditional policy, the rival rather than the friend of Austria in Northern Italy. If the fear of revolution had at times brought the Court of Turin into close alliance with Vienna, the connection had but thinly veiled the lasting antagonism of two States which, as neighbours, had habitually sought expansion each at the other's cost. Lombardy, according to the expression of an older time, was the artichoke which the Kings of Piedmont were destined to devour leaf by leaf. Austria, on the other hand, sought extension towards the Alps: it had in 1799 clearly shown its intention of excluding the House of Savoy altogether from the Italian mainland; and the remembrance of this epoch had led the restored dynasty in 1815 to resist the plans of Metternich for establishing a league of all the princes of Italy under Austria's protection. The sovereign, moreover, who after the failure of the constitutional movement of 1821 had mounted the throne surrounded by Austrian bayonets, was no longer alive. Charles Albert of Carignano, who had at that time played so ambiguous a part, and whom Metternich had subsequently endeavoured to exclude from the succession, was on the throne. He had made his peace with absolutism by fighting in Spain against the Cortes in 1823; and since his accession to the throne he had rigorously suppressed the agitation of Mazzini's partizans within his own dominions. But in spite of strong clerical and reactionary influences around him, he had lately shown an independence of spirit in his dealings with Austria which raised him in the estimation of his subjects; and it was believed that his opinions had been deeply affected by the predominance which the idea of national independence was now gaining over that of merely democratic change. If the earlier career of Charles Albert himself cast some doubt upon his personal sincerity, and much more upon his constancy of purpose, there was at least in Piedmont an army thoroughly national in its sentiment, and capable of taking the lead whenever the opportunity should arise for uniting Italy against the foreigner. In no other Italian State was there an effective military force, or one so little adulterated with foreign elements.

[Hopes of the Papacy.]

A third current of opinion in these years of hope and of illusion was that represented in the writings of Gioberti, the depicter of a new and glorious Italy, regenerated not by philosophic republicanism or the sword of a temporal monarch, but by the moral force of a reformed and reforming Papacy. The conception of the Catholic Church as a great Liberal power, strange and fantastic as it now appears, was no dream of an isolated Italian enthusiast; it was an idea which, after the French Revolution of 1830, and the establishment of a government at once anti-clerical and anti-democratic, powerfully influenced some of the best minds in France, and found in Montalembert and Lamennais exponents who commanded the ear of Europe. If the corruption of the Papacy had been at once the spiritual and the political death of Italy, its renovation in purity and in strength would be also the resurrection of the Italian people. Other lands had sought, and sought in vain, to work out their problems under the guidance of leaders antagonistic to the Church, and of popular doctrines divorced from religious faith. To Italy belonged the prerogative of spiritual power. By this power, aroused from the torpor of ages, and speaking, as it had once spoken, to the very conscience of mankind, the gates of a glorious future would be thrown open. Conspirators might fret, and politicians scheme, but the day on which the new life of Italy would begin would be that day when the head of the Church, taking his place as chief of a federation of Italian States, should raise the banner of freedom and national right, and princes and people alike should follow the all-inspiring voice.

[Election of Pius IX., June, 1846.]

[Reforms expected from Pius.]

[Ferrara, June, 1847.]

A monk, ignorant of everything but cloister lore, benighted, tyrannical, the companion in his private life of a few jolly priests and a gossiping barber, was not an alluring emblem of the Church of the future. But in 1846 Pope Gregory XVI., who for the last five years had been engaged in one incessant struggle against insurgents, conspirators, and reformers, and whose prisons were crowded with the best of his subjects, passed away.  [405] His successor, Mastai Ferretti, Bishop of Imola, was elected under the title of Pius IX., after the candidate favoured by Austria had failed to secure the requisite number of votes (June 17). The choice of this kindly and popular prelate was to some extent a tribute to Italian feeling; and for the next eighteen months it appeared as it Gioberti had really divined the secret of the age. The first act of the new Pope was the publication of a universal amnesty for political offences. The prison doors throughout his dominions were thrown open, and men who had been sentenced to confinement for life returned in exultation to their homes. The act created a profound impression throughout Italy, and each good-humoured utterance of Pius confirmed the belief that great changes were at hand. A wild enthusiasm seized upon Rome. The population abandoned itself to festivals in honour of the Pontiff and of the approaching restoration of Roman liberty. Little was done; not much was actually promised; everything was believed. The principle of representative government was discerned in the new Council of State now placed by the side of the College of Cardinals; a more serious concession was made to popular feeling in the permission given to the citizens of Rome, and afterwards to those of the provinces, to enrol themselves in a civic guard. But the climax of excitement was reached when, in answer to a threatening movement of Austria, occasioned by the growing agitation throughout Central Italy, the Papal Court protested against the action of its late protector. By the Treaties of Vienna Austria had gained the right to garrison the citadel of Ferrara, though this town lay within the Ecclesiastical States. Placing a new interpretation on the expression used in the Treaties, the Austrian Government occupied the town of Ferrara itself (June 17th, 1847). The movement was universally understood to be the preliminary to a new occupation of the Papal States, like that of 1831; and the protests of the Pope against the violation of his territory gave to the controversy a European importance. The English and French fleets appeared at Naples; the King of Sardinia openly announced his intention to take the field against Austria if war should break out. By the efforts of neutral Powers a compromise on the occupation of Ferrara was at length arranged; but the passions which had been excited were not appeased, and the Pope remained in popular imagination the champion of Italian independence against Austria, as well as the apostle of constitutional Government and the rights of the people.

[Revolution at Palermo, Jan., 1848.]

In the meantime the agitation begun in Rome was spreading through the north and the south of the peninsula, and beyond the Sicilian Straits. The centenary of the expulsion of the Austrians from Genoa in December, 1746, was celebrated throughout central Italy with popular demonstrations which gave Austria warning of the storm about to burst upon it. In the south, however, impatience under domestic tyranny was a far more powerful force than the distant hope of national independence. Sicily had never forgotten the separate rights which it had once enjoyed, and the constitution given to it under the auspices of England in 1812. Communications passed between the Sicilian leaders and the opponents of the Bourbon Government on the mainland, and in the autumn of 1847 simultaneous risings took place in Calabria and at Messina. These were repressed without difficulty; but the fire smouldered far and wide, and on the 13th of January, 1848, the population of Palermo rose in revolt. For fourteen days the conflict between the people and the Neapolitan troops continued. The city was bombarded, but in the end the people were victorious, and a provisional government was formed by the leaders of the insurrection. One Sicilian town after another followed the example of the capital, and expelled its Neapolitan garrison. Threatened by revolution in Naples itself, King Ferdinand II., grandson of the despot of 1821, now imitated the policy of his predecessor, and proclaimed a constitution. A Liberal Ministry was formed, but no word was said as to the autonomy claimed by Sicily, and promised, as it would seem, by the leaders of the popular party on the mainland. After the first excitement of success was past, it became clear that the Sicilians were as widely at variance with the newly-formed Government at Naples as with that which they had overthrown.

[Agitation in Austrian Italy.]

The insurrection of Palermo gave a new stimulus and imparted more of revolutionary colour to the popular movement throughout Italy. Constitutions were granted in Piedmont and Tuscany. In the Austrian provinces national exasperation against the rule of the foreigner grew daily more menacing. Radetzky, the Austrian Commander-in-chief, had long foreseen the impending struggle, and had endeavoured, but not with complete success, to impress his own views upon the imperial Government. Verona had been made the centre of a great system of fortifications, and the strength of the army under Radetzky's command had been considerably increased, but it was not until the eleventh hour that Metternich abandoned the hope of tiding over difficulties by his old system of police and spies, and permitted the establishment of undisguised military rule. In order to injure the finances of Austria, a general resolution had been made by the patriotic societies of Upper Italy to abstain from the use of tobacco, from which the Government drew a large part of its revenue. On the first Sunday in 1848 Austrian officers, smoking in the streets of Milan, were attacked by the people. The troops were called to arms: a conflict took place, and enough blood was shed to give to the tumult the importance of an actual revolt. In Padua and elsewhere similar outbreaks followed. Radetzky issued a general order to his troops, declaring that the Emperor was determined to defend his Italian dominion whether against an external or domestic foe. Martial law was proclaimed; and for a moment, although Piedmont gave signs of throwing itself into the Italian movement, the awe of Austria's military power hushed the rising tempest. A few weeks more revealed to an astonished world the secret that the Austrian State, so great and so formidable in the eyes of friend and foe, was itself on the verge of dissolution.

[Austria.]

[Affairs in Hungary.]

It was to the absence of all stirring public life, not to any real assimilative power or any high intelligence in administration, that the House of Hapsburg owed, during the eighteenth century, the continued union of that motley of nations or races which successive conquests, marriages, and treaties had brought under its dominion. The violence of the attack made by the Emperor Joseph upon all provincial rights first re-awakened the slumbering spirit of Hungary; but the national movement of that time, which excited such strong hopes and alarms, had been succeeded by a long period of stagnation, and during the Napoleonic wars the repression of everything that appealed to any distinctively national spirit had become more avowedly than before the settled principle of the Austrian Court. In 1812 the Hungarian Diet had resisted the financial measures of the Government. The consequence was that, in spite of the law requiring its convocation every three years, the Diet was not again summoned till 1825. During the intermediate period, the Emperor raised taxes and levies by edict alone. Deprived of its constitutional representation, the Hungarian nobility pursued its opposition to the encroachments of the Crown in the Sessions of each county. At these assemblies, to which there existed no parallel in the western and more advanced States of the Continent, each resident land-owner who belonged to the very numerous caste of the noblesse was entitled to speak and to vote. Retaining, in addition to the right of free discussion and petition, the appointment of local officials, as well as a considerable share in the actual administration, the Hungarian county-assemblies, handing down a spirit of rough independence from an immemorial past, were probably the hardiest relic of self-government existing in any of the great monarchical States of Europe. Ignorant, often uncouth in their habits, oppressive to their peasantry, and dominated by the spirit of race and caste, the mass of the Magyar nobility had indeed proved as impervious to the humanising influences of the eighteenth century as they had to the solicitations of despotism. The Magnates, or highest order of noblesse, who formed a separate chamber in the Diet, had been to some extent denationalised; they were at once more European in their culture, and more submissive to the Austrian Court. In banishing political discussion from the Diet to the County Sessions, the Emperor's Government had intensified the provincial spirit which it sought to extinguish. Too numerous to be won over by personal inducements, and remote from the imperial agencies which had worked so effectively through the Chamber of Magnates, the lesser nobility of Hungary during these years of absolutism carried the habit of political discussion to their homes, and learnt to baffle the imperial Government by withholding all help and all information from its subordinate agents. Each county-assembly became a little Parliament, and a centre of resistance to the usurpation of the Crown. The stimulus given to the national spirit by this struggle against unconstitutional rule was seen not less in the vigorous attacks made upon the Government on the re-assembling of the Diet in 1825, than in the demand that Magyar, and not Latin as heretofore, should be the language used in recording the proceedings of the Diet, and in which communications should pass between the Upper and the Lower House.

[Magyars and Slavs.]

There lay in this demand for the recognition of the national language the germ of a conflict of race against race which was least of all suspected by those by whom the demand was made. Hungary, as a political unity, comprised, besides the Slavic kingdom of Croatia, wide regions in which the inhabitants were of Slavic or Roumanian race, and where the Magyar was known only as a feudal lord. The district in which the population at large belonged to the Magyar stock did not exceed one-half of the kingdom. For the other races of Hungary, who were probably twice as numerous as themselves, the Magyars entertained the utmost contempt, attributing to them the moral qualities of the savage, and denying to them the possession of any nationality whatever. In a country combining so many elements ill-blended with one another, and all alike subject to a German Court at Vienna, Latin, as the language of the Church and formerly the language of international communication, had served well as a neutral means of expression in public affairs. There might be Croatian deputies in the Diet who could not speak Magyar; the Magyars could not understand Croatian; both could understand and could without much effort express themselves in the species of Latin which passed muster at Presburg and at Vienna. Yet no freedom of handling could convert a dead language into a living one; and when the love of country and of ancient right became once more among the Magyars an inspiring passion, it naturally sought a nobler and more spontaneous utterance than dog-latin. Though no law was passed upon the subject in the Parliament in which it was first mooted, speakers in the Diet of 1832 used their mother-tongue; and when the Viennese Government forbade the publication of the debates, reports were circulated in manuscript through the country by Kossuth, a young deputy, who after the dissolution of the Diet in 1836 paid for his defiance of the Emperor by three years' imprisonment.

[Hungary after 1830.]

[The Diet of 1832-36.]

[Széchenyi.]

Hungary now seemed to be entering upon an epoch of varied and rapid national development. The barriers which separated it from the Western world were disappearing. The literature, the ideas, the inventions of Western Europe were penetrating its archaic society, and transforming a movement which in its origin had been conservative and aristocratic into one of far-reaching progress and reform. Alone among the opponents of absolute power on the Continent, the Magyars had based their resistance on positive constitutional right, on prescription, and the settled usage of the past; and throughout the conflict with the Crown between 1812 and 1825 legal right was on the side not of the Emperor but of those whom he attempted to coerce. With excellent judgment the Hungarian leaders had during these years abstained from raising any demand for reforms, appreciating the advantage of a purely defensive position in a combat with a Court pledged in the eyes of all Europe, as Austria was, to the defence of legitimate rights. This policy had gained its end; the Emperor, after thirteen years of conflict, had been forced to re-convoke the Diet, and to abandon the hope of effecting a work in which his uncle, Joseph II., had failed. But, the constitution once saved, that narrow and exclusive body of rights for which the nobility had contended no longer satisfied the needs or the conscience of the time.  [406] Opinion was moving fast; the claims of the towns and of the rural population were making themselves felt; the agitation that followed the overthrow of the Bourbons in 1830 reached Hungary too, not so much through French influence as through the Polish war of independence, in which the Magyars saw a struggle not unlike their own, enlisting their warmest sympathies for the Polish armies so long as they kept the field, and for the exiles who came among them when the conflict was over. By the side of the old defenders of class-privilege there arose men imbued with the spirit of modern Liberalism. The laws governing the relation of the peasant to his lord, which remained nearly as they had been left by Maria Theresa, were dealt with by the Diet of 1832 in so liberal a spirit that the Austrian Government, formerly far in advance of Hungarian opinion on this subject, refused its assent to many of the measures passed. Great schemes of social and material improvement also aroused the public hopes in these years. The better minds became conscious of the real aspect of Hungarian life in comparison with that of civilised Europe-of its poverty, its inertia, its boorishness. Extraordinary energy was thrown into the work of advance by Count Széchenyi, a nobleman whose imagination had been fired by the contrast which the busy industry of Great Britain and the practical interests of its higher classes presented to the torpor of his own country. It is to him that Hungary owes the bridge uniting its double capital at Pesth, and that Europe owes the unimpeded navigation of the Danube, which he first rendered possible by the destruction of the rocks known as the Iron Gates at Orsova. Sanguine, lavishly generous, an ardent patriot, Széchenyi endeavoured to arouse men of his own rank, the great and the powerful in Hungary, to the sense of what was due from them to their country as leaders in its industrial development. He was no revolutionist, nor was he an enemy to Austria. A peaceful political future would best have accorded with his own designs for raising Hungary to its due place among nations.

[Transylvania.]

That the Hungarian movement of this time was converted from one of fruitful progress into an embittered political conflict ending in civil war was due, among other causes, to the action of the Austrian Cabinet itself. Wherever constitutional right existed, there Austria saw a natural enemy. The province of Transylvania, containing a mixed population of Magyars, Germans, and Roumanians, had, like Hungary, a Diet of its own, which Diet ought to have been summoned every year. It was, however, not once assembled between 1811 and 1834. In the agitation at length provoked in Transylvania by this disregard of constitutional right, the Magyar element naturally took the lead, and so gained complete ascendancy in the province. When the Diet met in 1834, its language and conduct were defiant in the highest degree. It was speedily dissolved, and the scandal occasioned by its proceedings disturbed the last days of the Emperor Francis, who died in 1835, leaving the throne to his son Ferdinand, an invalid incapable of any serious exertion. It soon appeared that nothing was changed in the principles of the Imperial Government, and that whatever hopes had been formed of the establishment of a freer system under the new reign were delusive. The leader of the Transylvanian Opposition was Count Wesselényi, himself a Magnate in Hungary, who, after the dissolution of the Diet, betook himself to the Sessions of the Hungarian counties, and there delivered speeches against the Court which led to his being arrested and brought to trial for high treason. His cause was taken up by the Hungarian Diet, as one in which the rights of the local assemblies were involved. The plea of privilege was, however, urged in vain, and the sentence of exile which was passed upon Count Wesselényi became a new source of contention between the Crown and the Magyar Estates.  [407]

[Parties among the Magyars.]

[The Diet of 1843.]

The enmity of Government was now a sufficient passport to popular favour. On emerging from his prison under a general amnesty in 1840, Kossuth undertook the direction of a Magyar journal at Pesth, which at once gained an immense influence throughout the country. The spokesman of a new generation, Kossuth represented an entirely different order of ideas from those of the orthodox defenders of the Hungarian Constitution. They had been conservative and aristocratic; he was revolutionary: their weapons had been drawn from the storehouse of Hungarian positive law; his inspiration was from the Liberalism of western Europe. Thus within the national party itself there grew up sections in more or less pronounced antagonism to one another, though all were united by a passionate devotion to Hungary and by an unbounded faith in its future. Széchenyi, and those who with him subordinated political to material ends, regarded Kossuth as a dangerous theorist. Between the more impetuous and the more cautious reformers stood the recognised Parliamentary leaders of the Liberals, among whom Deák had already given proof of political capacity of no common order. In Kossuth's journal the national problems of the time were discussed both by his opponents and by his friends. Publicity gave greater range as well as greater animation to the conflict of ideas; and the rapid development of opinion during these years was seen in the large and ambitious measures which occupied the Diet of 1843. Electoral and municipal reform, the creation of a code of criminal law, the introduction of trial by jury, the abolition of the immunity of the nobles from taxation; all these, and similar legislative projects, displayed at once the energy of the time and the influence of western Europe in transforming the political conceptions of the Hungarian nation. Hitherto the forty-three Free Cities had possessed but a single vote in the Diet, as against the sixty-three votes possessed by the Counties. It was now generally admitted that this anomaly could not continue; but inasmuch as civic rights were themselves monopolised by small privileged orders among the townsmen, the problem of constitutional reform carried with it that of a reform of the municipalities. Hungary in short was now face to face with the task of converting its ancient system of the representation of the privileged orders into the modern system of a representation of the nation at large. Arduous at every epoch and in every country, this work was one of almost insuperable difficulty in Hungary, through the close connection with the absolute monarchy of Austria; through the existence of a body of poor noblesse, numbered at two hundred thousand, who, though strong in patriotic sentiment, bitterly resented any attack upon their own freedom from taxation; and above all through the variety of races in Hungary, and the attitude assumed by the Magyars, as the dominant nationality, towards the Slavs around them. In proportion as the energy of the Magyars and their confidence in the victory of the national cause mounted high, so rose their disdain of all claims beside their own within the Hungarian kingdom. It was resolved by the Lower Chamber of the Diet of 1843 that no language but Magyar should be permitted in debate, and that at the end of ten years every person not capable of speaking the Magyar language should be excluded from all public employment. The Magnates softened the latter provision by excepting from it the holders of merely local offices in Slavic districts; against the prohibition of Latin in the Diet the Croatians appealed to the Emperor. A rescript arrived from Vienna placing a veto upon the resolution. So violent was the storm excited in the Diet itself by this rescript, and so threatening the language of the national leaders outside, that the Cabinet, after a short interval, revoked its decision, and accepted a compromise which, while establishing Magyar as the official language of the kingdom, and requiring that it should be taught even in Croatian schools, permitted the use of Latin in the Diet for the next six years. In the meantime the Diet had shouted down every speaker who began with the usual Latin formula, and fighting had taken place in Agram, the Croatian capital, between the national and the Magyar factions.

[The Slavic national movements.]

It was in vain that the effort was made at Presburg to resist all claims but those of one race. The same quickening breath which had stirred the Magyar nation to new life had also passed over the branches of the Slavic family within the Austrian dominions far and near. In Bohemia a revival of interest in the Czech language and literature, which began about 1820, had in the following decade gained a distinctly political character. Societies originally or professedly founded for literary objects had become the centres of a popular movement directed towards the emancipation of the Czech elements in Bohemia from German ascendancy, and the restoration of something of a national character to the institutions of the kingdom. Among the southern Slavs, with whom Hungary was more directly concerned, the national movement first became visible rather later. Its earliest manifestations took, just as in Bohemia, a literary or linguistic form. Projects for the formation of a common language which, under the name of Illyrian, should draw together all the Slavic populations between the Adriatic and the Black Sea, occupied for a while the fancy of the learned; but the more ambitious part of this design, which had given some umbrage to the Turkish Government, was abandoned in obedience to instructions from Vienna; and the movement first gained political importance when its scope was limited to the Croatian and Slavonic districts of Hungary, and it was endowed with the distinct task of resisting the imposition of Magyar as an official language. In addition to their representation in the Diet of the Kingdom at Presburg, the Croatian landowners had their own Provincial Diet at Agram. In this they possessed not only a common centre of action, but an organ of communication with the Imperial Government at Vienna, which rendered them some support in their resistance to Magyar pretensions. Later events gave currency to the belief that a conflict of races in Hungary was deliberately stimulated by the Austrian Court in its own interest. But the whole temper and principle of Metternich's rule was opposed to the development of national spirit, whether in one race or another; and the patronage which the Croats appeared at this time to receive at Vienna was probably no more than an instinctive act of conservatism, intended to maintain the balance of interests, and to reduce within the narrowest possible limits such changes as might prove inevitable.

[Agitation after 1843.]

Of all the important measures of reform which were brought before the Hungarian Diet of 1843, one alone had become law. The rest were either rejected by the Chamber of Magnates after passing the Lower House, or were thrown out in the Lower House in spite of the approval of the majority, in consequence of peremptory instructions sent to Presburg by the county assemblies. The representative of a Hungarian constituency was not free to vote at his discretion; he was the delegate of the body of nobles which sent him, and was legally bound to give his vote in accordance with the instructions which he might from time to time receive. However zealous the Legislature itself, it was therefore liable to be paralysed by external pressure as soon as any question was raised which touched the privileges of the noble caste. This was especially the case with all projects involving the expenditure of public revenue. Until the nobles bore their share of taxation it was impossible that Hungary should emerge from a condition of beggarly need; yet, be the inclination of the Diet what it might, it was controlled by bodies of stubborn squires or yeomen in each county, who fully understood their own power, and stoutly forbade the passing of any measure which imposed a share of the public burdens upon themselves. The impossibility of carrying out reforms tinder existing conditions had been demonstrated by the failures of 1843. In order to overcome the obstruction as well of the Magnates as of the county assemblies, it was necessary that an appeal should be made to the country at large, and that a force of public sentiment should be aroused which should both overmaster the existing array of special interests, and give birth to legislation merging them for the future in a comprehensive system of really national institutions. To this task the Liberal Opposition addressed itself; and although large differences existed within the party, and the action of Kossuth, who now exchanged the career of the journalist for that of the orator, was little fettered by the opinions of his colleagues, the general result did not disappoint the hopes that had been formed. Political associations and clubs took vigorous root in the country. The magic of Kossuth's oratory left every hearer a more patriotic, if not a wiser man; and an awakening passion for the public good seemed for a while to throw all private interests into the shade.

[Government Policy of Reform.]

[Programme of the Opposition.]

It now became plain to all but the blindest that great changes were inevitable; and at the instance of the more intelligent among the Conservative party in Hungary the Imperial Government resolved to enter the lists with a policy of reform, and, if possible, to wrest the helm from the men who were becoming masters of the nation. In order to secure a majority in the Diet, it was deemed requisite by the Government first to gain a predominant influence in the county-assemblies. As a preliminary step, most of the Lieutenants of counties, to whose high dignity no practical functions attached, were removed from their posts, and superseded by paid administrators, appointed from Vienna. Count Apponyi, one of the most vigorous of the conservative and aristocratic reformers, was placed at the head of the Ministry. In due time the proposals of the Government were made public. They comprised the taxation of the nobles, a reform of the municipalities, modifications in the land-system, and a variety of economic measures intended directly to promote the material development of the country. The latter were framed to some extent on the lines laid down by Széchenyi, who now, in bitter antagonism to Kossuth, accepted office under the Government, and gave to it the prestige of his great name. It remained for the Opposition to place their own counter-proposals before the country. Differences within the party were smoothed over, and a manifesto, drawn up by Deák, gave statesmanlike expression to the aims of the national leaders. Embracing every reform included in the policy of the Government, it added to them others which the Government had not ventured to face, and gave to the whole the character of a vindication of its own rights by the nation, in contrast to a scheme of administrative reform worked out by the officers of the Crown. Thus while it enforced the taxation of the nobles, it claimed for the Diet the right of control over every branch of the national expenditure. It demanded increased liberty for the Press, and an unfettered right of political association; and finally, while doing homage to the unity of the Crown, it required that the Government of Hungary should be one in direct accord with the national representation in the Diet, and that the habitual effort of the Court of Vienna to place this kingdom on the same footing as the Emperor's non-constitutional provinces should be abandoned. With the rival programmes of the Government and the Opposition before it, the country proceeded to the elections of 1847. Hopefulness and enthusiasm abounded on every side; and at the close of the year the Diet assembled from which so great a work was expected, and which was destined within so short a time to witness, in storm and revolution, the passing away of the ancient order of Hungarian life.

[The Rural System of Hungary.]

The directly constitutional problems with which the Diet of Presburg had to deal were peculiar to Hungary itself, and did not exist in the other parts of the Austrian Empire. There were, however, social problems which were not less urgently forcing themselves upon public attention alike in Hungary and in those provinces which enjoyed no constitutional rights. The chief of these was the condition of the peasant-population. In the greater part of the Austrian dominions, though serfage had long been abolished, society was still based upon the manorial system. The peasant held his land subject to the obligation of labouring on his lord's domain for a certain number of days in the year, and of rendering him other customary services: the manor-court, though checked by the neighbourhood of crown-officers, retained its jurisdiction, and its agents frequently performed duties of police. Hence the proposed extinction of the so-called feudal tie, and the conversion of the semi-dependent cultivator into a freeholder bound only to the payment of a fixed money-charge, or rendered free of all obligation by the surrender of a part of his holding, involved in many districts the institution of new public authorities and a general reorganisation of the minor local powers. From this task the Austrian Government had shrunk in mere lethargy, even when, as in 1835, proposals for change had come from the landowners themselves. The work begun by Maria Theresa and Joseph remained untouched, though thirty years of peace had given abundant opportunity for its completion, and the legislation of Hardenberg in 1810 afforded precedents covering at least part of the field.

[Insurrection in Galicia, Feb., 1846.]

[Rural Edict, Dec., 1845.]

At length events occurred which roused the drowsiest heads in Vienna from their slumbers. The party of action among the Polish refugees at Paris had determined to strike another blow for the independence of their country. Instead, however, of repeating the insurrection of Warsaw, it was arranged that the revolt should commence in Prussian and Austrian Poland, and the beginning of the year 1846 was fixed for the uprising. In Prussia the Government crushed the conspirators before a blow could be struck. In Austria, though ample warning was given, the precautions taken were insufficient. General Collin occupied the Free City of Cracow, where the revolutionary committee had its headquarters; but the troops under his command were so weak that he was soon compelled to retreat, and to await the arrival of reinforcements. Meanwhile the landowners in the district of Tarnow in northern Galicia raised the standard of insurrection, and sought to arm the country. The Ruthenian peasantry, however, among whom they lived, owed all that was tolerable in their condition to the protection of the Austrian crown-officers, and detested the memory of an independent Poland. Instead of following their lords into the field, they gave information of their movements, and asked instructions from the nearest Austrian authorities. They were bidden to seize upon any persons who instigated them to rebellion, and to bring them into the towns. A war of the peasants against the nobles forthwith broke out. Murder, pillage, and incendiary fires brought both the Polish insurrection and its leaders to a miserable end. The Polish nobles, unwilling to acknowledge the humiliating truth that their own peasants were their bitterest enemies, charged the Austrian Government with having set a price on their heads, and with having instigated the peasants to a communistic revolt. Metternich, disgraced by the spectacle of a Jacquerie raging apparently under his own auspices, insisted, in a circular to the European Courts, that the attack of the peasantry upon the nobles had been purely spontaneous, and occasioned by attempts to press certain villagers into the ranks of the rebellion by brute force. But whatever may have been the measure of responsibility incurred by the agents of the Government, an agrarian revolution was undoubtedly in full course in Galicia, and its effects were soon felt in the rest of the Austrian monarchy. The Arcadian contentment of the rural population, which had been the boast, and in some degree the real strength, of Austria, was at an end. Conscious that the problem which it had so long evaded must at length be faced, the Government of Vienna prepared to deal with the conditions of land-tenure by legislation extending over the whole of the Empire. But the courage which was necessary for an adequate solution of the difficulty nowhere existed within the official world, and the Edict which conveyed the last words of the Imperial Government on this vital question contained nothing more than a series of provisions for facilitating voluntary settlements between the peasants and their lords. In the quality of this enactment the Court of Vienna gave the measure of its own weakness. The opportunity of breaking with traditions of impotence had presented itself and had been lost. Revolution was at the gates; and in the unsatisfied claim of the rural population the Government had handed over to its adversaries a weapon of the greatest power.  [408]

[Vienna.]

In the purely German provinces of Austria there lingered whatever of the spirit of tranquillity was still to be found within the Empire. This, however, was not the case in the districts into which the influence of the capital extended. Vienna had of late grown out of its old careless spirit. The home in past years of a population notoriously pleasure-loving, good-humoured, and indifferent to public affairs, it had now taken something of a more serious character. The death of the Emperor Francis, who to the last generation of Viennese had been as fixed a part of the order of things as the river Danube, was not unconnected with this change in the public tone. So long as the old Emperor lived, all thought that was given to political affairs was energy thrown away. By his death not only had the State lost an ultimate controlling power, if dull, yet practised and tenacious, but this loss was palpable to all the world. The void stood bare and unrelieved before the public eye. The notorious imbecility of the Emperor Ferdinand, the barren and antiquated formalism of Metternich and of that entire system which seemed to be incorporated in him, made Government an object of general satire, and in some quarters of rankling contempt. In proportion as the culture and intelligence of the capital exceeded that of other towns, so much the more galling was the pressure of that part of the general system of tutelage which was especially directed against the independence of the mind. The censorship was exercised with grotesque stupidity. It was still the aim of Government to isolate Austria from the ideas and the speculation of other lands, and to shape the intellectual world of the Emperor's subjects into that precise form which tradition prescribed as suitable for the members of a well-regulated State. In poetry, the works of Lord Byron were excluded from circulation, where custom-house officers and market-inspectors chose to enforce the law; in history and political literature, the leading writers of modern times lay under the same ban. Native production was much more effectively controlled. Whoever wrote in a newspaper, or lectured at a University, or published a work of imagination, was expected to deliver himself of something agreeable to the constituted authorities, or was reduced to silence. Far as Vienna fell short of Northern Germany in intellectual activity, the humiliation inflicted on its best elements by this life-destroying surveillance was keenly felt and bitterly resented. More perhaps by its senile warfare against mental freedom than by any acts of direct political repression, the Government ranged against itself the almost unanimous opinion of the educated classes. Its hold on the affection of the capital was gone. Still quiescent, but ready to unite against the Government when opportunity should arrive, there stood, in addition to the unorganised mass of the middle ranks, certain political associations and students' societies, a vigorous Jewish element, and the usual contingent furnished by poverty and discontent in every great city from among the labouring population. Military force sufficient to keep the capital in subjection was not wanting; but the foresight and the vigour necessary to cope with the first onset of revolution were nowhere to be found among the holders of power.

[Prussia.]

[Frederick William IV., 1840.]

At Berlin the solid order of Prussian absolutism already shook to its foundation. With King Frederick William III., whose long reign ended in 1840, there departed the half-filial, half-spiritless acquiescence of the nation in the denial of the liberties which had been so solemnly promised to it at the epoch of Napoleon's fall. The new Sovereign, Frederick William IV., ascended the throne amid high national hopes. The very contrast which his warm, exuberant nature offered to the silent, reserved disposition of his father impressed the public for awhile in his favour. In the more shining personal qualities he far excelled all his immediate kindred. His artistic and literary sympathies, his aptitude of mind and readiness of speech, appeared to mark the man of a new age, and encouraged the belief that, in spite of the mediæval dreams and reactionary theories to which, as prince, he had surrendered himself, he would, as King, appreciate the needs of the time, and give to Prussia the free institutions which the nation demanded. The first acts of the new reign were generously conceived. Political offenders were freely pardoned. Men who had suffered for their opinions were restored to their posts in the Universities and the public service, or selected for promotion. But when the King approached the constitutional question, his utterances were unsatisfactory. Though undoubtedly in favour of some reform, he gave no sanction to the idea of a really national representation, but seemed rather to seek occasions to condemn it. Other omens of ill import were not wanting. Allying his Government with a narrow school of theologians, the King offended men of independent mind, and transgressed against the best traditions of Prussian administration. The prestige of the new reign was soon exhausted. Those who had believed Frederick William to be a man of genius now denounced him as a vaporous, inflated dilettante; his enthusiasm was seen to indicate nothing in particular; his sonorous commonplaces fell flat on second delivery. Not only in his own kingdom, but in the minor German States, which looked to Prussia as the future leader of a free Germany, the opinion rapidly gained ground that Frederick William IV. was to be numbered among the enemies rather than the friends of the good cause.

[United Diet convoked at Berlin, Feb. 3, 1847.]

In the Edicts by which the last King of Prussia had promised his people a Constitution, it had been laid down that the representative body was to spring from the Provincial Estates, and that it was to possess, in addition to its purely consultative functions in legislation, a real power of control over all State loans and over all proposed additions to taxation. The interdependence of the promised Parliament and the Provincial Estates had been seen at the time to endanger the success of Hardenberg's scheme; nevertheless, it was this conception which King Frederick William IV. made the very centre of his Constitutional policy. A devotee to the distant past, he spoke of the Provincial Estates, which in their present form had existed only since 1823, as if they were a great national and historic institution which had come down unchanged through centuries. His first experiment was the summoning of a Committee from these bodies to consider certain financial projects with which the Government was occupied (1842). The labours of the Committee were insignificant, nor was its treatment at the hands of the Crown Ministers of a serious character. Frederick William, however, continued to meditate over his plans, and appointed a Commission to examine the project drawn up at his desire by the Cabinet. The agitation in favour of Parliamentary Government became more and more pressing among the educated classes; and at length, in spite of some opposition from his brother, the Prince of Prussia, afterwards Emperor of Germany, the King determined to fulfil his father's promise and to convoke a General Assembly at Berlin. On the 3rd of February, 1847, there appeared a Royal Patent, which summoned all the Provincial Estates to the capital to meet as a United Diet of the Kingdom. The Diet was to be divided into two Chambers, the Upper Chamber including the Royal Princes and highest nobles, the Lower the representatives of the knights, towns, and peasants. The right of legislation was not granted to the Diet; it had, however, the right of presenting petitions on internal affairs. State-loans and new taxes were not, in time of peace, to be raised without its consent. No regular interval was fixed for the future meetings of the Diet, and its financial rights were moreover reduced by other provisions, which enacted that a United Committee from the Provincial Estates was to meet every four years for certain definite objects, and that a special Delegation was to sit each year for the transaction of business relating to the National Debt.  [409]

[King Frederick William and the Diet.]

The nature of the General Assembly convoked by this Edict, the functions conferred upon it, and the guarantees offered for Representative Government in the future, so little corresponded with the requirements of the nation, that the question was at once raised in Liberal circles whether the concessions thus tendered by the King ought to be accepted or rejected. The doubt which existed as to the disposition of the monarch himself was increased by the speech from the throne at the opening of the Diet (April 11). In a vigorous harangue extending over half an hour, King Frederick William, while he said much that was appropriate to the occasion, denounced the spirit of revolution that was working in the Prussian Press, warned the Deputies that they had been summoned not to advocate political theories, but to protect each the rights of his own order, and declared that no power on earth should induce him to change his natural relation to his people into a constitutional one, or to permit a written sheet of paper to intervene like a second Providence between Prussia and the Almighty. So vehement was the language of the King, and so uncompromising his tone, that the proposal was forthwith made at a private conference that the Deputies should quit Berlin in a body. This extreme course was not adopted; it was determined instead to present an address to the King, laying before him in respectful language the shortcomings in the Patent of February 3rd. In the debate on this address began the Parliamentary history of Prussia. The Liberal majority in the Lower Chamber, anxious to base their cause on some foundation of positive law, treated the Edicts of Frederick William III. defining the rights of the future Representative Body as actual statutes of the realm, although the late King had never called a Representative Body into existence. From this point of view the functions now given to Committees and Delegations were so much illegally withdrawn from the rights of the Diet. The Government, on the other hand, denied that the Diet possessed any rights or claims whatever beyond those assigned to it by the Patent of February 3rd, to which it owed its origin. In receiving the address of the Chambers, the King, while expressing a desire to see the Constitution further developed, repeated the principle already laid down by his Ministers, and refused to acknowledge any obligation outside those which he had himself created.

[Proceedings and Dissolution of the Diet.]

When, after a series of debates on the political questions at issue, the actual business of the Session began, the relations between the Government and the Assembly grew worse rather than better. The principal measures submitted were the grant of a State-guarantee to certain land-banks established for the purpose of extinguishing the rent-charges on peasants' holdings, and the issue of a public loan for the construction of railways by the State. Alleging that the former measure was not directly one of taxation, the Government, in laying it before the Diet, declared that they asked only for an opinion, and denied that the Diet possessed any right of decision. Thus challenged, as it were, to make good its claims, the Diet not only declined to assent to this guarantee, but set its veto on the proposed railway-loan. Both projects were in themselves admitted to be to the advantage of the State; their rejection by the Diet was an emphatic vindication of constitutional rights which the Government seemed indisposed to acknowledge. Opposition grew more and more embittered; and when, as a preliminary to the dissolution of the Diet, the King ordered its members to proceed to the election of the Committees and Delegation named in the Edict of February 3rd, an important group declined to take part in the elections, or consented to do so only under reservations, on the ground that the Diet, and that alone, possessed the constitutional control over finance which the King was about to commit to other bodies. Indignant at this protest, the King absented himself from the ceremony which brought the Diet to a close (June 26th). Amid general irritation and resentment the Assembly broke up. Nothing had resulted from its convocation but a direct exhibition of the antagonism of purpose existing between the Sovereign and the national representatives. Moderate men were alienated by the doctrines promulgated from the Throne; and an experiment which, if more wisely conducted, might possibly at the eleventh hour have saved all Germany from revolution, left the Monarchy discredited and exposed to the attack of the most violent of its foes.

[Louis Philippe.]

The train was now laid throughout central Europe; it needed but a flash from Paris to kindle the fire far and wide. That the Crown which Louis Philippe owed to one popular outbreak might be wrested from him by another, had been a thought constantly present not only to the King himself but to foreign observers during the earlier years of his reign. The period of comparative peace by which the first Republican movements after 1830 had been succeeded, the busy working of the Parliamentary system, the keen and successful pursuit of wealth which seemed to have mastered all other impulses in France, had made these fears a thing of the past. The Orleanist Monarchy had taken its place among the accredited institutions of Europe; its chief, aged, but vigorous in mind, looked forward to the future of his dynasty, and occupied himself with plans for extending its influence or its sway beyond the limits of France itself. At one time Louis Philippe had hoped to connect his family by marriage with the Courts of Vienna or Berlin; this project had not met with encouragement; so much the more eagerly did the King watch for opportunities in another direction, and devise plans for restoring the family-union between France and Spain which had been established by Louis XIV. and which had so largely influenced the history of Europe down to the overthrow of the Bourbon Monarchy. The Crown of Spain was now held by a young girl; her sister was the next in succession; to make the House of Orleans as powerful at Madrid as it was at Paris seemed under these circumstances no impossible task to a King and a Minister who, in the interests of the dynasty, were prepared to make some sacrifice of honour and good faith.

[The Spanish Marriage, October, 1846.]

While the Carlist War was still continuing, Lord Palmerston had convinced himself that Louis Philippe intended to marry the young Queen Isabella, if possible, to one of his sons. Some years later this project was unofficially mentioned by Guizot to the English statesman, who at once caused it to be understood that England would not permit the union. Abandoning this scheme, Louis Philippe then demanded, by a misconstruction of the Treaty of Utrecht, that the Queen's choice of a husband should be limited to the Bourbons of the Spanish or Neapolitan line. To this claim Lord Aberdeen, who had become Foreign Secretary in 1841, declined to give his assent; he stated, however, that no step would be taken by England in antagonism to such marriage, if it should be deemed desirable at Madrid. Louis Philippe now suggested that his youngest son, the Duke of Montpensier, should wed the Infanta Fernanda, sister of the Queen of Spain. On the express understanding that this marriage should not take place until the Queen should herself have been married and have had children, the English Cabinet assented to the proposal. That the marriages should not be simultaneous was treated by both Governments as the very heart and substance of the arrangement, inasmuch as the failure of children by the Queen's marriage would make her sister, or her sister's heir, inheritor of the Throne. This was repeatedly acknowledged by Louis Philippe and his Minister, Guizot, in the course of communications with the British Court which extended over some years. Nevertheless, in 1846, the French Ambassador at Madrid, in conjunction with the Queen's mother, Maria Christina, succeeded in carrying out a plan by which the conditions laid down at London and accepted at Paris were utterly frustrated. Of the Queen's Spanish cousins, there was one, Don Francisco, who was known to be physically unfit for marriage. To this person it was determined by Maria Christina and the French Ambassador that the young Isabella should be united, her sister being simultaneously married to the Duke of Montpensier. So flagrantly was this arrangement in contradiction to the promises made at the Tuileries, that, when intelligence of it arrived at Paris, Louis Philippe declared for a moment that the Ambassador must be disavowed and disgraced. Guizot, however, was of better heart than his master, and asked for delay. In the very crisis of the King's perplexity the return of Lord Palmerston to office, and the mention by him of a Prince of Saxe-Coburg as one of the candidates for the Spanish Queen's hand, afforded Guizot a pretext for declaring that Great Britain had violated its engagements towards the House of Bourbon by promoting the candidature of a Coburg. In reality the British Government had not only taken no part in assisting the candidature of the Coburg Prince, but had directly opposed it. This, however, was urged in vain at the Tuileries. Whatever may have been the original intentions of Louis Philippe or of Guizot, the temptation of securing the probable succession to the Spanish Crown was too strong to be resisted. Preliminaries were pushed forward with the utmost haste, and on the 10th of October, 1846, the marriages of Queen Isabella and her sister, as arranged by the French Ambassador and the Queen-Mother, were simultaneously solemnised at Madrid.  [410]

[Louis Philippe and Guizot, 1847.]

Few intrigues have been more disgraceful than that of the Spanish Marriages; none more futile. The course of history mocked its ulterior purposes; its immediate results were wholly to the injury of the House of Orleans. The cordial understanding between France and Great Britain, which had been revived after the differences of 1840, was now finally shattered, Louis Philippe stood convicted before his people of sacrificing a valuable alliance to purely dynastic ends; his Minister, the austere and sanctimonious Guizot, had to defend himself against charges which would have covered with shame the most hardened man of the world. Thus stripped of its garb of moral superiority, condemned as at once unscrupulous and unpatriotic, the Orleanist Monarchy had to meet the storm of popular discontent which was gathering over France as well as over neighbouring lands. For the lost friendship of England it was necessary to seek a substitute in the support of some Continental Power. Throwing himself into the reactionary policy of the Court of Vienna, Guizot endeavoured to establish a diplomatic concert from which England should be excluded, as France had been in 1840. There were circumstances which gave some countenance to the design. The uncompromising vigour with which Lord Palmerston supported the Liberal movement now becoming so formidable in Italy made every absolute Government in Europe his enemy; and had time been granted, the despotic Courts would possibly have united with France in some more or less open combination against the English Minister. But the moments were now numbered; and ere the projected league could take substance, the whirlwind descended before which Louis Philippe and his Minister were the first to fall.

[Demand for Parliamentary Reform.]

A demand for the reform of the French Parliamentary system had been made when Guizot was entering upon office in the midst of the Oriental crisis of 1840. It had then been silenced and repressed by all the means at the disposal of the Executive; King Louis Philippe being convinced that with a more democratic Chamber the maintenance of his own policy of peace would be impossible. The demand was now raised again with far greater energy. Although the franchise had been lowered after the Revolution of July, it was still so high that not one person in a hundred and fifty possessed a vote, while the property-qualification which was imposed upon the Deputies themselves excluded from the Chamber all but men of substantial wealth. Moreover, there existed no law prohibiting the holders of administrative posts under the Government from sitting in the Assembly. The consequence was that more than one-third of the Deputies were either officials who had secured election, or representatives who since their election had accepted from Government appointments of greater or less value. Though Parliamentary talent abounded, it was impossible that a Chamber so composed could be the representative of the nation at large. The narrowness of the franchise, the wealth of the Deputies themselves, made them, in all questions affecting the social condition of the people, a mere club of capitalists; the influence which the Crown exercised through the bestowal of offices converted those who ought to have been its controllers into its dependents, the more so as its patronage was lavished on nominal opponents even more freely than on avowed friends. Against King Louis Philippe the majority in the Chamber had in fact ceased to possess a will of its own. It represented wealth; it represented to some extent the common-sense of France; but on all current matters of dispute it only represented the executive government in another form. So thoroughly had the nation lost all hope in the Assembly during the last years of Louis Philippe, that even the elections had ceased to excite interest. On the other hand, the belief in the general prevalence of corruption was every day receiving new warrant. A series of State-trials disclosed the grossest frauds in every branch of the administration, and proved that political influence was habitually used for purposes of pecuniary gain. Taxed with his tolerance of a system scarcely distinguishable from its abuses, the Minister could only turn to his own nominees in the Chamber and ask them whether they felt themselves corrupted; invited to consider some measure of Parliamentary reform, he scornfully asserted his policy of resistance. Thus, hopeless of obtaining satisfaction either from the Government or from the Chamber itself, the leaders of the Opposition resolved in 1847 to appeal to the country at large; and an agitation for Parliamentary reform, based on the methods employed by O'Connell in Ireland, soon spread through the principal towns of France.

[Socialism.]

But there were other ideas and other forces active among the labouring population of Paris than those familiar to the politicians of the Assembly. Theories of Socialism, the property of a few thinkers and readers during the earlier years of Louis Philippe's reign, had now sunk deep among the masses, and become, in a rough and easily apprehended form, the creed of the poor. From the time when Napoleon's fall had restored to France its faculty of thought, and, as it were, turned the soldier's eyes again upon his home, those questionings as to the basis of the social union which had occupied men's minds at an earlier epoch were once more felt and uttered. The problem was still what it had been in the eighteenth century; the answer was that of a later age. Kings, priests, and nobles had been overthrown, but misery still covered the world. In the teaching of Saint-Simon, under the Restoration, religious conceptions blended with a great industrial scheme; in the Utopia of Fourier, produced at the same fruitful period, whatever was valuable belonged to its suggestions in co-operative production. But whether the doctrine propounded was that of philosopher, or sage, or charlatan, in every case the same leading ideas were visible;-the insufficiency of the individual in isolation, the industrial basis of all social life, the concern of the community, or of its supreme authority, in the organisation of labour. It was naturally in no remote or complex form that the idea of a new social order took possession of the mind of the workman in the faubourgs of Paris. He read in Louis Blanc, the latest and most intelligible of his teachers of the right to labour, of the duty of the State to provide work for its citizens. This was something actual and tangible. For this he was ready upon occasion to take up arms; not for the purpose of extending the franchise to another handful of the Bourgeoisie, or of shifting the profits of government from one set of place-hunters to another. In antagonism to the ruling Minister the Reformers in the Chamber and the Socialists in the streets might for a moment unite their forces: but their ends were irreconcilable, and the allies of to-day were necessarily the foes of to-morrow.

[The February Revolution, 1848.]

[Feb. 22nd.]

At the close of the year 1847 the last Parliament of the Orleanist Monarchy assembled. The speech from the Throne, delivered by Louis Philippe himself, denounced in strong terms the agitation for Reform which had been carried on during the preceding months, though this agitation had, on the whole, been the work of the so-called Dynastic Opposition, which, while demanding electoral reform, was sincerely loyal to the Monarchy. The King's words were a challenge; and in the debate on the Address, the challenge was taken up by all ranks of Monarchical Liberals as well as by the small Republican section in the Assembly. The Government, however, was still secure of its majority. Defeated in the votes on the Address, the Opposition determined, by way of protest, to attend a banquet to be held in the Champs Elysées on the 22nd of February by the Reform-party in Western Paris. It was at first desired that by some friendly arrangement with the Government, which had declared the banquet illegal, the possibility of recourse to violence should be avoided. Misunderstandings, however, arose, and the Government finally prohibited the banquet, and made preparations for meeting any disturbance with force of arms. The Deputies, anxious to employ none but legal means of resistance, now resolved not to attend the banquet; on the other hand, the Democratic and Socialist leaders welcomed a possible opportunity for revolt. On the morning of the 22nd masses of men poured westwards from the workmen's quarter. The city was in confusion all day, and the erection of barricades began. Troops were posted in the streets; no serious attack, however, was made by either side, and at nightfall quiet returned.

[Feb. 23rd.]

On the next morning the National Guard of Paris was called to arms. Throughout the struggle between Louis Philippe and the populace of Paris in the earlier years of his reign, the National Guard, which was drawn principally from the trading classes, had fought steadily for the King. Now, however, it was at one with the Liberal Opposition in the Assembly, and loudly demanded the dismissal of the Ministers. While some of the battalions interposed between the regular troops and the populace and averted a conflict, others proceeded to the Chamber with petitions for Reform. Obstinately as Louis Philippe had hitherto refused all concession, the announcement of the threatened defection of the National Guard at length convinced him that resistance was impossible. He accepted Guizot's resignation, and the Chamber heard from the fallen Minister himself that he had ceased to hold office. Although the King declined for awhile to commit the formation of a Ministry to Thiers, the recognised chief of the Opposition, and endeavoured to place a politician more acceptable to himself in office, it was felt that with the fall of Guizot all real resistance to Reform was broken. Nothing more was asked by the Parliamentary Opposition or by the middle-class of Paris. The victory seemed to be won, the crisis at an end. In the western part of the capital congratulation and good-humour succeeded to the fear of conflict. The troops fraternised with the citizens and the National Guard; and when darkness came on, the boulevards were illuminated as if for a national festival.

[Feb. 24th.]

In the midst, however, of this rejoicing, and while the chiefs of the revolutionary societies, fearing that the opportunity had been lost for striking a blow at the Monarchy, exhorted the defenders of the barricades to maintain their positions, a band of workmen came into conflict, accidentally or of set purpose, with the troops in front of the Foreign Office. A volley was fired, which killed or wounded eighty persons. Placing the dead bodies on a waggon, and carrying them by torchlight through the streets in the workmen's quarter, the insurrectionary leaders called the people to arms. The tocsin sounded throughout the night; on the next morning the populace marched against the Tuileries. In consequence of the fall of the Ministry and the supposed reconciliation of the King with the People, whatever military dispositions had been begun had since been abandoned. At isolated points the troops fought bravely; but there was no systematic defence. Shattered by the strain of the previous days, and dismayed by the indifference of the National Guard when he rode out among them, the King, who at every epoch of his long life had shown such conspicuous courage in the presence of danger, now lost all nerve and all faculty of action. He signed an act of abdication in favour of his grandson, the Count of Paris, and fled. Behind him the victorious mob burst into the Tuileries and devastated it from cellar to roof. The Legislative Chamber, where an attempt was made to proclaim the Count of Paris King, was in its turn invaded. In uproar and tumult a Provisional Government was installed at the Hôtel de Ville; and ere the day closed the news went out to Europe that the House of Orleans had ceased to reign, and that the Republic had been proclaimed. It was not over France alone, it was over the Continent at large, that the tide of revolution was breaking.

END OF VOL. II.

VOLUME III.

CHAPTER XIX.

Europe in 1789 and in 1848-Agitation in Western Germany before and after the Revolution at Paris-Austria and Hungary-The March Revolution at Vienna-Flight of Metternich-The Hungarian Diet-Hungary wins its independence-Bohemian movement-Autonomy promised to Bohemia- Insurrection of Lombardy-Of Venice-Piedmont makes war on Austria-A general Italian war against Austria imminent-The March Days at Berlin-Frederick William IV.-A National Assembly promised- Schleswig-Holstein-Insurrection in Holstein-War between Germany and Denmark-The German Ante-Parliament-Republican rising in Baden-Meeting of the German National Assembly at Frankfort-Europe generally in March, 1848-The French Provisional Government-The National Workshops-The Government and the Red Republicans-French National Assembly-Riot of May 15-Measures against the National Workshops-The Four Days of June- Cavaignac-Louis Napoleon-He is elected to the Assembly-Elected President.

[Europe in 1789 and 1848.]

There were few statesmen living in 1848 who, like Metternich and like Louis Philippe, could remember the outbreak of the French Revolution. To those who could so look back across the space of sixty years, a comparison of the European movements that followed the successive onslaughts upon authority in France afforded some measure of the change that had passed over the political atmosphere of the Continent within a single lifetime. The Revolution of 1789, deeply as it stirred men's minds in neighbouring countries, had occasioned no popular outbreak on a large scale outside France. The expulsion of Charles X. in 1830 had been followed by national uprisings in Italy, Poland, and Belgium, and by a struggle for constitutional government in the smaller States of Northern Germany. The downfall of Louis Philippe in 1848 at once convulsed the whole of central Europe. From the Rhenish Provinces to the Ottoman frontier there was no government but the Swiss Republic that was not menaced; there was no race which did not assert its claim to a more or less complete independence. Communities whose long slumber had been undisturbed by the shocks of the Napoleonic period now vibrated with those same impulses which, since 1815, no pressure of absolute power had been able wholly to extinguish in Italy and Germany. The borders of the region of political discontent had been enlarged; where apathy, or immemorial loyalty to some distant crown, had long closed the ear to the voices of the new age, now all was restlessness, all eager expectation of the dawning epoch of national life. This was especially the case with the Slavic races included in the Austrian Empire, races which during the earlier years of this century had been wholly mute. These in their turn now felt the breath of patriotism, and claimed the right of self-government. Distinct as the ideas of national independence and of constitutional liberty are in themselves, they were not distinct in their operation over a great part of Europe in 1848; and this epoch will be wrongly conceived if it is viewed as no more than a repetition on a large scale of the democratic outbreak of Paris with which it opened. More was sought in Europe in 1848 than the substitution of popular for monarchical or aristocratic rule. The effort to make the State one with the nation excited wider interests than the effort to enlarge and equalise citizen rights; and it is in the action of this principle of nationality that we find the explanation of tendencies of the epoch which appear at first view to be in direct conflict with one another. In Germany a single race was divided under many Governments: here the national instinct impelled to unity. In Austria a variety of races was held together by one crown: here the national instinct impelled to separation. In both these States, as in Italy, where the predominance of the foreigner and the continuance of despotic government were in a peculiar manner connected with one another, the efforts of 1848 failed; but the problems which then agitated Europe could not long be set aside, and the solution of them complete, in the case of Germany and Italy, partial and tentative in the case of Austria, renders the succeeding twenty-five years a memorable period in European history.

[Agitation in Western Germany.]

The sudden disappearance of the Orleanist monarchy and the proclamation of the Republic at Paris struck with dismay the Governments beyond the Rhine. Difficulties were already gathering round them, opposition among their own subjects was daily becoming more formidable and more outspoken. In Western Germany a meeting of Liberal deputies had been held in the autumn of 1847, in which the reform of the Federal Constitution and the establishment of a German Parliament had been demanded: a Republican or revolutionary party, small but virulent, had also its own avowed policy and its recognised organs in the press. No sooner had the news of the Revolution at Paris passed the frontier than in all the minor German States the cry for reform became irresistible. Ministers everywhere resigned; the popular demands were granted; and men were called to office whose names were identified with the struggle for the freedom of the Press, for trial by jury, and for the reform of the Federal Constitution. The Federal Diet itself, so long the instrument of absolutism, bowed beneath the stress of the time, abolished the laws of censorship, and invited the Governments to send Commissioners to Frankfort to discuss the reorganisation of Germany. It was not, however, at Frankfort or at the minor capitals that the conflict between authority and its antagonists was to be decided. Vienna, the stronghold of absolutism, the sanctuary from which so many interdicts had gone forth against freedom in every part of Europe, was itself invaded by the revolutionary spirit. The clear sky darkened, and Metternich found himself powerless before the storm.

[Austria.]

There had been until 1848 so complete an absence of political life in the Austrian capital, that, when the conviction suddenly burst upon all minds that the ancient order was doomed, there were neither party-leaders to confront the Government, nor plans of reform upon which any considerable body of men were agreed. The first utterances of public discontent were petitions drawn up by the Chamber of Commerce and by literary associations. These were vague in purport and far from aggressive in their tone. A sterner note sounded when intelligence reached the capital of the resolutions that had been passed by the Hungarian Lower House on the 3rd of March, and of the language in which these had been enforced by Kossuth. Casting aside all reserve, the Magyar leader had declared that the reigning dynasty could only be saved by granting to Hungary a responsible Ministry drawn from the Diet itself, and by establishing constitutional government throughout the Austrian dominions. "From the charnel-house of the Viennese system," he cried, "a poison-laden atmosphere steals over us, which paralyses our nerves and bows us when we would soar. The future of Hungary can never be secure while in the other provinces there exists a system of government in direct antagonism to every constitutional principle. Our task it is to found a happier future on the brotherhood of all the Austrian races, and to substitute for the union enforced by bayonets and police the enduring bond of a free constitution." When the Hungarian Assembly had thus taken into its own hands the cause of the rest of the monarchy, it was not for the citizens of Vienna to fall short in the extent of their demands. The idea of a Constitution for the Empire at large was generally accepted and it was proposed that an address embodying this demand should be sent in to the Emperor by the Provincial Estates of Lower Austria, whose meeting happened to be fixed for the 13th of March. In the meantime the students made themselves the heroes of the hour. The agitation of the city increased; rumours of State bankruptcy and of the impending repudiation of the paper currency filled all classes with the belief that some catastrophe was near at hand.  [411]

[The March Revolution at Vienna.]

The Provincial Estates of Lower Austria had long fallen into such insignificance that in ordinary times their proceedings were hardly noticed by the capital. The accident that they were now to assemble in the midst of a great crisis elevated them to a sudden importance. It was believed that the decisive word would be spoken in the course of their debates; and on the morning of the 13th of March masses of the populace, led by a procession of students, assembled round the Hall of the Diet. While the debate proceeded within, street-orators inflamed the passions of the crowd outside. The tumult deepened; and when at length a note was let down from one of the windows of the Hall stating that the Diet were inclining to half-measures, the mob broke into uproar, and an attack was made upon the Diet Hall itself. The leading members of the Estates were compelled to place themselves at the head of a deputation, which proceeded to the Emperor's palace in order to enforce the demands of the people. The Emperor himself, who at no time was capable of paying serious attention to business, remained invisible during this and the two following days; the deputation was received by Metternich and the principal officers of State, who were assembled in council. Meanwhile the crowds in the streets became denser and more excited; soldiers approached, to protect the Diet Hall and to guard the environs of the palace; there was an interval of confusion; and on the advance of a new regiment, which was mistaken for an attack, the mob who had stormed the Diet Hall hurled the shattered furniture from the windows upon the soldiers' heads. A volley was now fired, which cost several lives. At the sound of the firing still deeper agitation seized the city. Barricades were erected, and the people and soldiers fought hand to hand. As evening came on, deputation after deputation pressed into the palace to urge concession upon the Government. Metternich, who, almost alone in the Council, had made light of the popular uprising, now at length consented to certain definite measures of reform. He retired into an adjoining room to draft an order abolishing the censorship of the Press. During his absence the cry was raised among the deputations that thronged the Council-chamber, "Down with Metternich!" The old man returned, and found himself abandoned by his colleagues. There were some among them, members of the Imperial family, who had long been his opponents; others who had in vain urged him to make concessions before it was too late. Metternich saw that the end of his career was come; he spoke a few words, marked by all the dignity and self-possession of his greatest days, and withdrew, to place his resignation in the Emperor's hands.

[Flight of Metternich.]

For thirty-nine years Metternich had been so completely identified with the Austrian system of government that in his fall that entire system seemed to have vanished away. The tumult of the capital subsided on the mere announcement of his resignation, though the hatred which he had excited rendered it unsafe for him to remain within reach of hostile hands. He was conveyed from Vienna by a faithful secretary on the night of the 14th of March, and, after remaining for a few days in concealment, crossed the Saxon frontier. His exile was destined to be of some duration, but no exile was ever more cheerfully borne, or sweetened by a profounder satisfaction at the evils which a mad world had brought upon itself by driving from it its one thoroughly wise and just statesman. Betaking himself in the general crash of the Continental Courts to Great Britain, which was still as safe as when he had visited it fifty-five years before, Metternich received a kindly welcome from the Duke of Wellington and the leaders of English society; and when the London season was over he sought and found at Brighton something of the liveliness and the sunshine of his own southern home.  [412]

[The Hungarian Diet.]

The action of the Hungarian Diet under Kossuth's leadership had powerfully influenced the course of events at Vienna. The Viennese outbreak in its turn gave irresistible force to the Hungarian national movement. Up to the 13th of March the Chamber of Magnates had withheld their assent from the resolution passed by the Lower House in favour of a national executive; they now accepted it without a single hostile vote; and on the 15th a deputation was sent to Vienna to lay before the Emperor an address demanding not only the establishment of a responsible Ministry but the freedom of the Press, trial by jury, equality of religion, and a system of national education. At the moment when this deputation reached Vienna the Government was formally announcing its compliance with the popular demand for a Constitution for the whole of the Empire. The Hungarians were escorted in triumph through the streets, and were received on the following day by the Emperor himself, who expressed a general concurrence with the terms of the address. The deputation returned to Presburg, and the Palatine, or representative of the sovereign in Hungary, the Archduke Stephen, forthwith charged Count Batthyány, one of the most popular of the Magyar nobles, with the formation of a national Ministry. Thus far the Diet had been in the van of the Hungarian movement; it now sank almost into insignificance by the side of the revolutionary organisation at Pesth, where all the ardour and all the patriotism of the Magyar race glowed in their native force untempered by the political experience of the statesmen who were collected at Presburg, and unchecked by any of those influences which belong to the neighbourhood of an Imperial Court. At Pesth there broke out an agitation at once so democratic and so intensely national that all considerations of policy and of regard for the Austrian Government which might have affected the action of the Diet were swept away before it. Kossuth, himself the genuine representative of the capital, became supreme. At his bidding the Diet passed a law abolishing the departments of the Central Government by which the control of the Court over the Hungarian body politic had been exercised. A list of Ministers was submitted and approved, including not only those who were needed for the transaction of domestic business, but Ministers of War, Finance, and Foreign Affairs; and in order that the entire nation might rally round its Government, the peasantry were at one stroke emancipated from all services attaching to the land, and converted into free proprietors. Of the compensation to be paid to the lords for the loss of these services, no more was said than that it was a debt of honour to be discharged by the nation.

[Hungary wins independence.]

Within the next few days the measures thus carried through the Diet by Kossuth were presented for the Emperor's ratification at Vienna. The fall of Metternich, important as it was, had not in reality produced that effect upon the Austrian Government which was expected from it by popular opinion. The new Cabinet at Vienna was drawn from the ranks of the official hierarchy; and although some of its members were more liberally disposed than their late chief, they had all alike passed their lives in the traditions of the ancient system, and were far from intending to make themselves the willing agents of revolution. These men saw clearly enough that the action of the Diet at Presburg amounted to nothing less than the separation of Hungary from the Austrian Empire. With the Ministries of War, Finance, and Foreign Affairs established in independence of the central government, there would remain no link between Hungary and the Hereditary States but the person of a titular, and, for the present time, an imbecile sovereign. Powerless and distracted, Metternich's successors looked in all directions for counsel. The Palatine argued that three courses were open to the Austrian Government. It might endeavour to crush the Hungarian movement by force of arms; for this purpose, however, the troops available were insufficient: or it might withdraw from the country altogether, leaving the peasants to attack the nobles, as they had done in Galicia; this was a dishonourable policy, and the action of the Diet had, moreover, secured to the peasant everything that he could gain by a social insurrection: or finally, the Government might yield for the moment to the inevitable, make terms with Batthyány's Ministry, and quietly prepare for vigorous resistance when opportunity should arrive. The last method was that which the Palatine recommended; the Court inclined in the same direction, but it was unwilling to submit without making some further trial of the temper of its antagonists. A rescript was accordingly sent to Presburg, announcing that the Ministry formed by Count Batthyány was accepted by the Emperor, but that the central offices which the Diet had abolished must be preserved, and the functions of the Ministers of War and Finance be reduced to those of chiefs of departments, dependent on the orders of a higher authority at Vienna. From the delay that had taken place in the despatch of this answer the nationalist leaders at Pesth and at Presburg had augured no good result. Its publication brought the country to the verge of armed revolt. Batthyány refused to accept office under the conditions named; the Palatine himself declared that he could remain in Hungary no longer. Terrified at the result of its own challenge, the Court now withdrew from the position that it had taken up, and accepted the scheme of the Diet in its integrity, stipulating only that the disposal of the army outside Hungary in time of war, and the appointment to the higher commands, should remain with the Imperial Government.  [413]

[Bohemian movement.]

[Autonomy promised.]

Hungary had thus made good its position as an independent State connected with Austria only through the person of its monarch. Vast and momentous as was the change, fatal as it might well appear to those who could conceive of no unity but the unity of a central government, the victory of the Magyars appears to have excited no feeling among the German Liberals at Vienna but one of satisfaction. So odious, so detested, was the fallen system of despotism, that every victory won by its adversaries was hailed as a triumph of the good cause, be the remoter issues what they might. Even where a powerful German element, such as did not exist in Hungary itself, was threatened by the assertion of provincial claims, the Government could not hope for the support of the capital if it should offer resistance. The example of the Magyars was speedily followed by the Czechs in Bohemia. Forgotten and obliterated among the nationalities of Europe, the Czechs had preserved in their language, and in that almost alone, the emblem of their national independence. Within the borders of Bohemia there was so large a German population that the ultimate absorption of the Slavic element by this wealthier and privileged body had at an earlier time seemed not unlikely. Since 1830, however, the Czech national movement had been gradually gaining ground. In the first days of the agitation of 1848 an effort had been made to impress a purely constitutional form upon the demands made in the name of the people of Prague, and so to render the union of all classes possible. This policy, however, received its deathblow from the Revolution in Vienna and from the victory of the Magyars. The leadership at Prague passed from men of position and experience, representing rather the intelligence of the German element in Bohemia than the patriotism of the Czechs, to the nationalist orators who commanded the streets. An attempt made by the Cabinet at Vienna to evade the demands drawn up under the influence of the more moderate politicians resulted only in the downfall of this party, and in the tender of a new series of demands of far more revolutionary character. The population of Prague were beginning to organise a national guard; arms were being distributed; authority had collapsed. The Government was now forced to consent to everything that was asked of it, and a legislative Assembly with an independent local administration was promised to Bohemia. To this Assembly, as soon as it should meet, the new institutions of the kingdom were to be submitted.

[Insurrection of Lombardy, March 18.]

Thus far, if the authority of the Court of Vienna, had been virtually shaken off by a great part of its subjects, the Emperor had at least not seen these subjects in avowed rebellion against the House of Hapsburg, nor supported in their resistance by the arms of a foreign Power. South of the Alps the dynastic connection was openly severed, and the rule of Austria declared for ever at an end. Lombardy had since the beginning of the year 1848 been held in check only by the display of great military force. The Revolution at Paris had excited both hopes and fears; the Revolution at Vienna was instantly followed by revolt in Milan. Radetzky, the Austrian commander, a veteran who had served with honour in every campaign since that against the Turks in 1788, had long foreseen the approach of an armed conflict; yet when the actual crisis arrived his dispositions had not been made for meeting it. The troops in Milan were ill placed; the offices of Government were moreover separated by half the breadth of the city from the military head-quarters. Thus when on the 18th of March the insurrection broke out, it carried everything before it. The Vice-Governor, O'Donell, was captured, and compelled to sign his name to decrees handing over the government of the city to the Municipal Council. Radetzky now threw his soldiers upon the barricades, and penetrated to the centre of the city; but he was unable to maintain himself there under the ceaseless fire from the windows and the housetops, and withdrew on the night of the 19th to the line of fortifications. Fighting continued during the next two days in the outskirts and at the gates of the city. The garrisons of all the neighbouring towns were summoned to the assistance of their general, but the Italians broke up the bridges and roads, and one detachment alone out of all the troops in Lombardy succeeded in reaching Milan. A report now arrived at Radetzky's camp that the King of Piedmont was on the march against him. Preferring the loss of Milan to the possible capture of his army, he determined to evacuate the city. On the night of the 22nd of March the retreat was begun, and Radetzky fell back upon the Mincio and Verona, which he himself had made the centre of the Austrian system of defence in Upper Italy.  [414]

[Insurrection of Venice.]

[Piedmont makes war.]

Venice had already followed the example of the Lombard capital. The tidings received from Vienna after the 13th of March appear to have completely bewildered both the military and the civil authorities on the Adriatic coast. They released their political prisoners, among whom was Daniel Manin, an able and determined foe of Austria; they entered into constitutional discussions with the popular leaders; they permitted the formation of a national guard, and finally handed over to this guard the arsenals and the dockyards with all their stores. From this time all was over. Manin proclaimed the Republic of St. Mark, and became the chief of a Provisional Government. The Italian regiments in garrison joined the national cause; the ships of war at Pola, manned chiefly by Italian sailors, were only prevented from sailing to the assistance of the rebels by batteries that were levelled against them from the shore. Thus without a blow being struck Venice was lost to Austria. The insurrection spread westwards and northwards through city and village in the interior, till there remained to Austria nothing but the fortresses on the Adige and the Mincio, where Radetzky, deaf to the counsels of timidity, held his ground unshaken. The national rising carried Piedmont with it. It was in vain that the British envoy at Turin urged the King to enter into no conflict with Austria. On the 24th of March Charles Albert published a proclamation promising his help to the Lombards. Two days later his troops entered Milan.  [415]

[General war against Austria, beginning in Italy.]

Austria had for thirty years consistently laid down the principle that its own sovereignty in Upper Italy vested it with the right to control the political system of every other State in the peninsula. It had twice enforced this principle by arms: first in its intervention in Naples in 1820, afterwards in its occupation of the Roman States in 1831. The Government of Vienna had, as it were with fixed intention, made it impossible that its presence in any part of Italy should be regarded as the presence of an ordinary neighbour, entitled to quiet possession until some new provocation should be given. The Italians would have proved themselves the simplest of mankind if, having any reasonable hope of military success, they had listened to the counsels of Palmerston and other statesmen who urged them not to take advantage of the difficulties in which Austria was now placed. The paralysis of the Austrian State was indeed the one unanswerable argument for immediate war. So long as the Emperor retained his ascendency in any part of Italy, his interests could not permanently suffer the independence of the rest. If the Italians should chivalrously wait until the Cabinet of Vienna had recovered its strength, it was quite certain that their next efforts in the cause of internal liberty would be as ruthlessly crushed as their last. Every clearsighted patriot understood that the time for a great national effort had arrived. In some respects the political condition of Italy seemed favourable to such united action. Since the insurrection of Palermo in January, 1848, absolutism had everywhere fallen. Ministries had come into existence containing at least a fair proportion of men who were in real sympathy with the national feeling. Above all, the Pope seemed disposed to place himself at the head of a patriotic union against the foreigner. Thus, whatever might be the secret inclinations of the reigning Houses, they were unable for the moment to resist the call to arms. Without an actual declaration of war troops were sent northwards from Naples, from Florence, and from Rome, to take part, as it was supposed, in the national struggle by the side of the King of Piedmont. Volunteers thronged to the standards. The Papal benediction seemed for once to rest on the cause of manhood and independence. On the other hand, the very impetus which had brought Liberal Ministries into power threatened to pass into a phase of violence and disorder. The concessions already made were mocked by men who expected to win all the victories of democracy in an hour. It remained to be seen whether there existed in Italy the political sagacity which, triumphing over all local jealousies, could bend to one great aim the passions of the multitude and the fears of the Courts, or whether the cause of the whole nation would be wrecked in an ignoble strife between demagogues and reactionists, between the rabble of the street and the camarilla round the throne.  [416]

[The March Days at Berlin.]

Austria had with one hand held down Italy, with the other it had weighed on Germany. Though the Revolutionary movement was in full course on the east of the Rhine before Metternich's fall, it received, especially at Berlin, a great impetus from this event. Since the beginning of March the Prussian capital had worn an unwonted aspect. In this city of military discipline public meetings had been held day after day, and the streets had been blocked by excited crowds. Deputations which laid before the King demands similar to those now made in every German town received halting and evasive answers. Excitement increased, and on the 13th of March encounters began between the citizens and the troops, which, though insignificant, served to exasperate the people and its leaders. The King appeared to be wavering between resistance and concession until the Revolution at Vienna, which became known at Berlin on the 15th of March, brought affairs to their crisis. On the 17th the tumult in the streets suddenly ceased; it was understood that the following day would see the Government either reconciled with the people or forced to deal with an insurrection on a great scale. Accordingly on the morning of the 18th crowds made their way towards the palace, which was surrounded by troops. About midday there appeared a Royal edict summoning the Prussian United Diet for the 2nd of April, and announcing that the King had determined to promote the creation of a Parliament for all Germany and the establishment of Constitutional Government in every German State. This manifesto drew fresh masses towards the palace, desirous, it would seem, to express their satisfaction; its contents, however, were imperfectly understood by the assembly already in front of the palace, which the King vainly attempted to address. When called upon to disperse, the multitude refused to do so, and answered by cries for the withdrawal of the soldiery. In the midst of the confusion two shots were fired from the ranks without orders; a panic followed, in which, for no known reason, the cavalry and infantry threw themselves upon the people. The crowd was immediately put to flight, but the combat was taken up by the population of Berlin. Barricades appeared in the streets; fighting continued during the evening and night. Meanwhile the King, who was shocked and distressed at the course that events had taken, received deputations begging that the troops might be withdrawn from the city. Frederick William endeavoured for awhile to make the surrender of the barricades the condition for an armistice; but as night went on the troops became exhausted, and although they had gained ground, the resistance of the people was not overcome. Whether doubtful of the ultimate issue of the conflict or unwilling to permit further bloodshed, the King gave way, and at daybreak on the 19th ordered the troops to be withdrawn. His intention was that they should continue to garrison the palace, but the order was misunderstood, and the troops were removed to the outside of Berlin. The palace was thus left unprotected, and, although no injury was inflicted upon its inmates, the King was made to feel that the people could now command his homage. The bodies of the dead were brought into the court of the palace; their wounds were laid bare, and the King, who appeared in a balcony, was compelled to descend into the court, and to stand before them with uncovered head. Definite political expression was given to the changed state of affairs by the appointment of a new Ministry.  [417]

The conflict between the troops and the people at Berlin was described, and with truth, as the result of a misunderstanding. Frederick William had already determined to yield to the principal demands of his subjects; nor on the part of the inhabitants of Berlin had there existed any general hostility towards the sovereign, although a small group of agitators, in part foreign, had probably sought to bring about an armed attack on the throne. Accordingly, when once the combat was broken off, there seemed to be no important obstacle to a reconciliation between the King and the people. Frederick William chose a course which spared and even gratified his own self-love. In the political faith of all German Liberals the establishment of German unity was now an even more important article than the introduction of free institutions into each particular State. The Revolution at Berlin had indeed been occasioned by the King's delay in granting internal reform; but these domestic disputes might well be forgotten if in the great cause of German unity the Prussians saw their King rising to the needs of the hour. Accordingly the first resolution of Frederick William, after quiet had returned to the capital, was to appear in public state as the champion of the Fatherland. A proclamation announced on the morning of the 21st of March that the King had placed himself at the head of the German nation, and that he would on that day appear on horseback wearing the old German colours. In due time Frederick William came forth at the head of a procession, wearing the tricolor of gold, white, and black, which since 1815 had been so dear to the patriots and so odious to the Governments of Germany. As he passed through the streets he was saluted as Emperor, but he repudiated the title, asserting with oaths and imprecations that he intended to rob no German prince of his sovereignty. At each stage of his theatrical progress he repeated to appropriate auditors his sounding but ambiguous allusions to the duties imposed upon him by the common danger. A manifesto, published at the close of the day, summed up the utterances of the monarch in a somewhat less rhetorical form. "Germany is in ferment within, and exposed from without to danger from more than one side. Deliverance from this danger can come only from the most intimate union of the German princes and people under a single leadership. I take this leadership upon me for the hour of peril. I have to-day assumed the old German colours, and placed myself and my people under the venerable banner of the German Empire. Prussia henceforth is merged in Germany."  [418]

[National Assembly promised.]

The ride of the King through Berlin, and his assumption of the character of German leader, however little it pleased the minor sovereigns, or gratified the Liberals of the smaller States, who considered that such National authority ought to be conferred by the nation, not assumed by a prince, was successful for the moment in restoring to the King some popularity among his own subjects. He could now without humiliation proceed with the concessions which had been interrupted by the tragical events of the 18th of March. In answer to a deputation from Breslau, which urged that the Chamber formed by the union of the Provincial Diets should be replaced by a Constituent Assembly, the King promised that a national Representative Assembly should be convoked as soon as the United Diet had passed the necessary electoral law. To this National Assembly the Government would submit measures securing the liberty of the individual, the right of public meeting and of associations, trial by jury, the responsibility of Ministers, and the independence of the judicature. A civic militia was to be formed, with the right of choosing its own officers, and the standing army was to take the oath of allegiance to the Constitution. Hereditary jurisdictions and manorial rights of police were to be abolished; equality before the law was to be universally enforced; in short, the entire scheme of reforms demanded by the Constitutional Liberals of Prussia was to be carried into effect. In Berlin, as in every other capital in Germany, the victory of the party of progress now seemed to be assured. The Government no longer represented a power hostile to popular rights; and when, on the 22nd of March, the King spontaneously paid the last honours to those who had fallen in combat with his troops, as the long funeral procession passed his palace, it was generally believed that his expression of feeling was sincere.

[Schleswig-Holstein.]

In the passage of his address in which King Frederick William spoke of the external dangers threatening Germany, he referred to apprehensions which had for a while been current that the second French Republic would revive the aggressive energy of the first. This fear proved baseless; nevertheless, for a sovereign who really intended to act as the champion of the German nation at large, the probability of war with a neighbouring Power was far from remote. The cause of the Duchies of Schleswig-Holstein, which were in rebellion against the Danish Crown, excited the utmost interest and sympathy in Germany. The population of these provinces, with the exception of certain districts in Schleswig, was German; Holstein was actually a member of the German Federation. The legal relation of the Duchies to Denmark was, according to the popular view, very nearly that of Hanover to England before 1837. The King of Denmark was also Duke of Schleswig and of Holstein, but these were no more an integral portion of the Danish State than Hanover was of the British Empire; and the laws of succession were moreover different in Schleswig-Holstein, the Crown being transmitted by males, while in Denmark females were capable of succession. On the part of the Danes it was admitted that in certain districts in Holstein the Salic law held good; it was, however, maintained that in the remainder of Holstein and in all Schleswig the rules of succession were the same as in Denmark. The Danish Government denied that Schleswig-Holstein formed a unity in itself, as alleged by the Germans, and that it possessed separate national rights as against the authority of the King's Government at Copenhagen. The real heart of the difficulty lay in the fact that the population of the Duchies was German. So long as the Germans as a race possessed no national feeling, the union of the Duchies with the Danish Monarchy had not been felt as a grievance. It happened, however, that the great revival of German patriotism resulting from the War of Liberation in 1813 was almost simultaneous with the severance of Norway from the Danish Crown, which compelled the Government of Copenhagen to increase very heavily the burdens imposed on its German subjects in the Duchies. From this time discontent gained ground, especially in Altona and Kiel, where society was as thoroughly German as in the neighbouring city of Hamburg. After 1830, when Provincial Estates were established in Schleswig and Holstein, the German movement became formidable. The reaction, however, which marked the succeeding period generally in Europe prevailed in Denmark too, and it was not until 1844, when a posthumous work of Lornsen, the exiled leader of the German party, vindicated the historical rights of the Duchies, that the claims of German nationality in these provinces were again vigorously urged. From this time the separation of Schleswig-Holstein from Denmark became a question of practical politics. The King of Denmark, Christain VIII., had but one son, who, though long married, was childless, and with whom the male line of the reigning House would expire. In answer to an address of the Danish Provincial Estates calling upon the King to declare the unity of the Monarchy and the validity of the Danish law of succession for all its parts, the Holstein Estates passed a resolution in November, 1844, that the Duchies were an independent body, governed by the rule of male descent, and indivisible. After an interval of two years, during which a Commission examined the succession-laws, King Christian published a declaration that the succession was the same in Schleswig as in Denmark proper, and that, as regarded those parts of Holstein where a different rule of succession existed, he would spare no effort to maintain the unity of the Monarchy. On this the Provincial Estates both of Schleswig and of Holstein addressed protests to the King, who refused to accept them. The deputies now resigned in a mass, whilst on behalf of Holstein an appeal was made to the German Federal Diet. The Diet merely replied by a declaration of rights; but in Germany at large the keenest interest was aroused on behalf of these severed members of the race who were so resolutely struggling against incorporation with a foreign Power. The deputies themselves, passing from village to village, excited a strenuous spirit of resistance throughout the Duchies, which was met by the Danish Government with measures of repression more severe than any which it had hitherto employed.  [419]

[Insurrection in Holstein, March 24.]

[War between Germany and Denmark.]

Such was the situation of affairs when, on the 20th of January, 1848, King Christian VIII. died, leaving the throne to Frederick VII., the last of the male line of his House. Frederick's first act was to publish the draft of a Constitution, in which all parts of the Monarchy were treated as on the same footing. Before the delegates could assemble to whom the completion of this work was referred, the shock of the Paris Revolution reached the North Sea ports. A public meeting at Altona demanded the establishment of a separate constitution for Schleswig-Holstein, and the admission of Schleswig into the German Federation. The Provincial Estates accepted this resolution, and sent a deputation to Copenhagen to present this and other demands to the King. But in the course of the next few days a popular movement at Copenhagen brought into power a thoroughly Danish Ministry, pledged to the incorporation of Schleswig with Denmark as an integral part of the Kingdom. Without waiting to learn the answer made by the King to the deputation, the Holsteiners now took affairs into their own hands. A Provisional Government was formed at Kiel (March 24), the troops joined the people, and the insurrection instantly spread over the whole province. As the proposal to change the law of succession to the throne had originated with the King of Denmark, the cause of the Holsteiners was from one point of view that of established right. The King of Prussia, accepting the positions laid down by the Holstein Estates in 1844, declared that he would defend the claims of the legitimate heir by force of arms, and ordered his troops to enter Holstein. The Diet of Frankfort, now forced to express the universal will of Germany, demanded that Schleswig, as the sister State of Holstein, should enter the Federation. On the passing of this resolution, the envoy who represented the Denmark. King of Denmark at the Diet, as Duke of Holstein, quitted Frankfort, and a state of war ensued between Denmark on the one side and Prussia with the German Federation on the other.

[The German Ante-Parliament, March 30-April 4.]

[Republican rising in Baden.]

The passionate impulse of the German people towards unity had already called into being an organ for the expression of national sentiment, which, if without any legal or constitutional authority, was yet strong enough to impose its will upon the old and discredited Federal Diet and upon most of the surviving Governments. At the invitation of a Committee, about five hundred Liberals who had in one form or another taken part in public affairs assembled at Frankfort on the 30th of March to make the necessary preparations for the meeting of a German national Parliament. This Assembly, which is known as the Ante-Parliament, sat but for five days. Its resolutions, so far as regarded the method of electing the new Parliament, and the inclusion of new districts in the German Federation, were accepted by the Diet, and in the main carried into effect. Its denunciation of persons concerned in the repressive measures of 1819 and subsequent reactionary epochs was followed by the immediate retirement of all members of the Diet whose careers dated back to those detested days. But in the most important work that was expected from the Ante-Parliament, the settlement of a draft-Constitution to be laid before the future National Assembly as a basis for its deliberations, nothing whatever was accomplished. The debates that took place from the 31st of March to the 4th of April were little more than a trial of strength between the Monarchical and Republican parties. The Republicans, far outnumbered when they submitted a constitutional scheme of their own, proposed, after this repulse, that the existing Assembly should continue in session until the National Parliament met; in other words, that it should take upon itself the functions and character of a National Convention. Defeated also on this proposal, the leaders of the extreme section of the Republican party, strangely miscalculating their real strength, determined on armed insurrection. Uniting with a body of German refugees beyond the Rhine, who were themselves assisted by French and Polish soldiers of revolution, they raised the Republican standard in Baden, and for a few days maintained a hopeless and inglorious struggle against the troops which were sent to suppress them. Even in Baden, which had long been in advance of all other German States in democratic sentiment, and which was peculiarly open to Republican influences from France and Switzerland, the movement was not seriously supported by the population, and in the remainder of Germany it received no countenance whatever. The leaders found themselves ruined men. The best of them fled to the United States, where, in the great struggle against slavery thirteen years later, they rendered better service to their adopted than they had ever rendered to their natural Fatherland.

[Meeting of the German National Assembly, May 18.]

On breaking up on the 4th of April, the Ante-Parliament left behind it a Committee of Fifty, whose task it was to continue the work of preparation for the National Assembly to which it had itself contributed so little. One thing alone had been clearly established, that the future Constitution of Germany was not to be Republican. That the existing Governments could not be safely ignored by the National Assembly in its work of founding the new Federal Constitution for Germany was clear to those who were not blinded by the enthusiasm of the moment. In the Committee of Fifty and elsewhere plans were suggested for giving to the Governments a representation within the Constituent Assembly, or for uniting their representatives in a Chamber co-ordinate with this, so that each step in the construction of the new Federal order should be at once the work of the nation and of the Governments. Such plans were suggested and discussed; but in the haste and inexperience of the time they were brought to no conclusion. The opening of the National Assembly had been fixed for the 18th of May, and this brief interval had expired before the few sagacious men who understood the necessity of co-operation between the Governments and the Parliament had decided upon any common course of action. To the mass of patriots it was enough that Germany, after thirty years of disappointment, had at last won its national representation. Before this imposing image of the united race, Kings, Courts, and armies, it was fondly thought, must bow. Thus, in the midst of universal hope, the elections were held throughout Germany in its utmost federal extent, from the Baltic to the Italian border; Bohemia alone, where the Czech majority resisted any closer union with Germany, declining to send representatives to Frankfort. In the body of deputies elected there were to be found almost all the foremost Liberal politicians of every German community; a few still vigorous champions of the time of the War of Liberation, chief among them the poet Arndt; patriots who in the evil days that followed had suffered imprisonment and exile; historians, professors, critics, who in the sacred cause of liberty have, like Gervinus, inflicted upon their readers worse miseries than ever they themselves endured at the hands of unregenerate kings; theologians, journalists; in short, the whole group of leaders under whom Germany expected to enter into the promised land of national unity and freedom. No Imperial coronation ever brought to Frankfort so many honoured guests, or attracted to the same degree the sympathy of the German race. Greeted with the cheers of the citizens of Frankfort, whose civic militia lined the streets, the members of the Assembly marched in procession on the afternoon of the 18th of May from the ancient banqueting-hall of the Kaisers, where they had gathered, to the Church of St. Paul, which had been chosen as their Senate House. Their President and officers were elected on the following day. Arndt, who in the frantic confusion of the first meeting had been unrecognised and shouted down, was called into the Tribune, but could speak only a few words for tears. The Assembly voted him its thanks for his famous song, "What is the German's Fatherland?" and requested that he would add to it another stanza commemorating the union of the race at length visibly realised in that great Parliament. Four days after the opening of the General Assembly of Frankfort, the Prussian national Parliament began its sessions at Berlin.  [420]

[Europe generally in March, 1848.]

At this point the first act in the Revolutionary drama of 1848 in Germany, as in Europe generally, may be considered to have reached its close. A certain unity marks the memorable epoch known generally as the March Days and the events immediately succeeding. Revolution is universal; it scarcely meets with resistance; its views seem on the point of being achieved; the baffled aspirations of the last half-century seem on the point of being fulfilled. There exists no longer in Central Europe such a thing as an autocratic Government; and, while the French Republic maintains an unexpected attitude of peace, Germany and Italy, under the leadership of old dynasties now penetrated with a new spirit, appear to be on the point of achieving each its own work of Federal union and of the expulsion of the foreigner from its national soil. All Italy prepares to move under Charles Albert to force the Austrians from their last strongholds on the Mincio and the Adige; all Germany is with the troops of Frederick William of Prussia as they enter Holstein to rescue this and the neighbouring German province from the Dane. In Radetzky's camp alone, and at the Court of St. Petersburg, the old monarchical order of Europe still survives. How powerful were these two isolated centres of anti-popular energy the world was soon to see. Yet they would not have turned back the tide of European affairs and given one more victory to reaction had they not had their allies in the hatred of race to race, in the incapacity and the errors of peoples and those who represented them; above all, in the enormous difficulties which, even had the generation been one of sages and martyrs, the political circumstances of the time would in themselves have opposed to the accomplishment of the ends desired.

[The French Provisional Government.]

[The National Workshops.]

France had given to Central Europe the signal for the Revolution of 1848, and it was in France, where the conflict was not one for national independence but for political and social interests, that the Revolution most rapidly ran its course and first exhausted its powers. On the flight of Louis Philippe authority had been entrusted by the Chamber of Deputies to a Provisional Government, whose most prominent member was the orator and poet Lamartine. Installed at the Hôtel de Ville, this Government had with difficulty prevented the mob from substituting the Red Flag for the Tricolor, and from proceeding at once to realise the plans of its own leaders. The majority of the Provisional Government were Republicans of a moderate type, representing the ideas of the urban middle classes rather than those of the workmen; but by their side were Ledru Rollin, a rhetorician dominated by the phrases of 1793, and Louis Blanc, who considered all political change as but an instrument for advancing the organisation of labour and for the emancipation of the artisan from servitude, by the establishment of State-directed industries affording appropriate employment and adequate remuneration to all. Among the first proclamations of the Provisional Government was one in which, in answer to a petition demanding the recognition of the Right to Labour, they undertook to guarantee employment to every citizen. This engagement, the heaviest perhaps that was ever voluntarily assumed by any Government, was followed in a few days by the opening of national workshops. That in the midst of a Revolution which took all parties by surprise plans for the conduct of a series of industrial enterprises by the State should have been seriously examined was impossible. The Government had paid homage to an abstract idea; they were without a conception of the mode in which it was to be realised. What articles were to be made, what works were to be executed, no one knew. The mere direction of destitute workmen to the centres where they were to be employed was a task for which a new branch of the administration had to be created. When this was achieved, the men collected proved useless for all purposes of industry. Their numbers increased enormously, rising in the course of four weeks from fourteen to sixty-five thousand. The Revolution had itself caused a financial and commercial panic, interrupting all the ordinary occupations of business, and depriving masses of men of the means of earning a livelihood. These, with others who had no intention of working, thronged to the State workshops; while the certainty of obtaining wages from the public purse occasioned a series of strikes of workmen against their employers and the abandonment of private factories. The chocks which had been intended to confine enrolment at the public works to persons already domiciled in Paris completely failed; from all the neighbouring departments the idle and the hungry streamed into the capital. Every abuse incidental to a system of public relief was present in Paris in its most exaggerated form; every element of experience, of wisdom, of precaution, was absent. If, instead of a group of benevolent theorists, the experiment of 1848 had had for its authors a company of millionaires anxious to dispel all hope that mankind might ever rise to a higher order than that of unrestricted competition of man against man, it could not have been conducted under more fatal conditions.  [421]

[The Provisional Government and the Red Republicans.]

[Elections, April 23.]

The leaders of the democracy in Paris had from the first considered that the decision upon the form of Government to be established in France in place of the Orleanist monarchy belonged rather to themselves than to the nation at large. They distrusted, and with good reason, the results of the General Election which, by a decree of the Provisional Government, was to be held in the course of April. A circular issued by Ledru Rollin, Minister of the Interior, without the knowledge of his colleagues, to the Commissioners by whom he had replaced the Prefects of the Monarchy gave the first open indication of this alarm, and of the means of violence and intimidation by which the party which Ledru Rollin represented hoped to impose its will upon the country. The Commissioners were informed in plain language that, as agents of a revolutionary authority, their powers were unlimited, and that their task was to exclude from election all persons who were not animated by revolutionary spirit, and pure from any taint of association with the past. If the circular had been the work of the Government, and not of a single member of it who was at variance with most of his colleagues and whose words were far more formidable than his actions, it would have clearly foreshadowed a return to the system of 1793. But the isolation of Ledru Rollin was well understood. The attitude of the Government generally was so little in accordance with the views of the Red Republicans that on the 16th of April a demonstration was organised with the object of compelling them to postpone the elections. The prompt appearance in arms of the National Guard, which still represented the middle classes of Paris, baffled the design of the leaders of the mob, and gave to Lamartine and the majority in the Government a decisive victory over their revolutionary colleague. The elections were held at the time appointed; and, in spite of the institution of universal suffrage, they resulted in the return of a body of Deputies not widely different from those who had hitherto appeared in French Parliaments. The great majority were indeed Republicans by profession, but of a moderate type; and the session had no sooner opened than it became clear that the relation between the Socialist democracy of Paris and the National Representatives could only be one of more or less violent antagonism.

[The National Assembly, May 4.]

[Riot of May 15.]

[Measures against the National Workshops.]

The first act of the Assembly, which met on the 4th of May, was to declare that the Provisional Government had deserved well of the country, and to reinstate most of its members in office under the title of an Executive Commission. Ledru Rollin's offences were condoned, as those of a man popular with the democracy, and likely on the whole to yield to the influence of his colleagues. Louis Blanc and his confederate, Albert, as really dangerous persons, were excluded. The Jacobin leaders now proceeded to organise an attack on the Assembly by main force. On the 15th of May the attempt was made. Under pretence of tendering a petition on behalf of Poland, a mob invaded the Legislative Chamber, declared the Assembly dissolved, and put the Deputies to flight. But the triumph was of short duration. The National Guard, whose commander alone was responsible for the failure of measures of defence, soon rallied in force; the leaders of the insurgents, some of whom had installed themselves as a Provisional Government at the Hôtel de Ville, were made captive; and after an interval of a few hours the Assembly resumed possession of the Palais Bourbon. The dishonour done to the national representation by the scandalous scenes of the 15th of May, as well as the decisively proved superiority of the National Guard over the half armed mob, encouraged the Assembly to declare open war against the so-called social democracy, and to decree the abolition of the national workshops. The enormous growth of these establishments, which now included over a hundred thousand men, threatened to ruin the public finances; the demoralisation which they engendered seemed likely to destroy whatever was sound in the life of the working classes of Paris. Of honest industry there was scarcely a trace to be found among the masses who were receiving their daily wages from the State. Whatever the sincerity of those who had founded the national workshops, whatever the anxiety for employment on the part of those who first resorted to them, they had now become mere hives of disorder, where the resources of the State were lavished in accumulating a force for its own overthrow. It was necessary, at whatever risk, to extinguish the evil. Plans for the gradual dispersion of the army of workmen were drawn up by Committees and discussed by the Assembly. If put in force with no more than the necessary delay, these plans might perhaps have rendered a peaceful solution of the difficulty possible. But the Government hesitated, and finally, when a decision could no longer be avoided, determined upon measures more violent and more sudden than those which the Committees had recommended. On the 21st of June an order was published that all occupants of the public workshops between the ages of seventeen and twenty-five must enlist in the army or cease to receive support from the State, and that the removal of the workmen who had come into Paris from the provinces, for which preparations had already been made, must be at once effected.  [422]

[The Four Days of June, 23-26.]

The publication of this order was the signal for an appeal to arms. The legions of the national workshops were in themselves a half-organised force equal in number to several army-corps, and now animated by something like the spirit of military union. The revolt, which began on the morning of the 23rd of June, was conducted as no revolt in Pans had ever been conducted before. The eastern part of the city was turned into a maze of barricades. Though the insurgents had not artillery, they were in other respects fairly armed. The terrible nature of the conflict impending now became evident to the Assembly. General Cavaignac, Minister of War, was placed in command, and subsequently invested with supreme authority, the Executive Commission resigning its powers. All the troops in the neighbourhood of Paris were at once summoned to the capital, Cavaignac well understood that any attempt to hold the insurrection in check by means of scattered posts would only end, as in 1830, by the capture or the demoralisation of the troops. He treated Paris as one great battle-field in which the enemy must be attacked in mass and driven by main force from all his positions. At times the effort appeared almost beyond the power of the forces engaged, and the insurgents, sheltered by huge barricades and firing from the windows of houses, seemed likely to remain masters of the field. The struggle continued for four days, but Cavaignac's artillery and the discipline of his troops at last crushed resistance; and after the Archbishop of Paris had been mortally wounded in a heroic effort to stop further bloodshed, the last bands of the insurgents, driven back into the north-eastern quarter of the city, and there attacked with artillery in front and flank, were forced to lay down their arms.

[Fears left by the events of June.]

Such was the conflict of the Four Days of June, a conflict memorable as one in which the combatants fought not for a political principle or form of Government, but for the preservation or the overthrow of society based on the institution of private property. The National Guard, with some exceptions, fought side by side with the regiments of the line, braved the same perils, and sustained an equal loss. The workmen threw themselves the more passionately into the struggle, inasmuch as defeat threatened them with deprivation of the very means of life. On both sides acts of savagery were committed which the fury of the conflict could not excuse. The vengeance of the conquerors in the moment of success appears, however, to have been less unrelenting than that which followed the overthrow of the Commune in 1871, though, after the struggle was over, the Assembly had no scruple in transporting without trial the whole mass of prisoners taken with arms in their hands. Cavaignac's victory left the classes for whom he had fought terror-stricken at the peril from which they had escaped, and almost hopeless of their own security under any popular form of Government in the future. Against the rash and weak concessions to popular demands that had been made by the administration since February, especially in the matter of taxation and finance, there was now a deep, if not loudly proclaimed, reaction. The national workshops disappeared; grants were made by the Legislature for the assistance of the masses who were left without resource, but the money was bestowed in charitable relief or in the form of loans to associations, not as wages from the State. On every side among the holders of property the cry was for a return to sound principles of finance in the economy of the State, and for the establishment of a strong central power.

[Cavaignac and Louis Napoleon.]

[Louis Napoleon elected Deputy but resigns, June 14.]

General Cavaignac after the restoration of order had laid down the supreme authority which had been conferred on him, but at the desire of the Assembly he continued to exercise it until the new Constitution should be drawn up and an Executive appointed in accordance with its provisions. Events had suddenly raised Cavaignac from obscurity to eminence, and seemed to mark him out as the future ruler of France. But he displayed during the six months following the suppression of the revolt no great capacity for government, and his virtues as well as his defects made against his personal success. A sincere Republican, while at the same time a rigid upholder of law, he refused to lend himself to those who were, except in name, enemies of Republicanism; and in his official acts and utterances he spared the feelings of the reactionary classes as little as he would have spared those of rioters and Socialists. As the influence of Cavaignac declined, another name began to fill men's thoughts. Louis Napoleon, son of the Emperor's brother Louis, King of Holland, had while still in exile been elected to the National Assembly by four Departments. He was as yet almost unknown except by name to his fellow-countrymen. Born in the Tuileries in 1808, he had been involved as a child in the ruin of the Empire, and had passed into banishment with his mother Hortense, under the law that expelled from France all members of Napoleon's family. He had been brought up at Augsburg and on the shores of the Lake of Constance, and as a volunteer in a Swiss camp of artillery he had gained some little acquaintance with military life. In 1831 he had joined the insurgents in the Romagna who were in arms against the Papal Government. The death of his own elder brother, followed in 1832 by that of Napoleon's son, the Duke of Reichstadt, made him chief of the house of Bonaparte. Though far more of a recluse than a man of action, though so little of his own nation that he could not pronounce a sentence of French without a marked German accent, and had never even seen a French play performed, he now became possessed by the fixed idea that he was one day to wear the French Crown. A few obscure adventurers attached themselves to his fortunes, and in 1836 he appeared at Strasburg and presented himself to the troops as Emperor. The enterprise ended in failure and ridicule. Louis Napoleon was shipped to America by the Orleanist Government, which supplied him with money, and thought it unnecessary even to bring him to trial. He recrossed the Atlantic, made his home in England, and in 1840 repeated at Boulogne the attempt that had failed at Strasburg. The result was again disastrous. He was now sentenced to perpetual imprisonment, and passed the next six years in captivity at Ham, where he produced a treatise on the Napoleonic Ideas, and certain fragments on political and social questions. The enthusiasm for Napoleon, of which there had been little trace in France since 1815, was now reviving; the sufferings of the epoch of conquest were forgotten; the steady maintenance of peace by Louis Philippe seemed humiliating to young and ardent spirits who had not known the actual presence of the foreigner. In literature two men of eminence worked powerfully upon the national imagination. The history of Thiers gave the nation a great stage-picture of Napoleon's exploits; Béranger's lyrics invested his exile at St. Helena with an irresistible, though spurious, pathos. Thus, little as the world concerned itself with the prisoner at Ham, the tendencies of the time were working in his favour; and his confinement, which lasted six years and was terminated by his escape and return to England, appears to have deepened his brooding nature, and to have strengthened rather than diminished his confidence in himself. On the overthrow of Louis Philippe he visited Paris, but was requested by the Provisional Government, on the ground of the unrepealed law banishing the Bonaparte family, to quit the country. He obeyed, probably foreseeing that the difficulties of the Republic would create better opportunities for his reappearance. Meanwhile the group of unknown men who sought their fortunes in a Napoleonic restoration busily canvassed and wrote on behalf of the Prince, and with such success that, in the supplementary elections that were held at the beginning of June, he obtained a fourfold triumph. The Assembly, in spite of the efforts of the Government, pronounced his return valid. Yet with rare self-command the Prince still adhered to his policy of reserve, resigning his seat on the ground that his election had been made a pretext for movements of which he disapproved, while at the same time he declared in his letter to the President of the Assembly that if duties should be imposed upon him by the people he should know how to fulfil them.  [423]

[Louis Napoleon again elected, Sept. 17.]

[Louis Napoleon elected President, Dec. 10.]

From this time Louis Napoleon was a recognised aspirant to power. The Constitution of the Republic was now being drawn up by the Assembly. The Executive Commission had disappeared in the convulsion of June; Cavaignac was holding the balance between parties rather than governing himself. In the midst of the debates on the Constitution Louis Napoleon was again returned elected, to the Assembly by the votes of five Departments. He saw that he ought to remain no longer in the background, and, accepting the call of the electors, he took his seat in the Chamber. It was clear that he would become a candidate for the Presidency of the Republic, and that the popularity of his name among the masses was enormous. He had twice presented himself to France as the heir to Napoleon's throne; he had never directly abandoned his dynastic claim; he had but recently declared, in almost threatening language, that he should know how to fulfil the duties that the people might impose upon him. Yet with all these facts before it the Assembly, misled by the puerile rhetoric of Lamartine, decided that in the new Constitution the President of the Republic, in whom was vested the executive power, should be chosen by the direct vote of all Frenchmen, and rejected the amendment of M. Grevy, who, with real insight into the future, declared that such direct election by the people could only give France a Dictator, and demanded that the President should be appointed not by the masses but by the Chamber. Thus was the way paved for Louis Napoleon's march to power. The events of June had dispelled any attraction that he had hitherto felt towards Socialistic theories. He saw that France required an upholder of order and of property. In his address to the nation announcing his candidature for the Presidency he declared that he would shrink from no sacrifice in defending society, so audaciously attacked; that he would devote himself without reserve to the maintenance of the Republic, and make it his pride to leave to his successor at the end of four years authority strengthened, liberty unimpaired, and real progress accomplished. Behind these generalities the address dexterously touched on the special wants of classes and parties, and promised something to each. The French nation in the election which followed showed that it believed in Louis Napoleon even more than he did in himself. If there existed in the opinion of the great mass any element beyond the mere instinct of self-defence against real or supposed schemes of spoliation, it was reverence for Napoleon's memory. Out of seven millions of votes given, Louis Napoleon received above five, Cavaignac, who alone entered into serious competition with him, receiving about a fourth part of that number. Lamartine and the men who ten months before had represented all the hopes of the nation now found but a handful of supporters. Though none yet openly spoke of Monarchy, on all sides there was the desire for the restoration of power. The day-dreams of the second Republic had fled. France had shown that its choice lay only between a soldier who had crushed rebellion and a stranger who brought no title to its confidence but an Imperial name.

CHAPTER XX.

Austria and Italy-Vienna from March to May-Flight of the Emperor- Bohemian National Movement-Windischgrätz subdues Prague-Campaign around Verona-Papal Allocution-Naples in May-Negotiations as to Lombardy-Reconquest of Venetia-Battle of Custozza-The Austrians enter Milan-Austrian Court and Hungary-The Serbs in Southern Hungary-Serb Congress at Carlowitz-Jellacic-Affairs of Croatia-Jellacic, the Court and the Hungarian Movement-Murder of Lamberg-Manifesto of October 3 Vienna on October 6-The Emperor at Olmütz-Windischgrätz conquers Vienna-The Parliament at Kremsier-Schwarzenberg Minister-Ferdinand abdicates-Dissolution of the Kremsier Parliament-Unitary Edict- Hungary-The Roumanians in Transylvania-The Austrian Army occupies Pesth-Hungarian Government at Debreczin-The Austrians driven out of Hungary-Declaration of Hungarian Independence-Russian Intervention- The Hungarian Summer Campaign-Capitulation of Vilagos-Italy-Murder of Rossi-Tuscany-The March Campaign in Lombardy-Novara-Abdication of Charles Albert-Victor Emmanuel-Restoration in Tuscany-French Intervention in Rome-Defeat of Oudinot-Oudinot and Lesseps-The French enter Rome-The Restored Pontifical Government-Fall of Venice- Ferdinand reconquers Sicily Germany-The National Assembly at Frankfort- The Armistice of Malmö-Berlin from April to September-The Prussian Army-Last days of the Prussian Parliament-Prussian Constitution granted by Edict-The German National Assembly and Austria-Frederick William IV. elected Emperor-He refuses the Crown-End of the National Assembly-Prussia attempts to form a separate Union-The Union Parliament at Erfurt-Action of Austria-Hesse Cassel-The Diet of Frankfort restored-Olmütz-Schleswig-Holstein-Germany after 1849- Austria after 1851-France after 1848-Louis Napoleon-The October Message-Law Limiting the Franchise-Louis Napoleon and the Army- Proposed Revision of the Constitution-The Coup d'État-Napoleon III. Emperor

[Austria and Italy.]

The plain of Northern Italy has ever been an arena on which the contest between interests greater than those of Italy itself has been brought to an issue, and it may perhaps be truly said that in the struggle between established Governments and Revolution through out Central Europe in 1848 the real turning point, if it can anywhere be fixed, lay rather in the fortunes of a campaign in Lombardy than in any single combination of events at Vienna or Berlin. The very existence of the Austrian Monarchy depended on the victory of Radetzky's forces over the national movement at the head of which Piedmont had now placed itself. If Italian independence should be established upon the ruin of the Austrian arms, and the influence and example of the victorious Italian people be thrown into the scale against the Imperial Government in its struggle with the separatist forces that convulsed every part of the Austrian dominions, it was scarcely possible that any stroke of fortune or policy could save the Empire of the Hapsburgs from dissolution. But on the prostration or recovery of Austria, as represented by its central power at Vienna, the future of Germany in great part depended. Whatever compromise might be effected between popular and monarchical forces in the other German States if left free from Austria's interference, the whole influence of a resurgent Austrian power could not but be directed against the principles of popular sovereignty and national union. The Parliament of Frankfort might then in vain affect to fulfil its mandate without reckoning with the Court of Vienna. All this was indeed obscured in the tempests that for a while shut out the political horizon. The Liberals of Northern Germany had little sympathy with the Italian cause in the decisive days of 1848. Their inclinations went rather with the combatant who, though bent on maintaining an oppressive dominion, was nevertheless a member of the German race and paid homage for the moment to Constitutional rights. Yet, as later events were to prove, the fetters which crushed liberty beyond the Alps could fit as closely on to German limbs; and in the warfare of Upper Italy for its own freedom the battle of German Liberalism was in no small measure fought and lost.

[Vienna from March to May.]

Metternich once banished from Vienna, the first popular demand was for a Constitution. His successors in office, with a certain characteristic pedantry, devoted their studies to the Belgian Constitution of 1831; and after some weeks a Constitution was published by edict for the non-Hungarian part of the Empire, including a Parliament of two Chambers, the Lower to be chosen by indirect election, the Upper consisting of nominees of the Crown and representatives of the great landowners. The provisions of this Constitution in favour of the Crown and the Aristocracy, as well as the arbitrary mode of its promulgation, displeased the Viennese. Agitation recommenced in the city; unpopular officials were roughly handled the Press grew ever more violent and more scurrilous. One strange result of the tutelage in which Austrian society had been held was that the students of the University became, and for some time continued to be, the most important political body of the capital. Their principal rivals in influence were the National Guard drawn from citizens of the middle class, the workmen as yet remaining in the background. Neither in the Hall of the University nor at the taverns where the civic militia discussed the events of the hour did the office-drawn Constitution find favour. On the 13th of May it was determined, with the view of exercising stronger pressure upon the Government, that the existing committees of the National Guard and of the students should be superseded by one central committee representing both bodies. The elections to this committee had been held, and its sittings had begun, when the commander of the National Guard declared such proceedings to be inconsistent with military discipline, and ordered the dissolution of the committee. Riots followed, during which the students and the mob made their way into the Emperor's palace and demanded from his Ministers not only the re-establishment of the central committee but the abolition of the Upper Chamber in the projected Constitution, and the removal of the checks imposed on popular sovereignty by a limited franchise and the system of indirect elections. On point after point the Ministry gave way; and, in spite of the resistance and reproaches of the Imperial household, they obtained the Emperor's signature to a document promising that for the future all the important military posts in the city should be held by the National Guard jointly with the regular troops, that the latter should never be called out except on the requisition of the National Guard, and that the projected Constitution should remain without force until it should have been submitted for confirmation to a single Constituent Assembly elected by universal suffrage.

[Flight of the Emperor, May 17.]

[Tumult of May 26.]

The weakness of the Emperor's intelligence rendered him a mere puppet in the hands of those who for the moment exercised control over his actions. During the riot of the 15th of May he obeyed his Ministers; a few hours afterwards he fell under the sway of the Court party, and consented to fly from Vienna. On the 18th the Viennese learnt to their astonishment that Ferdinand was far on the road to the Tyrol. Soon afterwards a manifesto was published, stating that the violence and anarchy of the capital had compelled the Emperor to transfer his residence to Innsbruck; that he remained true, however, to the promises made in March and to their legitimate consequences; and that proof must be given of the return of the Viennese to their old sentiments of loyalty before he could again appear among them. A certain revulsion of feeling in the Emperor's favour now became manifest in the capital, and emboldened the Ministers to take the first step necessary towards obtaining his return, namely the dissolution of the Students' Legion. They could count with some confidence on the support of the wealthier part of the middle class, who were now becoming wearied of the students' extravagances and alarmed at the interruption of business caused by the Revolution; moreover, the ordinary termination of the academic year was near at hand. The order was accordingly given for the dissolution of the Legion and the closing of the University. But the students met the order with the stoutest resistance. The workmen poured in from the suburbs to join in their defence. Barricades were erected, and the insurrection of March seemed on the point of being renewed. Once more the Government gave way, and not only revoked its order, but declared itself incapable of preserving tranquillity in the capital unless it should receive the assistance of the leaders of the people. With the full concurrence of the Ministers, a Committee of Public Safety was formed, representing at once the students, the middle class, and the workmen; and it entered upon its duties with an authority exceeding, within the limits of the capital, that of the shadowy functionaries of State.  [424]

[Bohemian national movement.]

[Windischgrätz subdues Prague, June 12-17.]

In the meantime the antagonism between the Czechs and the Germans in Bohemia was daily becoming more bitter. The influence of the party of compromise, which had been dominant in the early days of March, had disappeared before the ill-timed attempt of the German national leaders at Frankfort to include Bohemia within the territory sending representatives to the German national Parliament. By consenting to this incorporation the Czech population would have definitely renounced its newly asserted claim to nationality. If the growth of democratic spirit at Vienna was accompanied by a more intense German national feeling in the capital, the popular movements at Vienna and at Prague must necessarily pass into a relation of conflict with one another. On the flight of the Emperor becoming known at Prague, Count Thun, the governor, who was also the chief of the moderate Bohemian party, invited Ferdinand to make Prague the seat of his Government. This invitation, which would have directly connected the Crown with Czech national interests, was not accepted. The rasher politicians, chiefly students and workmen, continued to hold their meetings and to patrol the streets; and a Congress of Slavs from all parts of the Empire, which was opened on the 2nd of June, excited national passions still further. So threatening grew the attitude of the students and workmen that Count Windischgrätz, commander of the troops at Prague, prepared to act with artillery. On the 12th of June, the day on which the Congress of Slavs broke up, fighting began. Windischgrätz, whose wife was killed by a bullet, appears to have acted with calmness, and to have sought to arrive at some peaceful settlement. He withdrew his troops, and desisted from a bombardment that he had begun, on the understanding that the barricades which had been erected should be removed. This condition was not fulfilled. New acts of violence occurred in the city, and on the 17th Windischgrätz reopened fire. On the following day Prague surrendered, and Windischgrätz re-entered the city as Dictator. The autonomy of Bohemia was at an end. The army had for the first time acted with effect against a popular rising; the first blow had been struck on behalf of the central power against the revolution which till now had seemed about to dissolve the Austrian State into its fragments.

[Campaign around Verona, April-May.]

At this point the dominant interest in Austrian affairs passes from the capital and the northern provinces to Radetzky's army and the Italians with whom it stood face to face. Once convinced of the necessity of a retreat from Milan, the Austrian commander had moved with sufficient rapidity to save Verona and Mantua from passing into the hands of the insurgents. He was thus enabled to place his army in one of the best defensive positions in Europe, the Quadrilateral flanked by the rivers Mincio and Adige, and protected by the fortresses of Verona, Mantua, Peschiera, and Legnano. With his front on the Mincio he awaited at once the attack of the Piedmontese and the arrival of reinforcements from the north-east. On the 8th of April the first attack was made, and after a sharp engagement at Goito the passage of the Mincio was effected by the Sardinian army. Siege was now laid to Peschiera; and while a Tuscan contingent watched Mantua, the bulk of Charles Albert's forces operated farther northward with the view of cutting off Verona from the roads to the Tyrol. This result was for a moment achieved, but the troops at the King's disposal were far too weak for the task of reducing the fortresses; and in an attempt that was made on the 6th of May to drive the Austrians out of their positions in front of Verona, Charles Albert was defeated at Santa Lucia and compelled to fall back towards the Mincio.  [425]

[Papal Allocution, April 29.]

[Naples in May.]

A pause in the war ensued, filled by political events of evil omen for Italy. Of all the princes who had permitted their troops to march northwards to the assistance of the Lombards, not one was acting in full sincerity. The first to show himself in his true colours was the Pope. On the 29th of April an Allocution was addressed to the Cardinals, in which Pius disavowed all participation in the war against Austria, and declared that his own troops should do no more than defend the integrity of the Roman States. Though at the moment an outburst of popular indignation in Rome forced a still more liberal Ministry into power, and Durando, the Papal general, continued his advance into Venetia, the Pope's renunciation of his supposed national leadership produced the effect which its author desired, encouraging every open and every secret enemy of the Italian cause, and perplexing those who had believed themselves to be engaged in a sacred as well as a patriotic war. In Naples things hurried far more rapidly to a catastrophe. Elections had been held to the Chamber of Deputies, which was to be opened on the 15th of May, and most of the members returned were men who, while devoted to the Italian national cause were neither Republicans nor enemies of the Bourbon dynasty, but anxious to co-operate with their King in the work of Constitutional reform. Politicians of another character, however, commanded the streets of Naples. Rumours were spread that the Court was on the point of restoring despotic government and abandoning the Italian cause. Disorder and agitation increased from day to day; and after the Deputies had arrived in the city and begun a series of informal meetings preparatory to the opening of the Parliament, an ill-advised act of Ferdinand gave to the party of disorder, who were weakly represented in the Assembly, occasion for an insurrection. After promulgating the Constitution on February both, Ferdinand had agreed that it should be submitted to the two Chambers for revision. He notified, however, to the Representatives on the eve of the opening of Parliament that they would be required to take an oath of fidelity to the Constitution. They urged that such an oath would deprive them of their right of revision. The King, after some hours, consented to a change in the formula of the oath; but his demand had already thrown the city into tumult. Barricades were erected, the Deputies in vain endeavouring to calm the rioters and to prevent a conflict with the troops. While negotiations were still in progress shots were fired. The troops now threw themselves upon the people; there was a struggle, short in duration, but sanguinary and merciless; the barricades were captured, some hundreds of the insurgents slain, and Ferdinand was once more absolute master of Naples. The Assembly was dissolved on the day after that on which it should have met. Orders were at once sent by the King to General Pepe, commander of the troops that were on the march to Lombardy, to return with his army to Naples. Though Pepe continued true to the national cause, and endeavoured to lead his army forward from Bologna in defiance of the King's instructions, his troops now melted away; and when he crossed the Po and placed himself under the standard of Charles Albert in Venetia there remained with him scarcely fifteen hundred men.

[Negotiations as to Lombardy.]

[Reconquest of Venetia, June, July.]

It thus became clear before the end of May that the Lombards would receive no considerable help from the Southern States in their struggle for freedom, and that the promised league of the Governments in the national cause was but a dream from which there was a bitter awakening. Nor in Northern Italy itself was there the unity in aim and action without which success was impossible. The Republican party accused the King and the Provisional Government at Milan of an unwillingness to arm the people; Charles Albert on his part regarded every Republican as an enemy. On entering Lombardy the King had stated that no question as to the political organisation of the future should be raised until the war was ended; nevertheless, before a fortress had been captured, he had allowed Modena and Parma to declare themselves incorporated with the Piedmontese monarchy; and, in spite of Mazzini's protest, their example was followed by Lombardy and some Venetian districts. In the recriminations that passed between the Republicans and the Monarchists it was even suggested that Austria had friends of its own in certain classes of the population. This was not the view taken by the Viennese Government, which from the first appears to have considered its cause in Lombardy as virtually lost. The mediation of Great Britain was invoked by Metternich's successors, and a willingness expressed to grant to the Italian provinces complete autonomy under the Emperor's sceptre. Palmerston, in reply to the supplications of a Court which had hitherto cursed his influence, urged that Lombardy and the greater part of Venetia should be ceded to the King of Piedmont. The Austrian Government would have given up Lombardy to their enemy; they hesitated to increase his power to the extent demanded by Palmerston, the more so as the French Ministry was known to be jealous of the aggrandisement of Sardinia, and to desire the establishment of weak Republics like those formed in 1796. Withdrawing from its negotiations at London, the Emperor's Cabinet now entered into direct communication with the Provisional Government at Milan, and, without making any reference to Piedmont or Venice, offered complete independence to Lombardy. As the union of this province with Piedmont had already been voted by its inhabitants, the offer was at once rejected. Moreover, even it the Italians had shown a disposition to compromise their cause and abandon Venice, Radetzky would not have broken off the combat while any possibility remained of winning over the Emperor from the side of the peace-party. In reply to instructions directing him to offer an armistice to the enemy, he sent Prince Felix Schwarzenberg to Innsbruck to implore the Emperor to trust to the valour of his soldiers and to continue the combat. Already there were signs that the victory would ultimately be with Austria. Reinforcements had cut their way through the insurgent territory and reached Verona; and although a movement by which Radetzky threatened to sever Charles Albert's communications was frustrated by a second engagement at Goito, and Peschiera passed into the besiegers' hands, this was the last success won by the Italians. Throwing himself suddenly eastwards, Radetzky appeared before Vicenza, and compelled this city, with the entire Papal army, commanded by General Durando, to capitulate. The fall of Vicenza was followed by that of the other cities on the Venetian mainland till Venice alone on the east of the Adige defied the Austrian arms. As the invader pressed onward, an Assembly which Manin had convoked at Venice decided on union with Piedmont. Manin himself had been the most zealous opponent of what he considered the sacrifice of Venetian independence. He gave way nevertheless at the last, and made no attempt to fetter the decision of the Assembly; but when this decision had been given he handed over the conduct of affairs to others, and retired for awhile into private life, declining to serve under a king.[426]

[Battle of Custozza July 25.]

[Austrians re-enter Milan, Aug. 6.]

Charles Albert now renewed his attempt to wrest the central fortresses from the Austrians. Leaving half his army at Peschiera and farther north, he proceeded with the other half to blockade Mantua. Radetzky took advantage of the unskilful generalship of his opponent, and threw himself upon the weakly guarded centre of the long Sardinian line. The King perceived his error, and sought to unite with his the northern detachments, now separated from him by the Mincio. His efforts were baffled, and on the 25th of July, after a brave resistance, his troops were defeated at Custozza. The retreat across the Mincio was conducted in fair order, but disasters sustained by the northern division, which should have held the enemy in check, destroyed all hope, and the retreat then became a flight. Radetzky followed in close pursuit. Charles Albert entered Milan, but declared himself unable to defend the city. A storm of indignation broke out against the unhappy King amongst the Milanese, whom he was declared to have betrayed. The palace where he had taken up his quarters was besieged by the mob; his life was threatened; and he escaped with difficulty on the night of August 5th under the protection of General La Marmora and a few faithful Guards. A capitulation was signed, and as the Piedmontese army evacuated the city Radetzky's troops entered it in triumph. Not less than sixty thousand of the inhabitants, according to Italian statements, abandoned their homes and sought refuge in Switzerland or Piedmont rather than submit to the conqueror's rule. Radetzky could now have followed his retreating enemy without difficulty to Turin, and have crushed Piedmont itself under foot; but the fear of France and Great Britain checked his career of victory, and hostilities were brought to a close by an armistice at Vigevano on August 9th.  [427]

[The Austrian Court and Hungary.]

The effects of Radetzky's triumph were felt in every province of the Empire. The first open expression given to the changed state of affairs was the return of the Imperial Court from its refuge at Innsbruck to Vienna. The election promised in May had been held, and an Assembly representing all the non-Hungarian parts of the Monarchy, with the exception of the Italian provinces, had been opened by the Archduke John, as representative of the Emperor, on the 22nd of July. Ministers and Deputies united in demanding the return of the Emperor to the capital. With Radetzky and Windischgrätz within call, the Emperor could now with some confidence face his students and his Parliament. But of far greater importance than the return of the Court to Vienna was the attitude which it now assumed towards the Diet and the national Government of Hungary. The concessions made in April, inevitable as they were, had in fact raised Hungary to the position of an independent State. When such matters as the employment of Hungarian troops against Italy or the distribution of the burden of taxation came into question, the Emperor had to treat with the Hungarian Ministry almost as if it represented a foreign and a rival Power. For some months this humiliation had to be borne, and the appearance of fidelity to the new Constitutional law maintained. But a deep, resentful hatred against the Magyar cause penetrated the circles in which the old military and official absolutism of Austria yet survived; and behind the men and the policy still representing with some degree of sincerity the new order of things, there gathered the passions and the intrigues of a reaction that waited only for the outbreak of civil war within Hungary itself, and the restoration of confidence to the Austrian army, to draw the sword against its foe. Already, while Italy was still unsubdued, and the Emperor was scarcely safe in his palace at Vienna, the popular forces that might be employed against the Government at Pesth came into view.

[The Serbs in Southern Hungary.]

[Serb Congress at Carlowitz, May 13-15.]

In one of the stormy sessions of the Hungarian Diet at the time when the attempt was first made to impose the Magyar language upon Croatia the Illyrian leader, Gai, had thus addressed the Assembly: "You Magyars are an island in the ocean of Slavism. Take heed that its waves do not rise and overwhelm you." The agitation of the spring of 1848 first revealed in its full extent the peril thus foreshadowed. Croatia had for above a year been in almost open mutiny, but the spirit of revolt now spread through the whole of the Serb population of Southern Hungary, from the eastern limits of Slavonia,  [428] across the plain known as the Banat beyond the junction of the Theiss and the Danube, up to the borders of Transylvania. The Serbs had been welcomed into these provinces in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries by the sovereigns of Austria as a bulwark against the Turks. Charters had been given to them, which were still preserved, promising them a distinct political administration under their own elected Voivode, and ecclesiastical independence under their own Patriarch of the Greek Church.  [429] These provincial rights had fared much as others in the Austrian Empire. The Patriarch and the Voivode had disappeared, and the Banat had been completely merged in Hungary. Enough, however, of Serb nationality remained to kindle at the summons of 1848, and to resent with a sudden fierceness the determination of the Magyar rulers at Pesth that the Magyar language, as the language of State, should thenceforward bind together all the races of Hungary in the enjoyment of a common national life. The Serbs had demanded from Kossuth and his colleagues the restoration of the local and ecclesiastical autonomy of which the Hapsburgs had deprived them, and the recognition of their own national language and customs. They found, or believed, that instead of a German they were now to have a Magyar lord, and one more near, more energetic, more aggressive. Their reply to Kossuth's defence of Magyar ascendency was the summoning of a Congress of Serbs at Carlowitz on the Lower Danube. Here it was declared that the Serbs of Austria formed a free and independent nation under the Austrian sceptre and the common Hungarian Crown. A Voivode was elected and the limits of his province were defined. A National Committee was charged with the duty of organising a Government and of entering into intimate connection with the neighbouring Slavic Kingdom of Croatia.

[Jellacic in Croatia.]

At Agram, the Croatian capital, all established authority had sunk in the catastrophe of March, and a National Committee had assumed power. It happened that the office of Governor, or Ban, of Croatia was then vacant. The Committee sent a deputation to Vienna requesting that the colonel of the first Croatian regiment, Jellacic, might be appointed. Without waiting for the arrival of the deputation, the Court, by a patent dated the 23rd of March, nominated Jellacic to the vacant post. The date of this appointment, and the assumption of office by Jellacic on the 14th of April, the very day before the Hungarian Ministry entered upon its powers, have been considered proof that a secret understanding existed from the first between Jellacic and the Court. No further evidence of this secret relation has, however, been made public, and the belief long current among all friends of the Magyar cause that Croatia was deliberately instigated to revolt against the Hungarian Government by persons around the Emperor seems to rest on no solid foundation. The Croats would have been unlike all other communities in the Austrian Empire if they had not risen under the national impulse of 1848. They had been murmuring against Magyar ascendency for years past, and the fire long smouldering now probably burst into flame here as elsewhere without the touch of an incendiary hand. With regard to Jellacic's sudden appointment it is possible that the Court, powerless to check the Croatian movement, may have desired to escape the appearance of compulsion by spontaneously conferring office on the popular soldier, who was at least more likely to regard the Emperor's interests than the lawyers and demagogues around him. Whether Jellacic was at this time genuinely concerned for Croatian autonomy, or whether from the first, while he apparently acted with the Croatian nationalists his deepest sympathies were with the Austrian army, and his sole design was that of serving the Imperial Crown with or without its own avowed concurrence, it is impossible to say. That, like most of his countrymen, he cordially hated the Magyars, is beyond doubt. The general impression left by his character hardly accords with the Magyar conception of him as the profound and far-sighted conspirator-he would seem, on the contrary, to have been a man easily yielding to the impulses of the moment, and capable of playing contradictory parts with little sense of his own inconsistency.  [430]

[Affairs of Croatia April 14-June 16.]

Installed in office, Jellacic cast to the winds all consideration due to the Emperor's personal engagements towards Hungary, and forthwith permitted the Magyar officials to be driven out of the country. On the 2nd of May he issued an order forbidding all Croatian authorities to correspond with the Government at Pesth. Batthyány, the Hungarian Premier, at once hurried to Vienna, and obtained from the Emperor a letter commanding Jellacic to submit to the Hungarian Ministry. As the Ban paid no attention to this mandate, General Hrabowsky, commander of the troops in the southern provinces, received orders from Pesth to annul all that Jellacic had done, to suspend him from his office, and to bring him to trial for high treason. Nothing daunted, Jellacic on his own authority convoked the Diet of Croatia for the 5th of June; the populace of Agram, on hearing of Hrabowsky's mission, burnt the Palatine in effigy. This was a direct outrage on the Imperial family, and Batthyány turned it to account. The Emperor had just been driven from Vienna by the riot of the 15th of May. Batthyány sought him at Innsbruck, and by assuring him of the support of his loyal Hungarians against both the Italians and the Viennese obtained his signature on June 10th to a rescript vehemently condemning the Ban's action and suspending him from office. Jellacic had already been summoned to appear at Innsbruck. He set out, taking with him a deputation of Croats and Serbs, and leaving behind him a popular Assembly sitting at Agram, in which, besides the representatives of Croatia, there were seventy Deputies from the Serb provinces. On the very day on which the Ban reached Innsbruck, the Imperial order condemning him and suspending him from his functions was published by Batthyány at Pesth. Nor was the situation made easier by the almost simultaneous announcement that civil war had broken out on the Lower Danube, and that General Hrabowsky, on attempting to occupy Carlowitz, had been attacked and compelled to retreat by the Serbs under their national leader Stratimirovic.  [431]

[Jellacic, the Court, and the Hungarian Government.]

It is said that the Emperor Ferdinand, during deliberations in council on which the fate of the Austrian Empire depended, was accustomed to occupy himself with counting the number of carriages that passed from right and left respectively under the windows. In the struggle between Croatia and Hungary he appears to have avoided even the formal exercise of authority, preferring to commit the decision between the contending parties to the Archduke John, as mediator or judge. John was too deeply immersed in other business to give much attention to the matter. What really passed between Jellacic and the Imperial family at Innsbruck is unknown. The official request of the Ban was for the withdrawal or suppression of the rescript signed by the Emperor on June 10th. Prince Esterhazy, who represented the Hungarian Government at Innsbruck, was ready to make this concession; but before the document could be revoked, it had been made public by Batthyány. With the object of proving his fidelity to the Court, Jellacic now published an address to the Croatian regiments serving in Lombardy, entreating them not to be diverted from their duty to the Emperor in the field by any report of danger to their rights and their nationality nearer home. So great was Jellacic's influence with his countrymen that an appeal from him of opposite tenor would probably have caused the Croatian regiments to quit Radetzky in a mass, and so have brought the war in Italy to an ignominious end. His action won for him a great popularity in the higher ranks of the Austrian army, and probably gained for him, even if he did not possess it before, the secret confidence of the Court. That some understanding now existed is almost certain, for, in spite of the unrepealed declaration of June 10th, and the postponement of the Archduke's judgment, Jellacic was permitted to return to Croatia and to resume his government. The Diet at Agram occupied itself with far-reaching schemes for a confederation of the southern Slavs; but its discussions were of no practical effect, and after some weeks it was extinguished under the form of an adjournment. From this time Jellacic held dictatorial power. It was unnecessary for him in his relations with Hungary any longer to keep up the fiction of a mere defence of Croatian rights; he appeared openly as the champion of Austrian unity. In negotiations which he held with Batthyány at Vienna during the last days of July, he demanded the restoration of single Ministries for War, Finance, and Foreign Affairs for the whole Austrian Empire. The demand was indignantly refused, and the chieftains of the two rival races quitted Vienna to prepare for war.

[Imminent breach between Austria and Hungary.]

[Jellacic restored to office, Sept. 3. He marches on Pesth.]

The Hungarian National Parliament, elected under the new Constitution, had been opened at Pesth on July 5th. Great efforts had been made, in view of the difficulties with Croatia and of the suspected intrigues between the Ban and the Court party, to induce the Emperor Ferdinand to appear at Pesth in person. He excused himself from this on the ground of illness, but sent a letter to the Parliament condemning not only in his own name but in that of every member of the Imperial family the resistance offered to the Hungarian Government in the southern provinces. If words bore any meaning, the Emperor stood pledged to a loyal co-operation with the Hungarian Ministers in defence of the unity and the constitution of the Hungarian Kingdom as established by the laws of April. Yet at this very time the Minister of War at Vienna was encouraging Austrian officers to join the Serb insurgents. Kossuth, who conducted most of the business of the Hungarian Government in the Lower Chamber at Pesth, made no secret of his hostility to the central powers. While his colleagues sought to avoid a breach with the other half of the Monarchy, it seemed to be Kossuth's object rather to provoke it. In calling for a levy of two hundred thousand men to crash the Slavic rebellion, he openly denounced the Viennese Ministry and the Court as its promoters. In leading the debate upon the Italian War, he endeavoured without the knowledge of his colleagues to make the cession of the territory west of the Adige a condition of Hungary's participation in the struggle. As Minister of Finance, he spared neither word nor act to demonstrate his contempt for the financial interests of Austria. Whether a gentler policy on the part of the most powerful statesman in Hungary might have averted the impending conflict it is vain to ask; but in the uncompromising enmity of Kossuth the Austrian Court found its own excuse for acts in which shamelessness seemed almost to rise into political virtue. No sooner had Radetzky's victories and the fall of Milan brought the Emperor back to Vienna than the new policy came into effect. The veto of the sovereign was placed upon the laws passed by the Diet at Pesth for the defence of the Kingdom. The Hungarian Government was required to reinstate Jellacic in his dignities, to enter into negotiations at Vienna with him and the Austrian Ministry, and finally to desist from all military preparations against the rebellious provinces. In answer to these demands the Diet sent a hundred of its members to Vienna to claim from the Emperor the fulfilment of his plighted word. The miserable man received them on the 9th of September with protestations of his sincerity; but even before the deputation had passed the palace-gates, there appeared in the official gazette a letter under the Emperor's own hand replacing Jellacic in office and acquitting him of every charge that had been brought against him. It was for this formal recognition alone that Jellacic had been waiting. On the 11th of September he crossed the Drave with his army, and began his march against the Hungarian capital.[432]

[Mission of Lamberg. He is murdered at Pesth, Sept. 28.]

The Ministry now in office at Vienna was composed in part of men who had been known as reformers in the early days of 1848; but the old order was represented by Count Wessenberg, who had been Metternich's assistant at the Congress of Vienna, and by Latour, the War Minister, a soldier of high birth whose career dated back to the campaign of Austerlitz. Whatever contempt might be felt by one section of the Cabinet for the other, its members were able to unite against the independence of Hungary as they had united against the independence of Italy. They handed in to the Emperor a memorial in which the very concessions to which they owed their own existence as a Constitutional Ministry were made a ground for declaring the laws establishing Hungarian autonomy null and void. In a tissue of transparent sophistries they argued that the Emperor's promise of a Constitution to all his dominions on the 15th of March disabled him from assenting, without the advice of his Viennese Ministry, to the resolutions subsequently passed by the Hungarian Diet, although the union between Hungary and the other Hereditary States had from the first rested solely on the person of the monarch, and no German official had ever pretended to exercise authority over Hungarians otherwise than by order of the sovereign as Hungarian King. The publication of this Cabinet memorial, which appeared in the journals at Pesth on the 15th of September, gave plain warning to the Hungarians that, if they were not to be attacked by Jellacic and the Austrian army simultaneously, they must make some compromise with the Government at Vienna. Batthyány was inclined to concession, and after resigning office in consequence of the Emperor's desertion he had already re-assumed his post with colleagues disposed to accept his own pacific policy. Kossuth spoke openly of war with Austria and of a dictatorship. As Jellacic advanced towards Pesth, the Palatine took command of the Hungarian army and marched southwards. On reaching Lake Baloton, on whose southern shore the Croats were encamped, he requested a personal conference with Jellacic, and sailed to the appointed place of meeting. But he waited in vain for the Ban; and rightly interpreting this rejection of his overtures, he fled from the army and laid down his office. The Emperor now sent General Lamberg from Vienna with orders to assume the supreme command alike over the Magyar and the Croatian forces, and to prevent an encounter. On the success of Lamberg's mission hung the last chance of reconciliation between Hungary and Austria. Batthyány, still clinging to the hope of peace, set out for the camp in order to meet the envoy on his arrival. Lamberg, desirous of obtaining the necessary credentials from the Hungarian Government, made his way to Pesth. There he found Kossuth and a Committee of Six installed in power. Under their influence the Diet passed a resolution forbidding Lamberg to assume command of the Hungarian troops, and declaring him a traitor if he should attempt to do so. The report spread through Pesth that Lamberg had come to seize the citadel and bombard the town; and before he could reach a place of safety he was attacked and murdered by a raging mob. It was in vain that Batthyány, who now laid down his office, besought the Government at Vienna to take no rash step of vengeance. The pretext for annihilating Hungarian independence had been given, and the mask was cast aside. A manifesto published by the Emperor on the 3rd of October declared the Hungarian Parliament dissolved, and its acts null and void. Martial law was proclaimed, and Jellacic appointed commander of all the forces and representative of the sovereign. In the course of the next few days it was expected that he would enter Pesth as conqueror.

[Manifesto of Oct. 3.]

[Tumult of Oct. 6 at Vienna. Latour murdered.]

In the meantime, however confidently the Government might reckon on Jellacic's victory, the passions of revolution were again breaking loose in Vienna itself. Increasing misery among the poor, financial panics, the reviving efforts of professional agitators, had renewed the disturbances of the spring in forms which alarmed the middle classes almost as much as the holders of power. The conflict of the Government with Hungary brought affairs to a crisis. After discovering the uselessness of negotiations with the Emperor, the Hungarian Parliament had sent some of its ablest members to request an audience from the Assembly sitting at Vienna, in order that the representatives of the western half of the Empire might, even at the last moment, have the opportunity of pronouncing a judgment upon the action of the Court. The most numerous group in the Assembly was formed by the Czech deputies from Bohemia. As Slavs, the Bohemian deputies had sympathised with the Croats and Serbs in their struggle against Magyar ascendency, and in their eyes Jellacic was still the champion of a national cause. Blinded by their sympathies of race to the danger involved to all nationalities alike by the restoration of absolutism, the Czech majority, in spite of a singularly impressive warning given by a leader of the German Liberals, refused a hearing to the Hungarian representatives. The Magyars, repelled by the Assembly, sought and found allies in the democracy of Vienna itself. The popular clubs rang with acclamations for the cause of Hungarian freedom and with invectives against the Czech instruments of tyranny. In the midst of this deepening agitation tidings arrived at Vienna that Jellacic had been repulsed in his march on Pesth and forced to retire within the Austrian frontier. It became necessary for the Viennese Government to throw its own forces into the struggle, and an order was given by Latour to the regiments in the capital to set out for the scene of warfare. This order had, however, been anticipated by the democratic leaders, and a portion of the troops had been won over to the popular side. Latour's commands were resisted; and upon an attempt being made to enforce the departure of the troops, the regiments fired on one another (October 6th). The battalions of the National Guard which rallied to the support of the Government were overpowered by those belonging to the working men's districts. The insurrection was victorious; the Ministers submitted once more to the masters of the streets, and the orders given to the troops were withdrawn. But the fiercer part of the mob was not satisfied with a political victory. There were criminals and madmen among its leaders who, after the offices of Government had been stormed and Latour had been captured, determined upon his death. It was in vain that some of the keenest political opponents of the Minister sought at the peril of their own lives to protect him from his murderers. He was dragged into the court in front of the War Office, and there slain with ferocious and yet deliberate barbarity.  [433]

[The Emperor at Olmütz.]

[Windischgrätz marches on Vienna.]

The Emperor, while the city was still in tumult, had in his usual fashion promised that the popular demands should be satisfied; but as soon as he was unobserved he fled from Vienna, and in his flight he was followed by the Czech deputies and many German Conservatives, who declared that their lives were no longer safe in the capital. Most of the Ministers gathered round the Emperor at Olmütz in Moravia; the Assembly, however, continued to hold its sittings in Vienna, and the Finance Minister, apparently under instructions from the Court, remained at his post, and treated the Assembly as still possessed of legal powers. But for all practical purposes the western half of the Austrian Empire had now ceased to have any Government whatever; and the real state of affairs was bluntly exposed in a manifesto published by Count Windischgrätz at Prague on the 11th of October, in which, without professing to have received any commission from the Emperor, he announced his intention of marching on Vienna in order to protect the sovereign and maintain the unity of the Empire. In due course the Emperor ratified the action of his energetic soldier; Windischgrätz was appointed to the supreme command over all the troops of the Empire with the exception of Radetzky's army, and his march against Vienna was begun.

[Windischgrätz conquers Vienna, Oct. 26-Nov. 1.]

To the Hungarian Parliament, exasperated by the decree ordering its own dissolution and the war openly levied against the country by the Court in alliance with Jellacic, the revolt of the capital seemed to bring a sudden deliverance from all danger. The Viennese had saved Hungary, and the Diet was willing, if summoned by the Assembly at Vienna, to send its troops to the defence of the capital. But the urgency of the need was not understood on either side till too late. The Viennese Assembly, treating itself as a legitimate and constitutional power threatened by a group of soldiers who had usurped the monarch's authority, hesitated to compromise its legal character by calling in a Hungarian army. The Magyar generals on the other hand were so anxious not to pass beyond the strict defence of their own kingdom, that, in the absence of communication from a Viennese authority, they twice withdrew from Austrian soil after following Jellacic in pursuit beyond the frontier. It was not until Windischgrätz had encamped within sight of Vienna, and had detained as a rebel the envoy sent to him by the Hungarian Government, that Kossuth's will prevailed over the scruples of weaker men, and the Hungarian army marched against the besiegers. In the meantime Windischgrätz had begun his attack on the suburbs, which were weakly defended by the National Guard and by companies of students and volunteers, the nominal commander being one Messenhauser, formerly an officer in the regular army, who was assisted by a soldier of far greater merit than himself, the Polish general Bem. Among those who fought were two members of the German Parliament of Frankfort, Robert Blum and Fröbel, who had been sent to mediate between the Emperor and his subjects, but had remained at Vienna as combatants. The besiegers had captured the outskirts of the city, and negotiations for surrender were in progress, when, on the 30th of October, Messenhauser from the top of the cathedral tower saw beyond the line of the besiegers on the south-east the smoke of battle, and announced that the Hungarian army was approaching. An engagement had in fact begun on the plain of Schwechat between the Hungarians and Jellacic, reinforced by divisions of Windischgrätz's troops. In a moment of wild excitement the defenders of the capital threw themselves once more upon their foe, disregarding the offer of surrender that had been already made. But the tide of battle at Schwechat turned against the Hungarians. They were compelled to retreat, and Windischgrätz, reopening his cannonade upon the rebels who were also violators of their truce, became in a few hours master of Vienna. He made his entry on the 31st of October, and treated Vienna as a conquered city. The troops had behaved with ferocity during the combat in the suburbs, and slaughtered scores of unarmed persons. No Oriental tyrant ever addressed his fallen foes with greater insolence and contempt for human right than Windischgrätz in the proclamations which, on assuming government, he addressed to the Viennese; yet, whatever might be the number of persons arrested and imprisoned, the number now put to death was not great. The victims were indeed carefully selected; the most prominent being Robert Blum, in whom, as a leader of the German Liberals and a Deputy of the German Parliament inviolable by law, the Austrian Government struck ostentatiously at the Parliament itself and at German democracy at large.

[The Parliament at Kremsier, Nov. 22.]

[Schwarzenberg Minister.]

In the subjugation of Vienna the army had again proved itself the real political power in Austria; but the time had not yet arrived when absolute government could be openly restored. The Bohemian deputies, fatally as they had injured the cause of constitutional rule by their secession from Vienna, were still in earnest in the cause of provincial autonomy, and would vehemently have repelled the charge of an alliance with despotism. Even the mutilated Parliament of Vienna had been recognised by the Court as in lawful session until the 22nd of October, when an order was issued proroguing the Parliament and bidding it re-assemble a month later at Kremsier, in Moravia. There were indications in the weeks succeeding the fall of Vienna of a conflict between the reactionary and the more liberal influences surrounding the Emperor, and of an impending coup d'etat: but counsels of prudence prevailed for the moment; the Assembly was permitted to meet at Kremsier, and professions of constitutional principle were still made with every show of sincerity. A new Ministry, however, came into office, with Prince Felix Schwarzenberg at its head. Schwarzenberg belonged to one of the greatest Austrian families. He had been ambassador at Naples when the revolution of 1848 broke out, and had quitted the city with words of menace when insult was offered to the Austrian flag. Exchanging diplomacy for war, he served under Radetzky, and was soon recognised as the statesman in whom the army, as a political power, found its own peculiar representative. His career had hitherto been illustrated chiefly by scandals of private life so flagrant that England and other countries where he had held diplomatic posts had insisted on his removal; but the cynical and reckless audacity of the man rose in his new calling as Minister of Austria to something of political greatness. Few statesmen have been more daring than Schwarzenberg; few have pushed to more excessive lengths the advantages to be derived from the moral or the material weakness of an adversary. His rule was the debauch of forces respited in their extremity for one last and worst exertion. Like the Roman Sulla, he gave to a condemned and perishing cause the passing semblance of restored vigour, and died before the next great wave of change swept his creations away.

[Ferdinand abdicates, Dec. 2. Francis Joseph Emperor.]

[Dissolution of the Kremsier Parliament, March 7, 1849.]

[The Unitary Constitutional Edict, March, 1849.]

Schwarzenberg's first act was the deposition of his sovereign. The imbecility of the Emperor Ferdinand had long suggested his abdication or dethronement, and the time for decisive action had now arrived. He gladly withdrew into private life: the crown, declined by his brother and heir, was passed on to his nephew, Francis Joseph, a youth of eighteen. This prince had at least not made in person, not uttered with his own lips, not signed with his own hand, those solemn engagements with the Hungarian nation which Austria was now about to annihilate with fire and sword. He had not moved in friendly intercourse with men who were henceforth doomed to the scaffold. He came to the throne as little implicated in the acts of his predecessor as any nominal chief of a State could be; as fitting an instrument in the hands of Court and army as any reactionary faction could desire. Helpless and well-meaning, Francis Joseph, while his troops poured into Hungary, played for a while in Austria the part of a loyal observer of his Parliament; then, when the moment had come for its destruction, he obeyed his soldier-minister as Ferdinand had in earlier days obeyed the students, and signed the decree for its dissolution (March 4, 1849). The Assembly, during its sittings at Vienna, had accomplished one important task: it had freed the peasantry from the burdens attaching to their land and converted them into independent proprietors. This part of its work survived it, and remained almost the sole gain that Austria derived from the struggle of 1848. After the removal to Kremsier, a Committee of the Assembly had been engaged with the formation of a Constitution for Austria, and the draft was now completed. In the course of debate something had been gained by the representatives of the German and the Slavic races in the way of respect for one another's interests and prejudices; some political knowledge had been acquired; some approach made to an adjustment between the claims of the central power and of provincial autonomy. If the Constitution sketched at Kremsier had come into being, it would at least have given to Western Austria and to Galicia, which belonged to this half of the Empire, a system of government based on popular desires and worthy, on the part of the Crown, of a fair trial. But, apart from its own defects from the monarchical point of view, this Constitution rested on the division of the Empire into two independent parts; it assumed the separation of Hungary from the other Hereditary States; and of a separate Hungarian Kingdom the Minister now in power would hear no longer. That Hungary had for centuries possessed and maintained its rights; that, with the single exception of the English, no nation in Europe had equalled the Magyars in the stubborn and unwearied defence of Constitutional law; that, in an age when national spirit was far less hotly inflamed, the Emperor Joseph had well-nigh lost his throne and wrecked his Empire in the attempt to subject this resolute race to a centralised administration, was nothing to Schwarzenberg and the soldiers who were now trampling upon revolution. Hungary was declared to have forfeited by rebellion alike its ancient rights and the contracts of 1848. The dissolution of the Parliament of Kremsier was followed by the publication of an edict affecting to bestow a uniform and centralised Constitution upon the entire Austrian Empire. All existing public rights were thereby extinguished; and, inasmuch as the new Constitution, in so far as it provided for a representative system, never came into existence, but remained in abeyance until it was formally abrogated in 1851, the real effect of the Unitary Edict of March, 1849, which professed to close the period of revolution by granting the same rights to all, was to establish absolute government and the rule of the sword throughout the Emperor's dominions. Provincial institutions giving to some of the German and Slavic districts a shadowy control of their own local affairs only marked the distinction between the favoured and the dreaded parts of the Empire. Ten years passed before freedom again came within sight of the Austrian peoples.  [434]

[Hungary.]

[The Roumanians in Transylvania.]

The Hungarian Diet, on learning of the transfer of the crown from Ferdinand to Francis Joseph, had refused to acknowledge this act as valid, on the ground that it had taken place without the consent of the Legislature, and that Francis Joseph had not been crowned King of Hungary. Ferdinand was treated as still the reigning sovereign, and the war now became, according to the Hungarian view, more than ever a war in defence of established right, inasmuch as the assailants of Hungary were not only violators of a settled constitution but agents of a usurping prince. The whole nation was summoned to arms; and in order that there might be no faltering at headquarters, the command over the forces on the Danube was given by Kossuth to Görgei, a young officer of whom little was yet known to the world but that he had executed Count Eugène Zichy, a powerful noble, for holding communications with Jellacic. It was the design of the Austrian Government to attack Hungary at once by the line of the Danube and from the frontier of Galicia on the north-east. The Serbs were to be led forward from their border-provinces against the capital; and another race, which centuries of oppression had filled with bitter hatred of the Magyars, was to be thrown into the struggle. The mass of the population of Transylvania belonged to the Roumanian stock. The Magyars, here known by the name of Szeklers, and a community of Germans, descended from immigrants who settled in Transylvania about the twelfth century, formed a small but a privileged minority, in whose presence the Roumanian peasantry, poor, savage, and absolutely without political rights, felt themselves before 1848 scarcely removed from serfdom. In the Diet of Transylvania the Magyars held command, and in spite of the resistance of the Germans, they had succeeded in carrying an Act, in May, 1848, uniting the country with Hungary. This Act had been ratified by the Emperor Ferdinand, but it was followed by a widespread insurrection of the Roumanian peasantry, who were already asserting their claims as a separate nation and demanding equality with their oppressors. The rising of the Roumanians had indeed more of the character of an agrarian revolt than of a movement for national independence. It was marked by atrocious cruelty; and although the Hapsburg standard was raised, the Austrian commandant, General Puchner, hesitated long before lending the insurgents his countenance. At length, in October, he declared against the Hungarian Government. The union of the regular troops with the peasantry overpowered for a time all resistance. The towns fell under Austrian sway, and although the Szeklers were not yet disarmed, Transylvania seemed to be lost to Hungary. General Puchner received orders to lead his troops, with the newly formed Roumanian militia, westward into the Banat, in order to co-operate in the attack which was to overwhelm the Hungarians from every quarter of the kingdom.  [435]

[The Austrians occupy Pesth, Jan. 5, 1849.]

On the 15th of December, Windischgrätz, in command of the main Austrian army, crossed the river Leitha, the border between German and Magyar territory. Görgei, who was opposed to him, had from the first declared that Pesth must be abandoned and a war of defence carried on in Central Hungary. Kossuth, however, had scorned this counsel, and announced that he would defend Pesth to the last. The backwardness of the Hungarian preparations and the disorder of the new levies justified the young general, who from this time assumed the attitude of contempt and hostility towards the Committee of Defence. Kossuth had in fact been strangely served by fortune in his choice of Görgei. He had raised him to command on account of one irretrievable act of severity against an Austrian partisan, and without any proof of his military capacity. In the untried soldier he had found a general of unusual skill; in the supposed devotee to Magyar patriotism he had found a military politician as self-willed and as insubordinate as any who have ever distracted the councils of a falling State. Dissensions and misunderstandings aggravated the weakness of the Hungarians in the field. Position after position was lost, and it soon became evident that the Parliament and Government could remain no longer at Pesth. They withdrew to Debreczin beyond the Theiss, and on the 5th of January, 1849, Windischgrätz made his entry into the capital.  [436]

[The Hungarian Government at Debreczin.]

[Kossuth and Görgei.]

The Austrians now supposed the war to be at an end. It was in fact but beginning. The fortress of Comorn, on the upper Danube, remained in the hands of the Magyars; and by conducting his retreat northwards into a mountainous country where the Austrians could not follow him Görgei gained the power either of operating against Windischgrätz's communications or of combining with the army of General Klapka, who was charged with the defence of Hungary against an enemy advancing from Galicia. While Windischgrätz remained inactive at Pesth, Klapka met and defeated an Austrian division under General Schlick which had crossed the Carpathians and was moving southwards towards Debreczin. Görgei now threw himself eastwards upon the line of retreat of the beaten enemy, and Schlick's army only escaped capture by abandoning its communications and seeking refuge with Windischgrätz at Pesth. A concentration of the Magyar forces was effected on the Theiss, and the command over the entire army was given by Kossuth to Dembinski, a Pole who had gained distinction in the wars of Napoleon and in the campaign of 1831. Görgei, acting as the representative of the officers who had been in the service before the Revolution, had published an address declaring that the army would fight for no cause but that of the Constitution as established by Ferdinand, the legitimate King, and that it would accept no commands but those of the Ministers whom Ferdinand had appointed. Interpreting this manifesto as a direct act of defiance, and as a warning that the army might under Görgei's command make terms on its own authority with the Austrian Government, Kossuth resorted to the dangerous experiment of superseding the national commanders by a Pole who was connected with the revolutionary party throughout Europe. The act was disastrous in its moral effects upon the army; and, as a general, Dembinski entirely failed to justify his reputation. After permitting Schlick's corps to escape him he moved forwards from the Theiss against Pesth. He was met by the Austrians and defeated at Kapolna (February 26). Both armies retired to their earlier positions, and, after a declaration from the Magyar generals that they would no longer obey his orders, Dembinski was removed from his command, though he remained in Hungary to interfere once more with evil effect before the end of the war.

[The Austrians driven out of Hungary, April.]

The struggle between Austria and Hungary had reached this stage when the Constitution merging all provincial rights in one centralised system was published by Schwarzenberg. The Croats, the Serbs, the Roumanians, who had so credulously flocked to the Emperor's banner under the belief that they were fighting for their own independence, at length discovered their delusion. Their enthusiasm sank; the bolder among them even attempted to detach their countrymen from the Austrian cause; but it was too late to undo what had already been done. Jellacic, now undistinguishable from any other Austrian general, mocked the politicians of Agram who still babbled of Croatian autonomy: Stratimirovic, the national leader of the Serbs, sank before his rival the Patriarch of Carlowitz, a Churchman who preferred ecclesiastical immunities granted by the Emperor of Austria to independence won on the field of battle by his countrymen. Had a wiser or more generous statesmanship controlled the Hungarian Government in the first months of its activity, a union between the Magyars and the subordinate races against Viennese centralisation might perhaps even now have been effected. But distrust and animosity had risen too high for the mediators between Slav and Magyar to attain any real success, nor was any distinct promise of self-government even now to be drawn from the offers of concession which were held out at Debreczin. An interval of dazzling triumph seemed indeed to justify the Hungarian Government in holding fast to its sovereign claims. In the hands of able leaders no task seemed too hard for Magyar troops to accomplish. Bem, arriving in Transylvania without a soldier, created a new army, and by a series of extraordinary marches and surprises not only overthrew the Austrian and Roumanian troops opposed to him, but expelled a corps of Russians whom General Puchner in his extremity had invited to garrison Hermannstadt. Görgei, resuming in the first week of April the movement in which Dembinski had failed, inflicted upon the Austrians a series of defeats that drove them back to the walls of Pesth; while Klapka, advancing on Comorn, effected the relief of this fortress, and planted in the rear of the Austrians a force which threatened to cut them off from Vienna. It was in vain that the Austrian Government removed Windischgrätz from his command. His successor found that a force superior to his own was gathering round him on every side. He saw that Hungary was lost; and leaving a garrison in the fortress of Buda, he led off his army in haste from the capital, and only paused in his retreat when he had reached the Austrian frontier.

[Declaration of Hungarian Independence, April 19.]

The Magyars, rallying from their first defeats, had brilliantly achieved the liberation of their land. The Court of Vienna, attempting in right of superior force to overthrow an established constitution, had proved itself the inferior power; and in mingled exaltation and resentment it was natural that the party and the leaders who had been foremost in the national struggle of Hungary should deem a renewed union with Austria impossible, and submission to the Hapsburg crown an indignity. On the 19th of April, after the defeat of Windischgrätz but before the evacuation of Pesth, the Diet declared that the House of Hapsburg had forfeited its throne, and proclaimed Hungary an independent State. No statement was made as to the future form of government, but everything indicated that Hungary, if successful in maintaining its independence, would become a Republic, with Kossuth, who was now appointed Governor, for its chief. Even in the revolutionary severance of ancient ties homage was paid to the legal and constitutional bent of the Hungarian mind. Nothing was said in the Declaration of April 19th of the rights of man; there was no Parisian commonplace on the sovereignty of the people. The necessity of Hungarian independence was deduced from the offences which the Austrian House had committed against the written and unwritten law of the land, offences continued through centuries and crowned by the invasion under Windischgrätz, by the destruction of the Hungarian Constitution in the edict of March 9th, and by the introduction of the Russians into Transylvania. Though coloured and exaggerated by Magyar patriotism, the charges made against the Hapsburg dynasty were on the whole in accordance with historical fact; and if the affairs of States were to be guided by no other considerations than those relating to the performance of contracts, Hungary had certainly established its right to be quit of partnership with Austria and of its Austrian sovereign. But the judgment of history has condemned Kossuth's declaration of Hungarian independence in the midst of the struggle of 1849 as a great political error. It served no useful purpose; it deepened the antagonism already existing between the Government and a large part of the army; and while it added to the sources of internal discord, it gave colour to the intervention of Russia as against a revolutionary cause. Apart from its disastrous effect upon the immediate course of events, it was based upon a narrow and inadequate view both of the needs and of the possibilities of the future. Even in the interests of the Magyar nation itself as a European power, it may well be doubted whether in severance from Austria such influence and such weight could possibly have been won by a race numerically weak and surrounded by hostile nationalities, as the ability and the political energy of the Magyars have since won for them in the direction of the accumulated forces of the Austro-Hungarian Empire.

[Russian intervention against Hungary.]

It has generally been considered a fatal error on the part of the Hungarian commanders that, after expelling the Austrian army, they did not at once march upon Vienna, but returned to lay siege to the fortress of Buda, which resisted long enough to enable the Austrian Government to reorganise and to multiply its forces. But the intervention of Russia would probably have been fatal to Hungarian independence, even if Vienna had been captured and a democratic government established there for a while in opposition to the Court at Olmütz. The plan of a Russian intervention, though this intervention was now explained by the community of interest between Polish and Hungarian rebels, was no new thing. Soon after the outbreak of the March Revolution the Czar had desired to send his troops both into Prussia and into Austria as the restorers of monarchical authority. His help was declined on behalf of the King of Prussia; in Austria the project had been discussed at successive moments of danger, and after the overthrow of the Imperial troops in Transylvania by Bem the proffered aid was accepted. The Russians who then occupied Hermannstadt did not, however, enter the country as combatants; their task was to garrison certain positions still held by the Austrians, and so to set free the Emperor's troops for service in the field. On the declaration of Hungarian independence, it became necessary for Francis Joseph to accept his protector's help without qualification or disguise. An army of eighty thousand Russians marched across Galicia to assist the Austrians in grappling with an enemy before whom, when single-handed, they had succumbed. Other Russian divisions, while Austria massed its troops on the Upper Danube, entered Transylvania from the south and east, and the Magyars in the summer of 1849 found themselves compelled to defend their country against forces three times more numerous than their own.  [437]

[The summer campaign in Hungary, July-August, 1849.]

[Capitulation of Vilagos, August 13.]

[Vengeance of Austria.]

When it became known that the Czar had determined to throw all his strength into the scale, Kossuth saw that no ordinary operations of war could possibly avert defeat, and called upon his countrymen to destroy their homes and property at the approach of the enemy, and to leave to the invader a flaming and devastated solitude. But the area of warfare was too vast for the execution of this design, even if the nation had been prepared for so desperate a course. The defence of Hungary was left to its armies, and Görgei became the leading figure in the calamitous epoch that followed. While the Government prepared to retire to Szegedin, far in the south-east, Görgei took post on the Upper Danube, to meet the powerful force which the Emperor of Austria had placed under the orders of General Haynau, a soldier whose mingled energy and ferocity in Italy had marked him out as a fitting scourge for the Hungarians, and had won for him supreme civil as well as military powers. Görgei naturally believed that the first object of the Austrian commander would be to effect a junction with the Russians, who, under Paskiewitsch, the conqueror of Kars in 1829, were now crossing the Carpathians; and he therefore directed all his efforts against the left of the Austrian line. While he was unsuccessfully attacking the enemy on the river Waag north of Comorn, Haynau with the mass of his forces advanced on the right bank of the Danube, and captured Raab (June 28th). Görgei threw himself southwards, but his efforts to stop Haynau were in vain, and the Austrians occupied Pesth (July 11th). The Russians meanwhile were advancing southwards by an independent line of march. Their vanguard reached the Danube and the Upper Theiss, and Görgei seemed to be enveloped by the enemy. The Hungarian Government adjured him to hasten towards Szegedin and Arad, where Kossuth was concentrating all the other divisions for a final struggle; but Görgei held on to his position about Comorn until his retreat could only be effected by means of a vast detour northwards, and before he could reach Arad all was lost. Dembinski was again in command. Charged with the defence of the passage of the Theiss about Szegedin, he failed to prevent the Austrians from crossing the river, and on the 5th of August was defeated at Czoreg with heavy loss. Kossuth now gave the command to Bern, who had hurried from Transylvania, where overpowering forces had at length wrested victory from his grasp. Bern fought the last battle of the campaign at Temesvar. He was overthrown and driven eastwards, but succeeded in leading a remnant of his army across the Moldavian frontier and so escaped capture. Görgei, who was now close to Arad, had some strange fancy that it would dishonour his army to seek refuge on neutral soil. He turned northwards so as to encounter Russian and not Austrian regiments, and without striking a blow, without stipulating even for the lives of the civilians in his camp, he led his army within the Russian lines at Vilagos, and surrendered unconditionally to the generals of the Czar. His own life was spared; no mercy was shown to those who were handed over as his fellow-prisoners by the Russian to the Austrian Government, or who were seized by Haynau as his troops advanced. Tribunals more resembling those of the French Reign of Terror than the Courts of a civilised Government sent the noblest patriots and soldiers of Hungary to the scaffold. To the deep disgrace of the Austrian Crown, Count Batthyány, the Minister of Ferdinand, was included among those whose lives were sacrificed. The vengeance of the conqueror seemed the more frenzied and the more insatiable because it had only been rendered possible by foreign aid. Crushed under an iron rule, exhausted by war, the prey of a Government which knew only how to employ its subject-races as gaolers over one another, Hungary passed for some years into silence and almost into despair. Every vestige of its old constitutional rights was extinguished. Its territory was curtailed by the separation of Transylvania and Croatia; its administration was handed over to Germans from Vienna. A conscription, enforced not for the ends of military service but as the surest means of breaking the national spirit, enrolled its youth in Austrian regiments, and banished them to the extremities of the empire. No darker period was known in the history of Hungary since the wars of the seventeenth century than that which followed the catastrophe of 1849.  [438]

[Italian affairs, August, 1848-March, 1849.]

[Murder of Rossi, Nov. 15. Flight of Pius IX.]

[Roman Republic, Feb. 9, 1849.]

[Tuscany.]

The gloom which followed Austrian victory was now descending not on Hungary alone but on Italy also. The armistice made between Radetzky and the King of Piedmont at Vigevano in August, 1848, lasted for seven months, during which the British and French Governments endeavoured, but in vain, to arrange terms of peace between the combatants. With military tyranny in its most brutal form crushing down Lombardy, it was impossible that Charles Albert should renounce the work of deliverance to which he had pledged himself. Austria, on the other hand, had now sufficiently recovered its strength to repudiate the concessions which it had offered at an earlier time, and Schwarzenberg on assuming power announced that the Emperor would maintain Lombardy at every cost. The prospects of Sardinia as regarded help from the rest of the Peninsula were far worse than when it took up arms in the spring of 1848. Projects of a general Italian federation, of a military union between the central States and Piedmont, of an Italian Constituent Assembly, had succeeded one another and left no result. Naples had fallen back into absolutism; Rome and Tuscany, from which aid might still have been expected, were distracted by internal contentions, and hastening as it seemed towards anarchy. After the defeat of Charles Albert at Custozza, Pius IX., who was still uneasily playing his part as a constitutional sovereign, had called to office Pellegrino Rossi, an Italian patriot of an earlier time, who had since been ambassador of Louis Philippe at Rome, and by his connection with the Orleanist Monarchy had incurred the hatred of the Republican party throughout Italy. Rossi, as a vigorous and independent reformer, was as much detested in clerical and reactionary circles as he was by the demagogues and their followers. This, however, profited him nothing; and on the 15th of November, as he was proceeding to the opening of the Chambers, he was assassinated by an unknown hand. Terrified by this crime, and by an attack upon his own palace by which it was followed, Pius fled to Gaeta and placed himself under the protection of the King of Naples. A Constituent Assembly was summoned and a Republic proclaimed at Rome, between which and the Sardinian Government there was so little community of feeling that Charles Albert would, if the Pope had accepted his protection, have sent his troops to restore him to a position of security. In Tuscany affairs were in a similar condition. The Grand Duke had for some months been regarded as a sincere, though reserved, friend of the Italian cause, and he had even spoken of surrendering his crown if this should be for the good of the Italian nation. When, however, the Pope had fled to Gaeta, and the project was openly avowed of uniting Tuscany with the Roman States in a Republic, the Grand Duke, moved more by the fulminations of Pius against his despoilers than by care for his own crown, fled in his turn, leaving the Republicans masters of Florence. A miserable exhibition of vanity, riot, and braggadocio was given to the world by the politicians of the Tuscan State. Alike in Florence and in Rome all sense of the true needs of the moment, of the absolute uselessness of internal changes of Government if Austria was to maintain its dominion, seemed to have vanished from men's minds. Republican phantoms distracted the heart and the understanding; no soldier, no military administrator arose till too late by the side of the rhetoricians and mob-leaders who filled the stage; and when, on the 19th of March, the armistice was brought to a close in Upper Italy, Piedmont took the field alone.  [439]

[The Match campaign, 1849.]

[Battle of Novara, March 23.]

The campaign which now began lasted but for five days. While Charles Albert scattered his forces from Lago Maggiore to Stradella on the south of the Po, hoping to move by the northern road upon Milan, Radetzky concentrated his troops near Pavia, where he intended to cross the Ticino. In an evil moment Charles Albert had given the command of his army to Chrzanowski, a Pole, and had entrusted its southern division, composed chiefly of Lombard volunteers, to another Pole, Ramorino, who had been engaged in Mazzini's incursion into Savoy in 1833. Ramorino had then, rightly or wrongly, incurred the charge of treachery. His relations with Chrzanowski were of the worst character, and the habit of military obedience was as much wanting to him as the sentiment of loyalty to the sovereign from whom he had now accepted a command. The wilfulness of this adventurer made the Piedmontese army an easy prey. Ramorino was posted on the south of the Po, near its junction with the Ticino, but received orders on the commencement of hostilities to move northwards and defend the passage of the Ticino at Pavia, breaking up the bridges behind him. Instead of obeying this order he kept his division lingering about Stradella. Radetzky, approaching the Ticino at Pavia, found the passage unguarded. He crossed the river with the mass of his army, and, cutting off Ramorino's division, threw himself upon the flank of the scattered Piedmontese. Charles Albert, whose headquarters were at Novara, hurried southwards. Before he could concentrate his troops, he was attacked at Mortara by the Austrians and driven back. The line of retreat upon Turin and Alessandria was already lost; an attempt was made to hold Novara against the advancing Austrians. The battle which was fought in front of this town on the 23rd of March ended with the utter overthrow of the Sardinian army. So complete was the demoralisation of the troops that the cavalry were compelled to attack bodies of half-maddened infantry in the streets of Novara in order to save the town from pillage.  [440]

[Abdication of Charles Albert.]

Charles Albert had throughout the battle of the 23rd appeared to seek death. The reproaches levelled against him for the abandonment of Milan in the previous year, the charges of treachery which awoke to new life the miserable record of his waverings in 1821, had sunk into the very depths of his being. Weak and irresolute in his earlier political career, harsh and illiberal towards the pioneers of Italian freedom during a great part of his reign, Charles had thrown his whole heart and soul into the final struggle of his country against Austria. This struggle lost, life had nothing more for him. The personal hatred borne towards him by the rulers of Austria caused him to believe that easier terms of peace might be granted to Piedmont if another sovereign were on its throne, and his resolution, in case of defeat, was fixed and settled. When night fell after the battle of Novara he called together his generals, and in their presence abdicated his crown. Bidding an eternal farewell to his son Victor Emmanuel, who knelt weeping before him, he quitted the army accompanied by but one attendant, and passed unrecognised through the enemy's guards. He left his queen, his capital, unvisited as he journeyed into exile. The brief residue of his life was spent in solitude near Oporto. Six months after the battle of Novara he was carried to the grave.

[Beginning of Victor Emmanuel's reign.]

It may be truly said of Charles Albert that nothing in his reign became him like the ending of it. Hopeless as the conflict of 1849 might well appear, it proved that there was one sovereign in Italy who was willing to stake his throne, his life, the whole sum of his personal interests, for the national cause; one dynasty whose sons knew no fear save that others should encounter death before them on Italy's behalf. Had the profoundest statesmanship, the keenest political genius, governed the counsels of Piedmont in 1849, it would, with full prescience of the ruin of Novara, have bidden the sovereign and the army strike in self-sacrifice their last unaided blow. From this time there was but one possible head for Italy. The faults of the Government of Turin during Charles Albert's years of peace had ceased to have any bearing on Italian affairs; the sharpest tongues no longer repeated, the most credulous ear no longer harboured the slanders of 1848; the man who, beaten and outnumbered, had for hours sat immovable in front of the Austrian cannon at Novara had, in the depth of his misfortune, given to his son not the crown of Piedmont only but the crown of Italy. Honour, patriotism, had made the young Victor Emmanuel the hope of the Sardinian army; the same honour and patriotism carried him safely past the lures which Austria set for the inheritor of a ruined kingdom, and gave in the first hours of his reign an earnest of the policy which was to end in Italian union. It was necessary for him to visit Radetzky in his camp in order to arrange the preliminaries of peace. There, amid flatteries offered to him at his father's expense, it was notified to him that if he would annul the Constitution that his father had made, he might reckon not only on an easy quittance with the conqueror, but on the friendship and support of Austria. This demand, though strenuously pressed in later negotiations, Victor Emmanuel unconditionally refused. He had to endure for a while the presence of Austrian troops in his kingdom, and to furnish an indemnity which fell heavily on so small a State; but the liberties of his people remained intact, and the pledge given by his father inviolate. Amid the ruin of all hopes and the bankruptcy of all other royal reputations throughout Italy, there proved to be one man, one government, in which the Italian people could trust. This compensation at least was given in the disasters of 1849, that the traitors to the cause of Italy and of freedom could not again deceive, nor the dream of a federation of princes again obscure the necessity of a single national government. In the fidelity of Victor Emmanuel to the Piedmontese Constitution lay the pledge that when Italy's next opportunity should arrive, the chief would be there who would meet the nation's need.

[Restoration in Tuscany.]

[Rome and France.]

[French intervention determined on.]

The battle of Novara had not long been fought when the Grand Duke of Tuscany was restored to his throne under an Austrian garrison, and his late democratic Minister, Guerazzi, who had endeavoured by submission to the Court-party to avert an Austrian occupation, was sent into imprisonment. At Rome a far bolder spirit was shown. Mazzini had arrived in the first week of March, and, though his exhortation to the Roman Assembly to forget the offences of Charles Albert and to unite against the Austrians in Lombardy came too late, he was able, as one of a Triumvirate with dictatorial powers, to throw much of his own ardour into the Roman populace in defence of their own city and State. The enemy against whom Rome had to be defended proved indeed to be other than that against whom preparations were being made. The victories of Austria had aroused the apprehension of the French Government; and though the fall of Piedmont and Lombardy could not now be undone, it was determined by Louis Napoleon and his Ministers to anticipate Austria's restoration of the Papal power by the despatch of French troops to Rome. All the traditions of French national policy pointed indeed to such an intervention. Austria had already invaded the Roman States from the north, and the political conditions which in 1832 had led so pacific a minister as Casimir Perier to occupy Ancona were now present in much greater force. Louis Napoleon could not, without abandoning a recognised interest and surrendering something of the due influence of France, have permitted Austrian generals to conduct the Pope back to his capital and to assume the government of Central Italy. If the first impulses of the Revolution of 1848 had still been active in France, its intervention would probably have taken the form of a direct alliance with the Roman Republic; but public opinion had travelled far in the opposite direction since the Four Days of June; and the new President, if he had not forgotten his own youthful relations with the Carbonari, was now a suitor for the solid favours of French conservative and religious sentiment. His Ministers had not recognised the Roman Republic. They were friends, no doubt, to liberty; but when it was certain that the Austrians, the Spaniards, the Neapolitans, were determined to restore the Pope, it might be assumed that the continuance of the Roman Republic was an impossibility. France, as a Catholic and at the same time a Liberal Power, might well, under these circumstances, address itself to the task of reconciling Roman liberty with the inevitable return of the Holy Father to his temporal throne. Events were moving too fast for diplomacy; troops must be at once despatched, or the next French envoy would find Radetzky on the Tiber. The misgivings of the Republican part of the Assembly at Paris were stilled by French assurances of the generous intentions of the Government towards the Roman populations, and of its anxiety to shelter them from Austrian domination, President, Ministers, and generals resolutely shut their eyes to the possibility that a French occupation of Rome might be resisted by force by the Romans themselves; and on the 22nd of April an armament of about ten thousand men set sail for Civita Vecchia under the command of General Oudinot, a son of the Marshal of that name.

[The French at Civita Vecchia, April 25, 1849.]

[Oudinot attacks Rome and is repelled, April 30.]

Before landing on the Italian coast, the French general sent envoys to the authorities at Civita Vecchia, stating that his troops came as friends, and demanding that they should be admitted into the town. The Municipal Council determined not to offer resistance, and the French thus gained a footing on Italian soil and a basis for their operations. Messages came from French diplomatists in Rome encouraging the general to advance without delay. The mass of the population, it was said, would welcome his appearance; the democratic faction, if reckless, was too small to offer any serious resistance, and would disappear as soon as the French should enter the city. On this point, however, Oudinot was speedily undeceived. In reply to a military envoy who was sent to assure the Triumvirs of the benevolent designs of the French, Mazzini bluntly answered that no reconciliation with the Pope was possible; and on the 26th of April the Roman Assembly called upon the Executive to repel force by force. Oudinot now proclaimed a state of siege at Civita Vecchia, seized the citadel, and disarmed the garrison. On the 28th he began his march on Rome. As he approached, energetic preparations were made for resistance. Garibaldi, who had fought at the head of a free corps against the Austrians in Upper Italy in 1848, had now brought some hundreds of his followers to Rome. A regiment of Lombard volunteers, under their young leader Manara, had escaped after the catastrophe of Novara, and had come to fight for liberty in its last stronghold on Italian soil. Heroes, exiles, desperadoes from all parts of the Peninsula, met in the streets of Rome, and imparted to its people a vigour and resolution of which the world had long deemed them incapable. Even the remnant of the Pontifical Guard took part in the work of defence. Oudinot, advancing with his little corps of seven thousand men, found himself, without heavy artillery, in front of a city still sheltered by its ancient fortifications, and in the presence of a body of combatants more resolute than his own troops and twice as numerous. He attacked on the 30th, was checked at every point, and compelled to retreat towards Civita Vecchia, leaving two hundred and fifty prisoners in the hands of the enemy.  [441]

[French policy, April-May.]

Insignificant as was this misfortune of the French arms, it occasioned no small stir in Paris and in the Assembly. The Government, which had declared that the armament was intended only to protect Rome against Austria, was vehemently reproached for its duplicity, and a vote was passed demanding that the expedition should not be permanently diverted from the end assigned to it. Had the Assembly not been on the verge of dissolution it would probably have forced upon the Government a real change of policy. A general election, however, was but a few days distant, and until the result of this election should be known the Ministry determined to temporise. M. Lesseps, since famous as the creator of the Suez Canal, was sent to Rome with instructions to negotiate for some peaceable settlement. More honest than his employers, Lesseps sought with heart and soul to fulfil his task. While he laboured in city and camp, the French elections for which the President and Ministers were waiting took place, resulting in the return of a Conservative and reactionary majority. The new Assembly met on the 28th of May. In the course of the next few days Lesseps accepted terms proposed by the Roman Government, which would have precluded the French from entering Rome. Oudinot, who had been in open conflict with the envoy throughout his mission, refused his sanction to the treaty, and the altercations between the general and the diplomatist were still at their height when despatches arrived from Paris announcing that the powers given to Lesseps were at an end, and ordering Oudinot to recommence hostilities. The pretence of further negotiation would have been out of place with the new Parliament. On the 4th of June the French general, now strongly reinforced, occupied the positions necessary for a regular siege of Rome.

[Attempted insurrection in France, June 13.]

[The French enter Rome, July 3.]

Against the forces now brought into action it was impossible that the Roman Republic could long defend itself. One hope remained, and that was in a revolution within France itself. The recent elections had united on the one side all Conservative interests, on the other the Socialists and all the more extreme factions of the Republican party. It was determined that a trial of strength should first be made within the Assembly itself upon the Roman question, and that, if the majority there should stand firm, an appeal should be made to insurrection. Accordingly on the 11th of June, after the renewal of hostilities had been announced in Paris, Ledru Rollin demanded the impeachment of the Ministry. His motion was rejected, and the signal was given for an outbreak not only in the capital but in Lyons and other cities. But the Government were on their guard, and it was in vain that the resources of revolution were once more brought into play. General Changarnier suppressed without bloodshed a tumult in Paris on June 13th; and though fighting took place at Lyons, the insurrection proved feeble in comparison with the movements of the previous year. Louis Napoleon and his Ministry remained unshaken, and the siege of Rome was accordingly pressed to its conclusion. Oudinot, who at the beginning of the month had carried the positions held by the Roman troops outside the walls, opened fire with heavy artillery on the 14th. The defence was gallantly sustained by Garibaldi and his companions until the end of the month, when the breaches made in the walls were stormed by the enemy, and further resistance became impossible. The French made their entry into Rome on the 3rd of July, Garibaldi leading his troops northwards in order to prolong the struggle with the Austrians who were now in possession of Bologna, and, if possible, to reach Venice, which was still uncaptured. Driven to the eastern coast and surrounded by the enemy, he was forced to put to sea. He landed again, but only to be hunted over mountain and forest. His wife died by his side. Rescued by the devotion of Italian patriots, he made his escape to Piedmont and thence to America, to reappear in all the fame of his heroic deeds and sufferings at the next great crisis in the history of his country.

[The restored Pontifical Government.]

It had been an easy task for a French army to conquer Rome; it was not so easy for the French Government to escape from the embarrassments of its victory. Liberalism was still the official creed of the Republic, and the protection of the Roman population from a reaction under Austrian auspices had been one of the alleged objects of the Italian expedition. No stipulation had, however, been made with the Pope during the siege as to the future institutions of Rome; and when, on the 14th of July, the restorations of Papal authority was formally announced by Oudinot, Pius and his Minister Antonelli still remained unfettered by any binding engagement. Nor did the Pontiff show the least inclination to place himself in the power of his protectors. He remained at Gaeta, sending a Commission of three Cardinals to assume the government of Rome. The first acts of the Cardinals dispelled any illusion that the French might have formed as to the docility of the Holy See. In the presence of a French Republican army they restored the Inquisition, and appointed a Board to bring to trial all officials compromised in the events that had taken place since the murder of Rossi in November, 1848. So great was the impression made on public opinion by the action of the Cardinals that Louis Napoleon considered it well to enter the lists in person on behalf of Roman liberty; and in a letter to Colonel Ney, a son of the Marshal, he denounced in language of great violence the efforts that were being made by a party antagonistic to France to base the Pope's return upon proscription and tyranny. Strong in the support of Austria and the other Catholic Powers, the Papal Government at Gaeta received this menace with indifference, and even made the discourtesy of the President a ground for withholding concessions. Of the re-establishment of the Constitution granted by Pius in 1848 there was now no question; all that the French Ministry could hope was to save some fragments in the general shipwreck of representative government, and to avert the vengeance that seemed likely to fall upon the defeated party. A Pontifical edict, known as the Motu Proprio, ultimately bestowed upon the municipalities certain local powers, and gave to a Council, nominated by the Pope from among the persons chosen by the municipalities, the right of consultation on matters of finance. More than this Pius refused to grant, and when he returned to Rome it was as an absolute sovereign. In its efforts on behalf of the large body of persons threatened with prosecution the French Government was more successful. The so-called amnesty which was published by Antonelli with the Motu Proprio seemed indeed to have for its object the classification of victims rather than the announcement of pardon; but under pressure from the French the excepted persons were gradually diminished in number, and all were finally allowed to escape other penalties by going into exile. To those who were so driven from their homes Piedmont offered a refuge.

[Fall of Venice, Aug. 25.]

[Sicily conquered by Ferdinand, April, May.]

Thus the pall of priestly absolutism and misrule fell once more over the Roman States, and the deeper the hostility of the educated classes to the restored power the more active became the system of repression. For liberty of person there was no security whatever, and, though the offences of 1848 were now professedly amnestied, the prisons were soon thronged with persons arrested on indefinite charges and detained for an unlimited time without trial. Nor was Rome more unfortunate in its condition than Italy generally. The restoration of Austrian authority in the north was completed by the fall of Venice. For months after the subjugation of the mainland, Venice, where the Republic had again been proclaimed and Manin had been recalled to power, had withstood all the efforts of the Emperor's forces. Its hopes had been raised by the victories of the Hungarians, which for a moment seemed almost to undo the catastrophe of Novara. But with the extinction of all possibility of Hungarian aid the inevitable end came in view. Cholera and famine worked with the enemy; and a fortnight after Görgei had laid down his arms at Vilagos the long and honourable resistance of Venice ended with the entry of the Austrians (August 25th). In the south, Ferdinand of Naples was again ruling as despot throughout the full extent of his dominions. Palermo, which had struck the first blow for freedom in 1848, had soon afterwards become the seat of a Sicilian Parliament, which deposed the Bourbon dynasty and offered the throne of Sicily to the younger brother of Victor Emmanuel. To this Ferdinand replied by a fleet to Messina, which bombarded that city for five days and laid a great part of it in ashes. His violence caused the British and French fleets to interpose, and hostilities were suspended until the spring of 1849, the Western Powers ineffectually seeking to frame some compromise acceptable at once to the Sicilians and to the Bourbon dynasty. After the triumph of Radetzky at Novara and the rejection by the Sicilian Parliament of the offer of a separate constitution and administration for the island, Ferdinand refused to remain any longer inactive. His fleet and army moved southwards from Messina, and a victory won at the foot of Mount Etna over the Sicilian forces, followed by the capture of Catania, brought the struggle to a close. The Assembly at Palermo dispersed, and the Neapolitan troops made their entry into the capital without resistance on the 15th of May. It was in vain that Great Britain now urged Ferdinand to grant to Sicily the liberties which he had hitherto professed himself willing to bestow. Autocrat he was, and autocrat he intended to remain. On the mainland the iniquities practised by his agents seem to have been even worse than in Sicily, where at least some attempt was made to use the powers of the State for the purposes of material improvement. For those who had incurred the enmity of Ferdinand's Government there was no law and no mercy. Ten years of violence and oppression, denounced by the voice of freer lands, had still to be borne by the subjects of this obstinate tyrant ere the reckoning-day arrived, and the deeply rooted jealousy between Sicily and Naples, which had wrought so much ill to the cause of Italian freedom, was appeased by the fall of the Bourbon throne.  [442]

[Germany from May, 1848.]

[The National Assembly at Frankfort.]

[Archduke John chosen Administrator, June 29.]

We have thus far traced the stages of conflict between the old monarchical order and the forces of revolution in the Austrian empire and in that Mediterranean land whose destiny was so closely interwoven with that of Austria. We have now to pass back into Germany, and to resume the history of the German revolution at the point where the national movement seemed to concentrate itself in visible form, the opening of the Parliament of Frankfort on the 18th of May, 1848. That an Assembly representing the entire German people, elected in unbounded enthusiasm and comprising within it nearly every man of political or intellectual eminence who sympathised with the national cause, should be able to impose its will upon the tottering Governments of the individual German States, was not an unnatural belief in the circumstances of the moment. No second Chamber represented the interests of the ruling Houses, nor had they within the Assembly itself the organs for the expression of their own real or unreal claims. With all the freedom of a debating club or of a sovereign authority like the French Convention, the Parliament of Frankfort entered upon its work of moulding Germany afresh, limited only by its own discretion as to what it should make matter of consultation with any other power. There were thirty-six Governments in Germany, and to negotiate with each of these on the future Constitution might well seem a harder task than to enforce a Constitution on all alike. In the creation of a provisional executive authority there was something of the same difficulty. Each of the larger States might, if consulted, resist the selection of a provisional chief from one of its rivals; and though the risk of bold action was not denied, the Assembly, on the instance of its President, Von Gagern, a former Minister of Hesse-Darmstadt, resolved to appoint an Administrator of the Empire by a direct vote of its own. The Archduke John of Austria, long known as an enemy of Metternich's system of repression and as a patron of the idea of German union, was chosen Administrator, and he accepted the office. Prussia and the other States acquiesced in the nomination, though the choice of a Hapsburg prince was unpopular with the Prussian nation and army, and did not improve the relations between the Frankfort Assembly and the Court of Berlin.  [443] Schmerling, an Austrian, was placed at the head of the Archduke's Ministry.

[The National Assembly. May-Sept.]

In the preparation of a Constitution for Germany the Assembly could draw little help from the work of legislators in other countries. Belgium, whose institutions were at once recent and successful, was not a Federal State; the founders of the American Union had not had to reckon with four kings and to include in their federal territory part of the dominions of an emperor. Instead of grappling at once with the formidable difficulties of political organisation, the Committee charged with the drafting of a Constitution determined first to lay down the principles of civil right which were to be the basis of the German commonwealth. There was something of the scientific spirit of the Germans in thus working out the substructure of public law on which all other institutions were to rest; moreover, the remembrance of the Decrees of Carlsbad and of the other exceptional legislation from which Germany had so heavily suffered excited a strong demand for the most solemn guarantees against arbitrary departure from settled law in the future. Thus, regardless of the absence of any material power by which its conclusions were to be enforced, the Assembly, in the intervals between its stormy debates on the politics of the hour, traced with philosophic thoroughness the consequences of the principles of personal liberty and of equality before the law, and fashioned the order of a modern society in which privileges of class, diversity of jurisdictions, and the trammels of feudalism on industrial life were alike swept away. Four months had passed, and the discussion of the so-called Primary Rights was still unfinished, when the Assembly was warned by an outbreak of popular violence in Frankfort itself of the necessity of hastening towards a constitutional settlement.

[The Armistice of Malmö, Aug. 26.]

[Outrages at Frankfort, Sept. 18.]

The progress of the insurrection in Schleswig-Holstein against Danish sovereignty had been watched with the greatest interest throughout Germany; and in the struggle of these provinces for their independence the rights and the honour of the German nation at large were held to be deeply involved. As the representative of the Federal authority, King Frederick William of Prussia had sent his troops into Holstein, and they arrived there in time to prevent the Danish army from following up its first successes and crushing the insurgent forces. Taking up the offensive, General Wrangel at the head of the Prussian troops succeeded in driving the Danes out of Schleswig, and at the beginning of May he crossed the border between Schleswig and Jutland and occupied the Danish fortress of Fredericia. His advance into purely Danish territory occasioned the diplomatic intervention of Russia and Great Britain; and, to the deep disappointment of the German nation and its Parliament, the King of Prussia ordered his general to retire into Schleswig. The Danes were in the meantime blockading the harbours and capturing the merchant-vessels of the Germans, as neither Prussia nor the Federal Government possessed a fleet of war. For some weeks hostilities were irresolutely continued in Schleswig, while negotiations were pursued in foreign capitals and various forms of compromise urged by foreign Powers. At length, on the 26th of August, an armistice of seven months was agreed upon at Malmö in Sweden by the representatives of Denmark and Prussia, the Court of Copenhagen refusing to recognise the German central Government at Frankfort or to admit its envoy to the conferences. The terms of this armistice, when announced in Germany, excited the greatest indignation, inasmuch as they declared all the acts of the Provisional Government of Schleswig-Holstein null and void, removed all German troops from the Duchies, and handed over their government during the duration of the armistice to a Commission of which half the members were to be appointed by the King of Denmark. Scornfully as Denmark had treated the Assembly of Frankfort, the terms of the armistice nevertheless required its sanction. The question was referred to a committee, which, under the influence of the historian Dahlmann, himself formerly an official in Holstein, pronounced for the rejection of the treaty. The Assembly, in a scene of great excitement, resolved that the execution of the measures attendant on the armistice should be suspended. The Ministry in consequence resigned, and Dahlmann was called upon to replace it by one under his own leadership. He proved unable to do so. Schmerling resumed office, and demanded that the Assembly should reverse its vote. Though in severance from Prussia the Central Government had no real means of carrying on a war with Denmark, the most passionate opposition was made to this demand. The armistice was, however, ultimately ratified by a small majority. Defeated in the Assembly, the leaders of the extreme Democratic faction allied themselves with the populace of Frankfort, which was ready for acts of violence. Tumultuous meetings were held; the deputies who had voted for the armistice were declared traitors to Germany. Barricades were erected, and although the appearance of Prussian troops prevented an assault from being made on the Assembly, its members were attacked in the streets, and two of them murdered by the mob (Sept. 17th). A Republican insurrection was once more attempted in Baden, but it was quelled without difficulty.[444]

[Berlin, April-Sept., 1848.]

The intervention of foreign Courts on behalf of Denmark had given ostensible ground to the Prussian Government for not pursuing the war with greater resolution; but though the fear of Russia undoubtedly checked King Frederick William, this was not the sole, nor perhaps the most powerful influence that worked upon him. The cause of Schleswig-Hulstein was, in spite of its legal basis, in the main a popular and a revolutionary one, and between the King of Prussia and the revolution there was an intense and a constantly deepening antagonism. Since the meeting of the National Assembly at Berlin on the 22nd of May the capital had been the scene of an almost unbroken course of disorder. The Assembly, which was far inferior in ability and character to that of Frankfort, soon showed itself unable to resist the influence of the populace. On the 8th of June a resolution was moved that the combatants in the insurrection of March deserved well of their country. Had this motion been carried the King would have dissolved the Assembly: it was outvoted, but the mob punished this concession to the feelings of the monarch by outrages upon the members of the majority. A Civic Guard was enrolled from citizens of the middle class, but it proved unable to maintain order, and wholly failed to acquire the political importance which was gained by the National Guard of Paris after the revolution of 1830. Exasperated by their exclusion from service in the Guard, the mob on the 14th of June stormed an arsenal and destroyed the trophies of arms which they found there. Though violence reigned in the streets the Assembly rejected a proposal for declaring the inviolability of its members, and placed itself under the protection of the citizens of Berlin. King Frederick William had withdrawn to Potsdam, where the leaders of reaction gathered round him. He detested his Constitutional Ministers, who, between a petulant king and a suspicious Parliament, were unable to effect any useful work and soon found themselves compelled to relinquish their office. In Berlin the violence of the working classes, the interruption of business, the example of civil war in Paris, inclined men of quiet disposition to a return to settled government at any price. Measures brought forward by the new Ministry for the abolition of the patrimonial jurisdictions, the hunting-rights and other feudal privileges of the greater landowners, occasioned the organisation of a league for the defence of property, which soon became the focus of powerful conservative interests. Above all, the claims of the Archduke John, as Administrator of the Empire, to the homage of the army, and the hostile attitude assumed towards the army by the Prussian Parliament itself, exasperated the military class and encouraged the king to venture on open resistance. A tumult having taken place at Schweidnitz in Silesia, in which several persons were shot by the soldiery, the Assembly, pending an investigation into the circumstances, demanded that the Minister of War should publish an order requiring the officers of the army to work with the citizens for the realisation of Constitutional Government; and it called upon all officers not loyally inclined to a Constitutional system to resign their commissions as a matter of honour. Denying the right of the Chamber to act as a military executive, the Minister of War refused to publish the order required. The vote was repeated, and in the midst of threatening demonstrations in the streets the Ministry resigned (Sept. 7th).  [445]

[The Prussian army.]

[Count Brandenburg Minister, Nov. 2.]

[Prorogation of the Prussian Assembly, Nov. 9.]

It had been the distinguishing feature of the Prussian revolution that the army had never for a moment wavered in its fidelity to the throne. The success of the insurrection of March 18th had been due to the paucity of troops and the errors of those in command, not to any military disaffection such as had paralysed authority in Paris and in the Mediterranean States. Each affront offered to the army by the democratic majority in the Assembly supplied the King with new weapons; each slight passed upon the royal authority deepened the indignation of the officers. The armistice of Malmö brought back to the neighbourhood of the capital a general who was longing to crush the party of disorder, and regiments on whom he could rely; but though there was now no military reason for delay, it was not until the capture of Vienna by Windischgrätz had dealt a fatal blow at democracy in Germany that Frederick William determined to have done with his own mutinous Parliament and the mobs by which it was controlled. During September and October the riots and tumults in the streets of Berlin continued. The Assembly, which had rejected the draft of a Constitution submitted to it by the Cabinet, debated the clauses of one drawn up by a Committee of its own members, abolished nobility, orders and titles, and struck out from the style of the sovereign the words that described him as King by the Grace of God. When intelligence arrived in Berlin that the attack of Windischgrätz upon Vienna had actually begun, popular passion redoubled. The Assembly was besieged by an angry crowd, and a resolution in favour of the intervention of Prussia was brought forward within the House. This was rejected, and it was determined instead to invoke the mediation of the Central Government at Frankfort between the Emperor and his subjects. But the decision of the Assembly on this and every other point was now matter of indifference. Events outstripped its deliberations, and with the fall of Vienna its own course was run. On the 2nd of November the King dismissed his Ministers and called to office the Count of Brandenburg, a natural son of Frederick William II., a soldier in high command, and one of the most outspoken representatives of the monarchical spirit of the army. The meaning of the appointment was at once understood. A deputation from the Assembly conveyed its protest to the King at Potsdam. The King turned his back upon them without giving an answer, and on the 9th of November an order was issued proroguing the Assembly, and bidding it to meet on the 27th at Brandenburg, not at Berlin.

[Last days of the Prussian Assembly.]

[Dissolution of the Assembly, Dec. 5.]

[Prussian Constitution granted by edict.]

The order of prorogation, as soon as signed by the King was brought into the Assembly by the Ministers, who demanded that it should be obeyed immediately and without discussion. The President allowing a debate to commence, the Ministers and seventy-eight Conservative deputies left the Hall. The remaining deputies, two hundred and eighty in number, then passed a resolution declaring that they would not meet at Brandenburg; that the King had no power to remove, to prorogue, or to dissolve the Assembly without its own consent; and that the Ministers were unfit to hold office. This challenge was answered by a proclamation of the Ministers declaring the further meeting of the deputies illegal, and calling upon the Civic Guard not to recognise them as a Parliament. On the following day General Wrangel and his troops entered Berlin and surrounded the Assembly Hall. In reply to the protests of the President, Wrangel answered that the Parliament had been prorogued and must disappear. The members peaceably left the Hall, but reassembled at another spot that they had selected in anticipation of expulsion; and for some days they were pursued by the military from one place of meeting to another. On the 15th of November they passed a resolution declaring the expenditure of state funds and the raising of taxes by the Government to be illegal so long as the Assembly should not be permitted to continue its deliberations. The Ministry on its part showed that it was determined not to brook resistance. The Civic Guard was dissolved and ordered to surrender its arms. It did so without striking a blow, and vanished from the scene, a memorable illustration of the political nullity of the middle class in Berlin as compared with that of Paris. The state of siege was proclaimed, the freedom of the Press and the right of public meeting were suspended. On the 27th of November a portion of the Assembly appeared, according to the King's order, at Brandenburg, but the numbers present were not sufficient for the transaction of business. The presence of the majority, however, was not required, for the King had determined to give no further legal opportunities to the men who had defied him. Treating the vote of November 15th as an act of rebellion on the part of those concerned in it, the King dissolved the Assembly (December 5th), and conferred upon Prussia a Constitution drawn up by his own advisers, with the promise that this Constitution should be subject to revision by the future representative body. Though the dissolution of the Assembly occasioned tumults in Breslau and Cologne it was not actively resented by the nation at large. The violence of the fallen body during its last weeks of existence had exposed it to general discredit; its vote of the 15th of November had been formally condemned by the Parliament of Frankfort; and the liberal character of the new Constitution, which agreed in the main with the draft-Constitution produced by the Committee of the Assembly, disposed moderate men to the belief that in the conflict between the King and the popular representatives the fault had not been on the side of the sovereign.

[The Frankfort Parliament and Austria, Oct.-Dec.]

In the meantime the Parliament of Frankfort, warned against longer delay by the disturbances of September 17th, had addressed itself in earnest to the settlement of the Federal Constitution of Germany. Above a host of minor difficulties two great problems confronted it at the outset. The first was the relation of the Austrian Empire, with its partly German and partly foreign territory, to the German national State; the other was the nature of the headship to be established. As it was clear that the Austrian Government could not apply the public law of Germany to its Slavic and Hungarian provinces, it was enacted in the second article of the Frankfort Constitution that where a German and a non-German territory had the same sovereign, the relation between these countries must be one of purely personal union under the sovereign, no part of Germany being incorporated into a single State with any non-German land. At the time when this article was drafted the disintegration of Austria seemed more probable than the re-establishment of its unity; no sooner, however, had Prince Schwarzenberg been brought into power by the subjugation of Vienna, than he made it plain that the government of Austria was to be centralised as it had never been before. In the first public declaration of his policy he announced that Austria would maintain its unity and permit no exterior influence to modify its internal organisation; that the settlement of the relations between Austria and Germany could only be effected after each had gained some new and abiding political form; and that in the meantime Austria would continue to fulfil its duties as a confederate.  [446] The interpretation put upon this statement at Frankfort was that Austria, in the interest of its own unity, preferred not to enter the German body, but looked forward to the establishment of some intimate alliance with it at a future time. As the Court of Vienna had evidently determined not to apply to itself the second article of the Constitution, and an antagonism between German and Austrian policy came within view, Schmerling, as an Austrian subject, was induced to resign his office, and was succeeded in it by Gagern, hitherto President of the Assembly (Dec. 16th).  [447]

[The Frankfort Parliament and Austria, Dec., Jan.]

In announcing the policy of the new Ministry, Gagern assumed the exclusion of Austria from the German Federation. Claiming for the Assembly, as the representative of the German nation, sovereign power in drawing up the Constitution, he denied that the Constitution could be made an object of negotiation with Austria. As Austria refused to fulfil the conditions of the second article, it must remain outside the Federation; the Ministry desired, however, to frame some close and special connection between Austria and Germany, and asked for authority to negotiate with the Court of Vienna for this purpose. Gagern's declaration of the exclusion of Austria occasioned a vehement and natural outburst of feeling among the Austrian deputies, and was met by their almost unanimous protest. Some days later there arrived a note from Schwarzenberg which struck at the root of all that had been done and all that was claimed by the Assembly. Repudiating the interpretation that had been placed upon his words, Schwarzenberg declared that the affairs of Germany could only be settled by an understanding between the Assembly and the Courts, and by an arrangement with Austria, which was the recognised chief of the Governments and intended to remain so in the new Federation. The question of the inclusion or exclusion of Austria now threw into the shade all the earlier differences between parties in the Assembly. A new dividing-line was drawn. On the one side appeared a group composed of the Austrian representatives, of Ultramontanes who feared a Protestant ascendency if Austria should be excluded, and of deputies from some of the smaller States who had begun to dread Prussian domination. On the other side was the great body of representatives who set before all the cause of German national union, who saw that this union would never be effected in any real form if it was made to depend upon negotiations with the Austrian Court, and who held, with the Minister, that to create a true German national State without the Austrian provinces was better than to accept a phantom of complete union in which the German people should be nothing and the Cabinet of Vienna everything. Though coalitions and intrigues of parties obscured the political prospect from day to day, the principles of Gagern were affirmed by a majority of the Assembly, and authority to negotiate some new form of connection with Austria, as a power outside the Federation, was granted to the Ministry.

[The Federal Headship.]

[King Frederick William IV. elected Emperor, March 28.]

The second great difficulty of the Assembly was the settlement of the Federal headship. Some were for a hereditary Emperor, some for a President or Board, some for a monarchy alternating between the Houses of Prussia and Austria, some for a sovereign elected for life or for a fixed period. The first decision arrived at was that the head should be one of the reigning princes of Germany, and that he should bear the title of Emperor. Against the hereditary principle there was a strong and, at first, a successful opposition. Reserving for future discussion other questions relating to the imperial office, the Assembly passed the Constitution through the first reading on February 3rd, 1849. It was now communicated to all the German Governments, with the request that they would offer their opinions upon it. The four minor kingdoms-Saxony, Hanover, Bavaria, and Würtemberg-with one consent declared against any Federation in which Austria should not be included; the Cabinet of Vienna protested against the subordination of the Emperor of Austria to a central power vested in any other German prince, and proposed that the entire Austrian Empire, with its foreign as well as its German elements, should enter the Federation. This note was enough to prove that Austria was in direct conflict with the scheme of national union which the Assembly had accepted; but the full peril of the situation was not perceived till on the 9th of March Schwarzenberg published the Constitution of Olmütz, which extinguished all separate rights throughout the Austrian Empire, and confounded in one mass, as subjects of the Emperor Francis Joseph, Hungarians, Germans, Slavs and Italians. The import of the Austrian demand now stood out clear and undisguised. Austria claimed to range itself with a foreign population of thirty millions within the German Federation; in other words, to reduce the German national union to a partnership with all the nationalities of Central Europe, to throw the weight of an overwhelming influence against any system of free representative government, and to expose Germany to war where no interests but those of the Pole or the Magyar might be at stake. So deep was the impression made at Frankfort by the fall of the Kremsier Parliament and the publication of Schwarzenberg's unitary edict, that one of the most eminent of the politicians who had hitherto opposed the exclusion of Austria-the Baden deputy Welcker-declared that further persistence in this course would be treason to Germany. Ranging himself with the Ministry, he proposed that the entire German Constitution, completed by a hereditary chieftainship, should be passed at a single vote on the second reading, and that the dignity of Emperor should be at once offered to the King of Prussia. Though the Assembly declined to pass the Constitution by a single vote, it agreed to vote upon clause by clause without discussion. The hereditary principle was affirmed by the narrow majority of four in a House of above five hundred. The second reading of the Constitution was completed on the 27th of March, and on the following day the election of the sovereign took place. Two hundred and ninety votes were given for the King of Prussia. Two hundred and forty-eight members, hostile to the hereditary principle or to the prince selected, abstained from voting.  [448]

[Frederick William IV.]

Frederick William had from early years cherished the hope of seeing some closer union of Germany established under Prussian influence. But he dwelt in a world where there was more of picturesque mirage than of real insight. He was almost superstitiously loyal to the House of Austria; and he failed to perceive, what was palpable to men of far inferior endowments to his own, that by setting Prussia at the head of the constitutional movement of the epoch he might at any time from the commencement of his reign have rallied all Germany round it. Thus the revolution of 1848 burst upon him, and he was not the man to act or to lead in time of revolution. Even in 1848, had he given promptly and with dignity what, after blood had been shed in his streets, he had to give with humiliation, he would probably have been acclaimed Emperor on the opening of the Parliament of Frankfort, and have been accepted by the universal voice of Germany. But the odium cast upon him by the struggle of March 18th was so great that in the election of a temporary Administrator of the Empire in June no single member at Frankfort gave him a vote. Time was needed to repair his credit, and while time passed Austria rose from its ruins. In the spring of 1849 Frederick William could not have assumed the office of Emperor of Germany without risk of a war with Austria, even had he been willing to accept this office on the nomination of the Frankfort Parliament. But to accept the Imperial Crown from a popular Assembly was repugnant to his deepest convictions. Clear as the Frankfort Parliament had been, as a whole, from the taint of Republicanism or of revolutionary violence, it had nevertheless had its birth in revolution: the crown which it offered would, in the King's expression, have been picked up from blood and mire. Had the princes of Germany by any arrangement with the Assembly tendered the crown to Frederick William the case would have been different; a new Divine right would have emanated from the old, and conditions fixed by negotiation between the princes and the popular Assembly might have been endured. That Frederick William still aspired to German leadership in one form or another no one doubted; his disposition to seek or to reject an accommodation with the Frankfort Parliament varied with the influences which surrounded him. The Ministry led by the Count of Brandenburg, though anti-popular in its domestic measures, was desirous of arriving at some understanding with Gagern and the friends of German union. Shortly before the first reading of the Constitution at Frankfort, a note had been drafted in the Berlin Cabinet admitting under certain provisions the exclusion of Austria from the Federation, and proposing, not that the Assembly should admit the right of each Government to accept or reject the Constitution, but that it should meet in a fair spirit such recommendations as all the Governments together should by a joint act submit to it. This note, which would have rendered an agreement between the Prussian Court and the Assembly possible, Frederick William at first refused to sign. He was induced to do so (Jan. 23rd) by his confidant Bunsen, who himself was authorised to proceed to Frankfort. During Bunsen's absence despatches arrived at Berlin from Schwarzenberg, who, in his usual resolute way, proposed to dissolve the Frankfort Assembly, and to divide Germany between Austria, Prussia, and the four secondary kingdoms. Bunsen on his return found his work undone; the King recoiled under Austrian pressure from the position which he had taken up, and sent a note to Frankfort on the 16th of February, which described Austria as a necessary part of Germany and claimed for each separate Government the right to accept or reject the Constitution as it might think fit. Thus the acceptance of the headship by Frederick William under any conditions compatible with the claims of the Assembly was known to be doubtful when, on the 28th of March, the majority resolved to offer him the Imperial Crown. The disposition of the Ministry at Berlin was indeed still favourable to an accommodation; and when, on the 2nd of April, the members of the Assembly who were charged to lay its offer before Frederick William arrived at Berlin, they were received with such cordiality by Brandenburg that it was believed the King's consent had been won.

[Frederick William IV. refuses the Crown, April 3.]

The reply of the King to the deputation on the following day rudely dispelled these hopes. He declared that before he could accept the Crown not only must he be summoned to it by the Princes of Germany, but the consent of all the Governments must be given to the Constitution. In other words, he required that the Assembly should surrender its claims to legislative supremacy, and abandon all those parts of the Federal Constitution of which any of the existing Governments disapproved. As it was certain that Austria and the four minor kingdoms would never agree to any Federal union worthy of the name, and that the Assembly could not now, without renouncing its past, admit that the right of framing the Constitution lay outside itself, the answer of the King was understood to amount to a refusal. The deputation left Berlin in the sorrowful conviction that their mission had failed; and a note which was soon afterwards received at Frankfort from the King showed that this belief was correct.  [449]

[The Frankfort Constitution rejected by the Governments.]

The answer of King Frederick William proved indeed much more than that he had refused the Crown of Germany; it proved that he would not accept the Constitution which the Assembly had enacted. The full import of this determination, and the serious nature of the crisis now impending over Germany, were at once understood. Though twenty-eight Governments successively accepted the Constitution, these were without exception petty States, and their united forces would scarcely have been a match for one of its more powerful enemies. On the 5th of April the Austrian Cabinet declared the Assembly to have been guilty of illegality in publishing the Constitution, and called upon all Austrian deputies to quit Frankfort. The Prussian Lower Chamber, elected under the King's recent edict, having protested against the state of siege in Berlin, and having passed a resolution in favour of the Frankfort Constitution, was forthwith dissolved. Within the Frankfort Parliament the resistance of Governments excited a patriotic resentment and caused for the moment a union of parties. Resolutions were passed declaring that the Assembly would adhere to the Constitution. A Committee was charged with the ascertainment of measures to be adopted for enforcing its recognition; and a note was addressed to all the hostile Governments demanding that they should abstain from proroguing or dissolving the representative bodies within their dominions with the view of suppressing the free utterance of opinions in favour of the Constitution.

[End of the German National Assembly, June, 1849.]

On the ground of this last demand the Prussian official Press now began to denounce the Assembly of Frankfort as a revolutionary body. The situation of affairs daily became worse. It was in vain that the Assembly appealed to the Governments, the legislative Chambers, the local bodies, the whole people, to bring the Constitution into effect. The moral force on which it had determined to rely proved powerless, and in despair of conquering the Governments by public opinion the more violent members of the democratic party determined to appeal to insurrection. On the 4th of May a popular rising began at Dresden, where the King, under the influence of Prussia, had dismissed those of his Ministers who urged him to accept the Constitution, and had dissolved his Parliament. The outbreak drove the King from his capital; but only five days had passed when a Prussian army-corps entered the city and crushed the rebellion. In this interval, short as it was, there had been indications that the real leaders of the insurrection were fighting not for the Frankfort Constitution but for a Republic, and that in the event of their victory a revolutionary Government, connected with French and Polish schemes of subversion, would come into power. In Baden this was made still clearer. There the Government of the Grand Duke had actually accepted the Frankfort Constitution, and had ordered elections to be held for the Federal legislative body by which the Assembly was to be succeeded. Insurrection nevertheless broke out. The Republic was openly proclaimed; the troops joined the insurgents; and a Provisional Government allied itself with a similar body that had sprung into being with the help of French and Polish refugees in the neighbouring Palatinate. Conscious that these insurrections must utterly ruin its own cause, the Frankfort Assembly on the suggestion of Gagern called upon the Archduke John to suppress them by force of arms, and at the same time to protect the free expression of opinion on behalf of the Constitution where threatened by Governments. John, who had long clung to his office only to further the ends of Austria, refused to do so, and Gagern in consequence resigned. With his fall ended the real political existence of the Assembly. In reply to a resolution which it passed on the 10th of May, calling upon John to employ all the forces of Germany in defence of the Constitution, the Archduke placed a mock-Ministry in office. The Prussian Government, declaring the vote of the 10th of May to be a summons to civil war, ordered all Prussian deputies to withdraw from the Assembly, and a few days later its example was imitated by Saxony and Hanover. On the 20th of May sixty-five of the best known of the members, including Arndt and Dahlmann, placed on record their belief that in the actual situation the relinquishment of the task of the Assembly was the least of evils, and declared their work at Frankfort ended. Other groups followed them till there remained only the party of the extreme Left, which had hitherto been a weak minority, and which in no sense represented the real opinions of Germany. This Rump-Parliament, troubling itself little with John and his Ministers, determined to withdraw from Frankfort, where it dreaded the appearance of Prussian troops, into Würtemberg, where it might expect some support from the revolutionary Governments of Baden and the Palatinate. On the 6th of June a hundred and five deputies assembled at Stuttgart. There they proceeded to appoint a governing Committee for all Germany, calling upon the King of Würtemberg to supply them with seven thousand soldiers, and sending out emissaries to stir up the neighbouring population. But the world disregarded them. The Government at Stuttgart, after an interval of patience, bade them begone; and on the 18th of June their hall was closed against them and they were dispersed by troops, no one raising a hand on their behalf. The overthrow of the insurgents who had taken up arms in Baden and the Palatinate was not so easy a matter. A campaign of six weeks was necessary, in which the army of Prussia, led by the Prince of Prussia, sustained some reverses, before the Republican levies were crushed, and with the fall of Rastadt the insurrection was brought to a close.  [450]

[The Baden insurrection suppressed, July, 1849.]

[Prussia attempts to form a separate union.]

The end of the German Parliament, on which the nation had set such high hopes and to which it had sent so much of what was noblest in itself, contrasted lamentably with the splendour of its opening. Whether a better result would have been attained if, instead of claiming supreme authority in the construction of Federal union, the Assembly had from the first sought the co-operation of the Governments, must remain matter of conjecture. Austria would under all circumstances have been the great hindrance in the way; and after the failure of the efforts made at Frankfort to establish the general union of Germany, Austria was able completely to frustrate the attempts which were now made at Berlin to establish partial union upon a different basis. In notifying to the Assembly his refusal of the Imperial Crown, King Frederick William had stated that he was resolved to place himself at the head of a Federation to be formed by States voluntarily uniting with him under terms to be subsequently arranged; and in a circular note addressed to the German Governments he invited such as were disposed to take counsel with Prussia to unite in Conference at Berlin. The opening of the Conference was fixed for the 17th of May. Two days before this the King issued a proclamation to the Prussian people announcing that in spite of the failure of the Assembly of Frankfort a German union was still to be formed. When the Conference opened at Berlin, no envoys appeared but those of Austria, Saxony, Hanover, and Bavaria. The Austrian representative withdrew at the end of the first sitting, the Bavarian rather later, leaving Prussia to lay such foundations as it could for German unity with the temporising support of Saxony and Hanover. A confederation was formed, known as the League of the Three Kingdoms. An undertaking was given that a Federal Parliament should be summoned, and that a Constitution should be made jointly by this Parliament and the Governments (May 26th). On the 11th of June the draft of a Federal Constitution was published. As the King of Prussia was apparently acting in good faith, and the draft-Constitution in spite of some defects seemed to afford a fair basis for union, the question now arose among the leaders of the German national movement whether the twenty-eight States which had accepted the ill-fated Constitution of Frankfort ought or ought not to enter the new Prussian League. A meeting of a hundred and fifty ex-members of the Frankfort Parliament was held at Gotha; and although great indignation was expressed by the more democratic faction, it was determined that the scheme now put forward by Prussia deserved a fair trial. The whole of the twenty-eight minor States consequently entered the League, which thus embraced all Germany with the exception of Austria, Bavaria and Würtemberg. But the Courts of Saxony and Hanover had from the first been acting with duplicity. The military influence of Prussia, and the fear which they still felt of their own subjects, had prevented them from offering open resistance to the renewed work of Federation; but they had throughout been in communication with Austria, and were only waiting for the moment when the complete restoration of Austria's military strength should enable them to display their true colours. During the spring of 1849, while the Conferences at Berlin were being held, Austria was still occupied with Hungary and Venice. The final overthrow of these enemies enabled it to cast its entire weight upon Germany. The result was seen in the action of Hanover and Saxony, which now formally seceded from the Federation. Prussia thus remained at the end of 1849 with no support but that of the twenty-eight minor States. Against it, in open or in tacit antagonism to the establishment of German unity in any effective form, the four secondary Kingdoms stood ranged by the side of Austria.

[Prussia in 1849.]

[The Union Parliament at Erfurt, March 1850.]

It was not until the 20th of March, 1850, that the Federal Parliament, which had been promised ten months before on the incorporation of the new League, assembled at Erfurt. In the meantime reaction had gone far in many a German State. In Prussia, after the dissolution of the Lower Chamber on April 27th, 1849, the King had abrogated the electoral provisions of the Constitution so recently granted by himself, and had substituted for them a system based on the representation of classes. Treating this act as a breach of faith, the Democratic party had abstained from voting at the elections, with the result that in the Berlin Parliament of 1850 Conservatives, Reactionists, and officials formed the great majority. The revision of the Prussian Constitution, promised at first as a concession to Liberalism, was conducted in the opposite sense. The King demanded the strengthening of monarchical power; the Feudalists, going far beyond him, attacked the municipal and social reforms of the last two years, and sought to lead Prussia back to the system of its mediæval estates. It was in the midst of this victory of reaction in Prussia that the Federal Parliament at Erfurt began its sittings. Though the moderate Liberals, led by Gagern and other tried politicians of Frankfurt, held the majority in both Houses, a strong Absolutist party from Prussia confronted them, and it soon became clear that the Prussian Government was ready to play into the hands of this party. The draft of the Federal Constitution, which had been made at Berlin, was presented, according to the undertaking of May 28th, 1849, to the Erfurt Assembly. Aware of the gathering strength of the reaction and of the danger of delay, the Liberal majority declared itself ready to pass the draft into law without a single alteration. The reactionary minority demanded that a revision should take place; and, to the scandal of all who understood the methods or the spirit of Parliamentary rule, the Prussian Ministers united with the party which demanded alterations in the project which they themselves had brought forward. A compromise was ultimately effected; but the action of the Court of Prussia and the conduct of its Ministers throughout the Erfurt debates struck with deep despondency those who had believed that Frederick William might still effect the work in which the Assembly of Frankfort had failed. The trust in the King's sincerity or consistence of purpose sank low. The sympathy of the national Liberal party throughout Germany was to a great extent alienated from Prussia; while, if any expectation existed at Berlin that the adoption of a reactionary policy would disarm the hostility of the Austrian Government to the new League, this hope was wholly vain and baseless.[451]

[Action of Austria.]

Austria had from the first protested against the attempt of the King of Prussia to establish any new form of union in Germany, and had declared that it would recognise none of the conclusions of the Federal Parliament of Erfurt. According to the theory now advanced by the Cabinet of Vienna the ancient Federal Constitution of Germany was still in force. All that had happened since March, 1848, was so much wanton and futile mischief-making. The disturbance of order had at length come to an end, and with the exit of the rioters the legitimate powers re-entered into their rights. Accordingly, there could be no question of the establishment of new Leagues. The old relation of all the German States to one another under the ascendency of Austria remained in full strength; the Diet of Frankfort, which had merely suspended its functions and by no means suffered extinction, was still the legitimate central authority. That some modifications might be necessary in the ancient Constitution was the most that Austria was willing to admit. This, however, was an affair not for the German people but for its rulers, and Austria accordingly invited all the Governments to a Congress at Frankfort where the changes necessary might be discussed. In reply to this summons, Prussia strenuously denied that the old Federal Constitution was still in existence. The princes of the numerous petty States which were included in the new Union assembled at Berlin round Frederick William, and resolved that they would not attend the Conference at Frankfort except under reservations and conditions which Austria would not admit. Arguments and counter-arguments were exchanged; but the controversy between an old and a new Germany was one to be decided by force of will or force of arms, not by political logic. The struggle was to be one between Prussia and Austria, and the Austrian Cabinet had well gauged the temper of its opponent. A direct summons to submission would have roused all the King's pride, and have been answered by war. Before demanding from Frederick William the dissolution of the Union which he had founded, Schwarzenberg determined to fix upon a quarrel in which the King should be perplexed or alarmed at the results of his own policy. The dominant conviction in the mind of Frederick William was that of the sanctity of monarchical rule. If the League of Berlin could be committed to some enterprise hostile to monarchical power, and could be charged with an alliance with rebellion, Frederick William would probably falter in his resolutions, and a resort to arms, for which, however, Austria was well prepared, would become unnecessary.[452]

[Hesse-Cassel.]

[The Diet of Frankfort restored, Sept., 1850.]

[Prussia and Austria.]

[The Warsaw meeting, Oct. 29, 1850.]

[Manteuffel at Olmütz, Nov. 29.]

Among the States whose Governments had been forced by public opinion to join the new Federation was the Electorate of Hesse-Cassel. The Elector was, like his predecessors, a thorough despot at heart, and chafed under the restrictions which a constitutional system imposed upon his rule. Acting under Austrian instigation, he dismissed his Ministers in the spring of 1850, and placed in office one Hassenpflug, a type of the worst and most violent class of petty tyrants produced by the officialism of the minor German States. Hassenpflug immediately quarrelled with the Estates at Cassel, and twice dissolved them, after which he proceeded to levy taxes by force. The law-courts declared his acts illegal; the officers of the army, when called on for assistance, began to resign. The conflict between the Minister and the Hessian population was in full progress when, at the beginning of September, Austria with its vassal Governments proclaimed the re-establishment of the Diet of Frankfort. Though Prussia and most of the twenty-eight States confederate with it treated this announcement as null and void, the Diet, constituted by the envoys of Austria, the four minor Kingdoms, and a few seceders from the Prussian Union, commenced its sittings. To the Diet the Elector of Hesse forthwith appealed for help against his subjects, and the decision was given that the refusal of the Hessian Estates to grant the taxes was an offence justifying the intervention of the central power. Fortified by this judgment, Hassenpflug now ordered that every person offering resistance to the Government should be tried by court-martial. He was baffled by the resignation of the entire body of officers in the Hessian army; and as this completed the discomfiture of the Elector, the armed intervention of Austria, as identified with the Diet of Frankfort, now became a certainty. But to the protection of the people of Hesse in their constitutional rights Prussia, as chief of the League which Hesse had joined, stood morally pledged. It remained for the King to decide between armed resistance to Austria or the humiliation of a total abandonment of Prussia's claim to leadership in any German union. Conflicting influences swayed the King in one direction and another. The friends of Austria and of absolutism declared that the employment of the Prussian army on behalf of the Hessians would make the King an accomplice of revolution: the bolder and more patriotic spirits protested against the abdication of Prussia's just claims and the evasion of its responsibilities towards Germany. For a moment the party of action, led by the Prince of Prussia, gained the ascendant. General Radowitz, the projector of the Union, was called to the Foreign Ministry, and Prussian troops entered Hesse. Austria now ostentatiously prepared for war. Frederick William, terrified by the danger confronting him, yet unwilling to yield all, sought the mediation of the Czar of Russia. Nicholas came to Warsaw, where the Emperor of Austria and Prince Charles, brother of the King of Prussia, attended by the Ministers of their States, met him. The closest family ties united the Courts of St. Petersburg and Berlin but the Russian sovereign was still the patron of Austria as he had been in the Hungarian campaign. He resented the action of Prussia in Schleswig-Holstein, and was offended that King Frederick William had not presented himself at Warsaw in person. He declared in favour of all Austria's demands, and treated Count Brandenburg with such indignity that the Count, a high-spirited patriot, never recovered from its effect. He returned to Berlin only to give in his report and die. Manteuffel, Minister of the Interior, assured the King that the Prussian army was so weak in numbers and so defective in organisation that, if it took the field against Austria and its allies, it would meet with certain ruin. Bavarian troops, representing the Diet of Frankfort, now entered Hesse at Austria's bidding, and stood face to face with the Prussians. The moment had come when the decision must be made between peace and war. At a Council held at Berlin on November and the peace-party carried the King with them. Radowitz gave up office; Manteuffel, the Minister of repression within and of submission without, was set at the head of the Government. The meaning of his appointment was well understood, and with each new proof of the weakness of the King the tone of the Court of Austria became more imperious. On the 9th of November Schwarzenberg categorically demanded the dissolution of the Prussian Union, the recognition of the Federal Diet, and the evacuation of Hesse by the Prussian troops. The first point was at once conceded, and in hollow, equivocating language Manteuffel made the fact known to the members of the Confederacy. The other conditions not being so speedily fulfilled, Schwarzenberg set Austrian regiments in motion, and demanded the withdrawal of the Prussian troops from Hesse within twenty-four hours. Manteuffel begged the Austrian Minister for an interview, and, without waiting for an answer, set out for Olmütz. His instructions bade him to press for certain concessions; none of these did he obtain, and he made the necessary submission without them. On the 29th of November a convention was signed at Olmütz, in which Prussia recognised the German Federal Constitution of 1815 as still existing, undertook to withdraw all its troops from Hesse with the exception of a single battalion, and consented to the settlement of affairs both in Hesse and in Schleswig-Holstein by the Federal Diet. One point alone in the scheme of the Austrian statesman was wanting among the fruits of his victory at Olmütz and of the negotiations at Dresden by which this was followed. Schwarzenberg had intended that the entire Austrian Empire should enter the German Federation; and if he had had to reckon with no opponents but the beaten and humbled Prussia, he would have effected his design. But the prospect of a central European Power, with a population of seventy millions, controlled as this would virtually be by the Cabinet of Vienna, alarmed other nations. England declared that such a combination would undo the balance of power in Europe and menace the independence of Germany; France protested in more threatening terms; and the project fell to the ground, to be remembered only as the boldest imagination of a statesman for whom fortune, veiling the Nemesis in store, seemed to set no limit to its favours.

[Schleswig-Holstein.]

[The German National Fleet sold by auction, June, 1852.]

The cause of Schleswig-Holstein, so intimately bound up with the efforts of the Germans towards national union, sank with the failure of these efforts; and in the final humiliation of Prussia it received what might well seem its death-blow. The armistice of Malmö, which was sanctioned by the Assembly of Frankfort in the autumn of 1848, lasted until March 26th, 1849. War was then recommenced by Prussia, and the lines of Düppel were stormed by its troops, while the volunteer forces of Schleswig-Holstein unsuccessfully laid siege to Fredericia. Hostilities had continued for three months, when a second armistice, to last for a year, and Preliminaries of Peace, were agreed upon. At the conclusion of this armistice, in July, 1850, Prussia, in the name of Germany, made peace with Denmark. The inhabitants of the Duchies in consequence continued the war for themselves, and though defeated with great loss at Idstedt on the 24th of July, they remained unconquered at the end of the year. This was the situation of affairs when Prussia, by the Treaty of Olmütz, agreed that the restored Federal Diet should take upon itself the restoration of order in Schleswig-Holstein, and that the troops of Prussia should unite with those of Austria to enforce its decrees. To the Cabinet of Vienna, the foe in equal measure of German national union and of every democratic cause, the Schleswig-Holsteiners were simply rebels in insurrection against their Sovereign. They were required by the Diet, under Austrian dictation, to lay down their arms; and commissioners from Austria and Prussia entered the Duchies to compel them to do so. Against Denmark, Austria, and Prussia together, it was impossible for Schleswig-Holstein to prolong its resistance. The army was dissolved, and the Duchies were handed over to the King of Denmark, to return to the legal status which was defined in the Treaties of Peace. This was the nominal condition of the transfer; but the Danish Government treated Schleswig as part of its national territory, and in the northern part of the Duchy the process of substituting Danish for German nationality was actively pursued. The policy of foreign Courts, little interested in the wish of the inhabitants, had from the beginning of the struggle of the Duchies against Denmark favoured the maintenance and consolidation of the Danish Kingdom. The claims of the Duke of Augustenburg, as next heir to the Duchies in the male line, were not considered worth the risk of a new war; and by a protocol signed at London on the 2nd of August, 1850, the Powers, with the exception of Prussia, declared themselves in favour of a single rule of succession in all parts of the Danish State. By a Treaty of the 8th of May, 1852, to which Prussia gave its assent, the pretensions of all other claimants to the disputed succession were set aside, and Prince Christian, of the House of Glücksburg, was declared heir to the throne, the rights of the German Federation as established by the Treaties of 1815 being reserved. In spite of this reservation of Federal rights, and of the stipulations in favour of Schleswig and Holstein made in the earlier agreements, the Duchies appeared to be now practically united with the Danish State. Prussia, for a moment their champion, had joined with Austria in coercing their army, in dissolving their Government, in annulling the legislation by which the Parliament of Frankfort had made them participators in public rights thenceforward to be the inheritance of all Germans. A page in the national history was obliterated; Prussia had turned its back on its own professions; there remained but one relic from the time when the whole German people seemed so ardent for the emancipation of its brethren beyond the frontier. The national fleet, created by the Assembly of Frankfort for the prosecution of the struggle with Denmark, still lay at the mouth of the Elbe. But the same power which had determined that Germany was not to be a nation had also determined that it could have no national maritime interests. After all that had passed, authority had little call to be nice about appearances; and the national fleet was sold by auction, in accordance with a decree of the restored Diet of Frankfort, in the summer of 1852.  [453]

[Germany after 1849.]

It was with deep disappointment and humiliation that the Liberals of Germany, and all in whom the hatred of democratic change had not overpowered the love of country, witnessed the issue of the movement of 1848. In so far as that movement was one directed towards national union it had totally failed, and the state of things that had existed before 1848 was restored without change. As a movement of constitutional and social reform, it had not been so entirely vain; nor in this respect can it be said that Germany after the year 1848 returned altogether to what it was before it. Many of the leading figures of the earlier time re-appeared indeed with more or less of lustre upon the stage. Metternich though excluded from office by younger men, beamed upon Vienna with the serenity of a prophet who had lived to see most of his enemies shot and of a martyr who had returned to one of the most enviable Salons in Europe. No dynasty lost its throne, no class of the population had been struck down with proscription as were the clergy and the nobles of France fifty years before. Yet the traveller familiar with Germany before the revolution found that much of the old had now vanished, much of a new world come into being. It was not sought by the re-established Governments to undo at one stroke the whole of the political, the social, the agrarian legislation of the preceding time, as in some other periods of reaction. The nearest approach that was made to this was in a decree of the Diet annulling the Declaration of Rights drawn up by the Frankfort Assembly, and requiring the Governments to bring into conformity with the Federal Constitution all laws and institutions made since the beginning of 1848. Parliamentary government was thereby enfeebled, but not necessarily extinguished. Governments narrowed the franchise, curtailed the functions of representative assemblies, filled these with their creatures, coerced voters at elections; but, except in Austria, there was no open abandonment of constitutional forms. In some States, as in Saxony under the reactionary rule of Count Beust, the system of national representation established in 1848 was abolished and the earlier Estates were revived; in Prussia the two Houses of Parliament continued in existence, but in such dependence upon the royal authority, and under such strong pressure of an aristocratic and official reaction, that, after struggling for some years in the Lower House, the Liberal leaders at length withdrew in despair. The character which Government now assumed in Prussia was indeed far more typical of the condition of Germany at large than was the bold and uncompromising despotism of Prince Schwarzenberg in Austria. Manteuffel, in whom the Prussian epoch of reaction was symbolised, was not a cruel or a violent Minister; but his rule was stamped with a peculiar and degrading meanness, more irritating to those who suffered under it than harsher wrong. In his hands government was a thing of eavesdropping and espionage, a system of petty persecution, a school of subservience and hypocrisy. He had been the instrument at Olmütz of such a surrender of national honour and national interests as few nations have ever endured with the chances of war still untried. This surrender may, in the actual condition of the Prussian army, have been necessary, but the abasement of it seemed to cling to Manteuffel and to lower all his conceptions of government. Even where the conclusions of his policy were correct they seemed to have been reached by some unworthy process. Like Germany at large, Prussia breathed uneasily under an oppression which was everywhere felt and yet was hard to define. Its best elements were those which suffered the most: its highest intellectual and political aims were those which most excited the suspicion of the Government. Its King had lost whatever was stimulating or elevated in his illusions. From him no second alliance with Liberalism, no further effort on behalf of German unity, was to be expected: the hope for Germany and for Prussia, if hope there was, lay in a future reign.

[Austria after 1851.]

[Austrian Concordat, Sept. 18, 1855.]

The powerlessness of Prussia was the measure of Austrian influence and prestige. The contrast presented by Austria in 1848 and Austria in 1851 was indeed one that might well arrest political observers. Its recovery had no doubt been effected partly by foreign aid, and in the struggle with the Magyars a dangerous obligation had been incurred towards Russia; but scarred and riven as the fabric was within, it was complete and imposing without. Not one of the enemies who in 1848 had risen against the Court of Vienna now remained standing. In Italy, Austria had won back what had appeared to be hopelessly lost; in Germany it had more than vindicated its old claims. It had thrown its rival to the ground, and the full measure of its ambition was perhaps even yet not satisfied. "First to humiliate Prussia, then to destroy it," was the expression in which Schwarzenberg summed up his German policy. Whether, with his undoubted firmness and daring, the Minister possessed the intellectual qualities and the experience necessary for the successful administration of an Empire built up, as Austria now was, on violence and on the suppression of every national force, was doubted even by his admirers. The proof, however, was not granted to him, for a sudden death carried him off in his fourth year of power (April 5th, 1852). Weaker men succeeded to his task. The epoch of military and diplomatic triumph was now ending, the gloomier side of the reaction stood out unrelieved by any new succession of victories. Financial disorder grew worse and worse. Clericalism claimed its bond from the monarchy which it had helped to restore. In the struggle of the nationalities of Austria against the central authority the Bishops had on the whole thrown their influence on to the side of the Crown. The restored despotism owed too much to their help and depended too much on their continued goodwill to be able to refuse their demands. Thus the new centralised administration, reproducing in general the uniformity of government attempted by the Emperor Joseph II., contrasted with this in its subservience to clerical power. Ecclesiastical laws and jurisdictions were allowed to encroach on the laws and jurisdiction of the State; education was made over to the priesthood; within the Church itself the bishops were allowed to rule uncontrolled. The very Minister who had taken office under Schwarzenberg as the representative of the modern spirit, to which the Government still professed to render homage, became the instrument of an act of submission to the Papacy which marked the lowest point to which Austrian policy fell. Alexander Bach, a prominent Liberal in Vienna at the beginning of 1848, had accepted office at the price of his independence, and surrendered himself to the aristocratic and clerical influences that dominated the Court. Consistent only in his efforts to simplify the forms of government, to promote the ascendency of German over all other elements in the State, to maintain the improvement in the peasant's condition effected by the Parliament of Kremsier, Bach, as Minister of the Interior, made war in all other respects on his own earlier principles. In the former representative of the Liberalism of the professional classes in Vienna absolutism had now its most efficient instrument; and the Concordat negotiated by Bach with the Papacy in 1855 marked the definite submission of Austria to the ecclesiastical pretensions which in these years of political languor and discouragement gained increasing recognition throughout Central Europe. Ultramontanism had sought allies in many political camps since the revolution of 1848. It had dallied in some countries with Republicanism; but its truer instincts divined in the victory of absolutist systems its own surest gain. Accommodations between the Papacy and several of the German Governments were made in the years succeeding 1849; and from the centralised despotism of the Emperor Francis Joseph the Church won concessions which since the time of Maria Theresa it had in vain sought from any ruler of the Austrian State.

[France after 1848.]

[Louis Napoleon.]

The European drama which began in 1848 had more of unity and more of concentration in its opening than in its close. In Italy it ends with the fall of Venice; in Germany the interest lingers till the days of Olmütz; in France there is no decisive break in the action until the Coup d'Etat which, at the end of the year 1851, made Louis Napoleon in all but name Emperor of France. The six million votes which had raised Louis Napoleon to the Presidency of the Republic might well have filled with alarm all who hoped for a future of constitutional rule; yet the warning conveyed by the election seems to have been understood by but few. As the representative of order and authority, as the declared enemy of Socialism, Louis Napoleon was on the same side as the Parliamentary majority; he had even been supported in his candidature by Parliamentary leaders such as M. Thiers. His victory was welcomed as a victory over Socialism and the Red Republic; he had received some patronage from the official party of order, and it was expected that, as nominal chief of the State, he would act as the instrument of this party. He was an adventurer, but an adventurer with so little that was imposing about him, that it scarcely occurred to men of influence in Paris to credit him with the capacity for mischief. His mean look and spiritless address, the absurdities of his past, the insignificance of his political friends, caused him to be regarded during his first months of public life with derision rather than with fear. The French, said M. Thiers long afterwards, made two mistakes about Louis Napoleon: the first when they took him for a fool, the second when they took him for a man of genius. It was not until the appearance of the letter to Colonel Ney, in which the President ostentatiously separated himself from his Ministers and emphasised his personal will in the direction of the foreign policy of France, that suspicions of danger to the Republic from his ambition arose. From this time, in the narrow circle of the Ministers whom official duty brought into direct contact with the President, a constant sense of insecurity and dread of some new surprise on his part prevailed, though the accord which had been broken by the letter to Colonel Ney was for a while outwardly re-established, and the forms of Parliamentary government remained unimpaired.

[Message of Oct. 31, 1849.]

The first year of Louis Napoleon's term of office was drawing to a close when a message from him was delivered to the Assembly which seemed to announce an immediate attack upon the Constitution. The Ministry in office was composed of men of high Parliamentary position; it enjoyed the entire confidence of a great majority in the Assembly, and had enforced with at least sufficient energy the measures of public security which the President and the country seemed agreed in demanding. Suddenly, on the 31st of October, the President announced to the Assembly by a message carried by one of his aides-de-camp that the Ministry were dismissed. The reason assigned for their dismissal was the want of unity within the Cabinet itself; but the language used by the President announced much more than a ministerial change. "France, in the midst of confusion, seeks for the hand, the will of him whom it elected on the 10th of December. The victory won on that day was the victory of a system, for the name of Napoleon is in itself a programme. It signifies order, authority, religion, national prosperity within; national dignity without. It is this policy, inaugurated by my election, that I desire to carry to triumph with the support of the Assembly and of the people." In order to save the Republic from anarchy, to maintain the prestige of France among other nations, the President declared that he needed men of action rather than of words; yet when the list of the new Ministers appeared, it contained scarcely a single name of weight. Louis Napoleon had called to office persons whose very obscurity had marked them as his own instruments, and guaranteed to him the ascendency which he had not hitherto possessed within the Cabinet. Satisfied with having given this proof of his power, he resumed the appearance of respect, if not of cordiality, towards the Assembly. He had learnt to beware of precipitate action; above two years of office were still before him; and he had now done enough to make it clear to all who were disposed to seek their fortunes in a new political cause that their services on his behalf would be welcomed, and any excess of zeal more than pardoned. From this time there grew up a party which had for its watchword the exaltation of Louis Napoleon and the derision of the methods of Parliamentary government. Journalists, unsuccessful politicians, adventurers of every description, were enlisted in the ranks of this obscure but active band. For their acts and their utterances no one was responsible but themselves. They were disavowed without compunction when their hardihood went too far; but their ventures brought them no peril, and the generosity of the President was not wanting to those who insisted on serving him in spite of himself.

[Law limiting the Franchise, May 31, 1850.]

France was still trembling with the shock of the Four Days of June; and measures of repression formed the common ground upon which Louis Napoleon and the Assembly met without fear of conflict. Certain elections which were held in the spring of 1850, and which gave a striking victory in Paris and elsewhere to Socialist or Ultra-Democratic candidates, revived the alarms of the owners of property, and inspired the fear that with universal suffrage the Legislature itself might ultimately fall into the hands of the Red Republicans. The principle of universal suffrage had been proclaimed almost by accident in the midst of the revolution of 1848. It had been embodied in the Constitution of that year because it was found already in existence. No party had seriously considered the conditions under which it was to be exercised, or had weighed the political qualifications of the mass to whom it was so lightly thrown. When election after election returned to the Chamber men whose principles were held to menace society itself, the cry arose that France must be saved from the hands of the vile multitude; and the President called upon a Committee of the Assembly to frame the necessary measures of electoral reform. Within a week the work of the Committee was completed, and the law which it had drafted was brought before the Assembly. It was proposed that, instead of a residence of six months, a continuous residence of three years in the same commune should be required of every voter, and that the fulfilment of this condition should be proved, not by ordinary evidence, but by one of certain specified acts, such as the payment of personal taxes. With modifications of little importance the Bill was passed by the Assembly. Whether its real effect was foreseen even by those who desired the greatest possible limitation of the franchise is doubtful; it is certain that many who supported it believed, in their ignorance of the practical working of electoral laws, that they were excluding from the franchise only the vagabond and worthless class which has no real place within the body politic. When the electoral lists drawn up in pursuance of the measure appeared, they astounded all parties alike. Three out of the ten millions of voters in France were disfranchised. Not only the inhabitants of whole quarters in the great cities but the poorer classes among the peasantry throughout France had disappeared from the electoral body. The Assembly had at one blow converted into enemies the entire mass of the population that lived by the wages of bodily labour. It had committed an act of political suicide, and had given to a man so little troubled with scruples of honour as Louis Napoleon the fatal opportunity of appealing to France as the champion of national sovereignty and the vindicator of universal suffrage against an Assembly which had mutilated it in the interests of class.  [454]

[Prospects of Louis Napoleon.]

The duration of the Presidency was fixed by the Constitution of 1848 at four years, and it was enacted that the President should not be re-eligible to his dignity. By the operation of certain laws imperfectly adjusted to one another, the tenure of office by Louis Napoleon expired on the 8th of May, 1852, while the date for the dissolution of the Assembly fell within a few weeks of this day. France was therefore threatened with the dangers attending the almost simultaneous extinction of all authority. The perils of 1852 loomed only too visibly before the country, and Louis Napoleon addressed willing hearers when, in the summer of 1850, he began to hint at the necessity of a prolongation of his own power. The Parliamentary recess was employed by the President in two journeys through the Departments; the first through those of the south-east, where Socialism was most active, and where his appearance served at once to prove his own confidence and to invigorate the friends of authority; the second through Normandy, where the prevailing feeling was strongly in favour of firm government, and utterances could safely be made by the President which would have brought him into some risk at Paris. In suggesting that France required his own continued presence at the head of the State Louis Napoleon was not necessarily suggesting a violation of the law. It was provided by the Statutes of 1848 that the Assembly by a vote of three-fourths might order a revision of the Constitution; and in favour of this revision petitions were already being drawn up throughout the country. Were the clause forbidding the re-election of the President removed from the Constitution, Louis Napoleon might fairly believe that an immense majority of the French people would re-invest him with power. He would probably have been content with a legal re-election had this been rendered possible; but the Assembly showed little sign of a desire to smooth his way, and it therefore became necessary for him to seek the means of realising his aims in violation of the law. He had persuaded himself that his mission, his destiny, was to rule France; in other words, he had made up his mind to run such risks and to sanction such crimes as might be necessary to win him sovereign power. With the loftier impulses of ambition, motives of a meaner kind stimulated him to acts of energy. Never wealthy, the father of a family though unmarried, he had exhausted his means, and would have returned to private life a destitute man, if not laden with debt. When his own resolution flagged, there were those about him too deeply interested in his fortunes to allow him to draw back.

[Louis Napoleon and the army.]

[Dismissal of Changarnier, Jan., 1851.]

It was by means of the army that Louis Napoleon intended in the last resort to make himself master of France, and the army had therefore to be won over to his personal cause. The generals who had gained distinction either in the Algerian wars or in the suppression of insurrection in France were without exception Orleanists or Republicans. Not a single officer of eminence was as yet included in the Bonapartist band. The President himself had never seen service except in a Swiss camp of exercise; beyond his name he possessed nothing that could possibly touch the imagination of a soldier. The heroic element not being discoverable in his person or his career, it remained to work by more material methods. Louis Napoleon had learnt many things in England, and had perhaps observed in the English elections of that period how much may be effected by the simple means of money-bribes and strong drink. The saviour of society was not ashamed to order the garrison of Paris double rations of brandy and to distribute innumerable doles of half a franc or less. Military banquets were given, in which the sergeant and the corporal sat side by side with the higher officers. Promotion was skilfully offered or withheld. As the generals of the highest position were hostile to Bonaparte, it was the easier to tempt their subordinates with the prospect of their places. In the acclamations which greeted the President at the reviews held at Paris in the autumn of 1850, in the behaviour both of officers and men in certain regiments, it was seen how successful had been the emissaries of Bonapartism. The Committee which represented the absent Chamber in vain called the Minister of War to account for these irregularities. It was in vain that Changarnier, who, as commander both of the National Guard of Paris and of the first military division, seemed to hold the arbitrament between President and Assembly in his hands, openly declared at the beginning of 1851 in favour of the Constitution. He was dismissed from his post; and although a vote of censure which followed this dismissal led to the resignation of the Ministry, the Assembly was unable to reinstate Changarnier in his command, and helplessly witnessed the authority which he had held pass into hostile or untrustworthy hands.

[Proposed Revision of the Constitution.]

[Revision of the Constitution rejected, July 19.]

There now remained only one possible means of averting the attack upon the Constitution which was so clearly threatened, and that was by subjecting the Constitution itself to revision in order that Louis Napoleon might legally seek re-election at the end of his Presidency. An overwhelming current of public opinion pressed indeed in the direction of such a change. However gross and undisguised the initiative of the local functionaries in preparing the petitions which showered upon the Assembly, the national character of the demand could not be doubted. There was no other candidate whose name carried with it any genuine popularity or prestige, or around whom even the Parliamentary sections at enmity with the President could rally. The Assembly was divided not very unevenly between Legitimists, Orleanists, and Republicans. Had indeed the two monarchical groups been able to act in accord, they might have had some hope of re-establishing the throne; and an attempt had already been made to effect a union, on the understanding that the childless Comté de Chambord should recognise the grandson of Louis Philippe as his heir, the House of Orleans renouncing its claims during the lifetime of the chief of the elder line. These plans had been frustrated by the refusal of the Comté de Chambord to sanction any appeal to the popular vote, and the restoration of the monarchy was therefore hopeless for the present. It remained for the Assembly to decide whether it would facilitate Louis Napoleon's re-election as President by a revision of the Constitution or brave the risk of his violent usurpation of power. The position was a sad and even humiliating one for those who, while they could not disguise their real feeling towards the Prince, yet knew themselves unable to count on the support of the nation if they should resist him. The Legitimists, more sanguine in temper, kept in view an ultimate restoration of the monarchy, and lent themselves gladly to any policy which might weaken the constitutional safeguards of the Republic. The Republican minority alone determined to resist any proposal for revision, and to stake everything upon the maintenance of the constitution in its existing form. Weak as the Republicans were as compared with the other groups in the Assembly when united against them, they were yet strong enough to prevent the Ministry from securing that majority of three-fourths without which the revision of the Constitution could not be undertaken. Four hundred and fifty votes were given in favour of revision, two hundred and seventy against it (July 19th). The proposal therefore fell to the ground, and Louis Napoleon, who could already charge the Assembly with having by its majority destroyed universal suffrage, could now charge it with having by its minority forbidden the nation to choose its own head. Nothing more was needed by him. He had only to decide upon the time and the circumstances of the coup d'état which was to rid him of his adversaries and to make him master of France.

[Preparations for the coup d'état.]

Louis Napoleon had few intimate confidants; the chief among these were his half-brother Morny, one of the illegitimate offspring of Queen Hortense, a man of fashion and speculator in the stocks; Fialin or Persigny, a person of humble origin who had proved himself a devoted follower of the Prince through good and evil; and Fleury, an officer at this time on a mission in Algiers. These were not men out of whom Louis Napoleon could form an administration, but they were useful to him in discovering and winning over soldiers and officials of sufficient standing to give to the execution of the conspiracy something of the appearance of an act of Government. A general was needed at the War Office who would go all lengths in illegality. Such a man had already been found in St. Arnaud, commander of a brigade in Algiers, a brilliant soldier who had redeemed a disreputable past by years of hard service, and who was known to be ready to treat his French fellow-citizens exactly as he would treat the Arabs. As St. Arnaud's name was not yet familiar in Paris, a campaign was arranged in the summer of 1851 for the purpose of winning him distinction. At the cost of some hundreds of lives St. Arnaud was pushed into sufficient fame; and after receiving congratulations proportioned to his exploits from the President's own hand, he was summoned to Paris, in order at the right moment to be made Minister of War. A troop of younger officers, many of whom gained a lamentable celebrity as the generals of 1870, were gradually brought over from Algiers and placed round the Minister in the capital. The command of the army of Paris was given to General Magnan, who, though he preferred not to share in the deliberations on the coup d'état, had promised his co-operation when the moment should arrive. The support, or at least the acquiescence, of the army seemed thus to be assured. The National Guard, which, under Changarnier, would probably have rallied in defence of the Assembly, had been placed under an officer pledged to keep it in inaction. For the management of the police Louis Napoleon had fixed upon M. Maupas, Préfet of the Haute Garonne. This person, to whose shamelessness we owe the most authentic information that exists on the coup d'état, had, while in an inferior station, made it his business to ingratiate himself with the President by sending to him personally police reports which ought to have been sent to the Ministers. The objects and the character of M. Maupas were soon enough understood by Louis Napoleon. He promoted him to high office; sheltered him from the censure of his superiors; and, when the coup d'état was drawing nigh, called him to Paris, in the full and well-grounded confidence that, whatever the most perfidious ingenuity could contrive in turning the guardians of the law against the law itself, that M. Maupas, as Préfet of Police, might be relied upon to accomplish.

[The coup d'état fixed for December.]

Preparations for the coup d'état had been so far advanced in September that a majority of the conspirators had then urged Louis Napoleon to strike the blow without delay, while the members of the Assembly were still dispersed over France in the vacation. St. Arnaud, however, refused his assent, declaring that the deputies, if left free, would assemble at a distance from Paris, summon to them the generals loyal to the Constitution, and commence a civil war. He urged that, in order to avoid greater subsequent risks, it would be necessary to seize all the leading representatives and generals from whom resistance might be expected, and to hold them under durance until the crisis should be over. This simultaneous arrest of all the foremost public men in France could only be effected at a time when the Assembly was sitting. St. Arnaud therefore demanded that the coup d'état should be postponed till the winter. Another reason made for delay. Little as the populace of Paris loved the reactionary Assembly, Louis Napoleon was not altogether assured that it would quietly witness his own usurpation of power. In waiting until the Chamber should again be in session, he saw the opportunity of exhibiting his cause as that of the masses themselves, and of justifying his action as the sole means of enforcing popular rights against a legislature obstinately bent on denying them. Louis Napoleon's own Ministers had overthrown universal suffrage. This might indeed be matter for comment on the part of the censorious, but it was not a circumstance to stand in the way of the execution of a great design. Accordingly Louis Napoleon determined to demand from the Assembly at the opening of the winter session the repeal of the electoral law of May 31st, and to make its refusal, on which he could confidently reckon, the occasion of its destruction.

[Louis Napoleon demands repeal of Law of May 31.]

[The Assembly refuses.]

The conspirators were up to this time conspirators and nothing more. A Ministry still subsisted which was not initiated in the President's designs nor altogether at his command. On his requiring that the repeal of the law of May 31st should be proposed to the Assembly, the Cabinet resigned. The way to the highest functions of State was thus finally opened for the agents of the coup d'état. St. Arnaud was placed at the War Office, Maupas at the Prefecture of Police. The colleagues assigned to them were too insignificant to exercise any control over their actions. At the reopening of the Assembly on the 4th of November an energetic message from the President was read. On the one hand he denounced a vast and perilous combination of all the most dangerous elements of society which threatened to overwhelm France in the following year; on the other hand he demanded, with certain undefined safeguards, the re-establishment of universal suffrage. The middle classes were scared with the prospect of a Socialist revolution; the Assembly was divided against itself, and the democracy of Paris flattered by the homage paid to the popular vote. With very little delay a measure repealing the Law of May 31st was introduced into the Assembly. It was supported by the Republicans and by many members of the other groups; but the majority of the Assembly, while anxious to devise some compromise, refused to condemn its own work in the unqualified form on which the President insisted. The Bill was thrown out by seven votes. Forthwith the rumour of an impending coup d'etat spread through Paris. The Questors, or members charged with the safeguarding of the Assembly, moved the resolutions necessary to enable them to secure sufficient military aid. Even now prompt action might perhaps have saved the Chamber. But the Republican deputies, incensed by their defeat on the question of universal suffrage, plunged headlong into the snare set for them by the President, and combined with his open or secret partisans to reject the proposition of the Questors. Changarnier had blindly vouched for the fidelity of the army; one Republican deputy, more imaginative than his colleagues, bade the Assembly confide in their invisible sentinel, the people. Thus the majority of the Chamber, with the clearest warning of danger, insisted on giving the aggressor every possible advantage. If the imbecility of opponents is the best augury of success in a bold enterprise, the President had indeed little reason to anticipate failure.

[The coup d'etat, Dec. 2.]

The execution of the coup d'etat was fixed for the early morning of December 2nd. On the previous evening Louis Napoleon held a public reception at the Elysée, his quiet self-possessed manner indicating nothing of the struggle at hand. Before the guests dispersed the President withdrew to his study. There the last council of the conspirators was held, and they parted, each to the execution of the work assigned to him. The central element in the plan was the arrest of Cavaignac, of Changarnier and three other generals who were members of the Assembly, of eleven civilian deputies including M. Thiers, and of sixty-two other politicians of influence. Maupas summoned to the Prefecture of Police in the dead of night a sufficient number of his trusted agents, received each of them on his arrival in a separate room, and charged each with the arrest of one of the victims. The arrests were accomplished before dawn, and the leading soldiers and citizens of France met one another in the prison of Mazas. The Palais Bourbon, the meeting-place of the Assembly, was occupied by troops. The national printing establishment was seized by gendarmes, and the proclamations of Louis Napoleon, distributed sentence by sentence to different compositors, were set in type before the workmen knew upon what they were engaged. When day broke the Parisians found the soldiers in the streets, and the walls placarded with manifestoes of Louis Napoleon. The first of these was a decree which announced in the name of the French people that the National Assembly and the Council of State were dissolved, that universal suffrage was restored, and that the nation was convoked in its electoral colleges from the 14th to the 21st of December. The second was a proclamation to the people, in which Louis Napoleon denounced at once the monarchical conspirators within the Assembly and the anarchists who sought to overthrow all government. His duty called upon him to save the Republic by an appeal to the nation. He proposed the establishment of a decennial executive authority, with a Senate, a Council of State, a Legislative Body, and other institutions borrowed from the Consulate of 1799. If the nation refused him a majority of its votes he would summon a new Assembly and resign his powers; if the nation believed in the cause of which his name was the symbol, in France regenerated by the Revolution and organised by the Emperor, it would prove this by ratifying his authority. A third proclamation was addressed to the army. In 1830 and in 1848 the army had been treated as the conquered, but its voice was now to be heard. Common glories and sorrows united the soldiers of France with Napoleon's heir, and the future would unite them in common devotion to the repose and greatness of their country.

[Paris on Dec. 2.]

The full meaning of these manifestoes was not at first understood by the groups who read them. The Assembly was so unpopular that the announcement of its dissolution, with the restoration of universal suffrage, pleased rather than alarmed the democratic quarters of Paris. It was not until some hours had passed that the arrests became generally known, and that the first symptoms of resistance appeared. Groups of deputies assembled at the houses of the Parliamentary leaders; a body of fifty even succeeded in entering the Palais Bourbon and in commencing a debate: they were, however, soon dispersed by soldiers. Later in the day above two hundred members assembled at the Mairie of the Tenth Arrondissement. There they passed resolutions declaring the President removed from his office, and appointing a commander of the troops at Paris. The first officers who were sent to clear the Mairie flinched in the execution of their work, and withdrew for further orders. The Magistrates of the High Court, whose duty it was to order the impeachment of the President in case of the violation of his oath to the Constitution, assembled, and commenced the necessary proceedings; but before they could sign a warrant, soldiers forced their way into the hall and drove the judges from the Bench. In due course General Forey appeared with a strong body of troops at the Mairie, where the two hundred deputies were assembled. Refusing to disperse, they were one and all arrested, and conducted as prisoners between files of troops to the Barracks of the Quai d'Orsay. The National Guard, whose drums had been removed by their commander in view of any spontaneous movement to arms, remained invisible. Louis Napoleon rode out amidst the acclamations of the soldiery; and when the day closed it seemed as if Paris had resolved to accept the change of Government and the overthrow of the Constitution without a struggle.

[December 3.]

[December 4.]

There were, however, a few resolute men at work in the workmen's quarters; and in the wealthier part of the city the outrage upon the National Representation gradually roused a spirit of resistance. On the morning of December 3rd the Deputy Baudin met with his death in attempting to defend a barricade which had been erected in the Faubourg St. Antoine. The artisans of eastern Paris showed, however, little inclination to take up arms on behalf of those who had crushed them in the Four Days of June; the agitation was strongest within the Boulevards, and spread westwards towards the stateliest district of Paris. The barricades erected on the south of the Boulevards were so numerous, the crowds so formidable, that towards the close of the day the troops were withdrawn, and it was determined that after a night of quiet they should make a general attack and end the struggle at one blow. At midday on December 4th divisions of the army converged from all directions upon the insurgent quarter. The barricades were captured or levelled by artillery, and with a loss on the part of the troops of twenty-eight killed, and a hundred and eighty wounded resistance was overcome. But the soldiers had been taught to regard the inhabitants of Paris as their enemies, and they bettered the instructions given them. Maddened by drink or panic, they commenced indiscriminate firing in the Boulevards after the conflict was over, and slaughtered all who either in the street or at the windows of the houses came within range of their bullets. According to official admissions, the lives of sixteen civilians paid for every soldier slain; independent estimates place far higher the number of the victims of this massacre. Two thousand arrests followed, and every Frenchman who appeared dangerous to Louis Napoleon's myrmidons, from Thiers and Victor Hugo down to the anarchist orators of the wineshops, was either transported, exiled, or lodged in prison. Thus was the Republic preserved and society saved.

[The Plébiscite, Dec. 20.]

[Napoleon III. Emperor, Dec. 2, 1852.]

France in general received the news of the coup d'etat with indifference: where it excited popular movements these movements were of such a character that Louis Napoleon drew from them the utmost profit. A certain fierce, blind Socialism had spread among the poorest of the rural classes in the centre and south of France. In these departments there were isolated risings, accompanied by acts of such murderous outrage and folly that a general terror seized the surrounding districts. In the course of a few days the predatory bands were dispersed, and an unsparing chastisement inflicted on all who were concerned in their misdeeds; but the reports sent to Paris were too serviceable to Louis Napoleon to be left in obscurity; and these brutish village-outbreaks, which collapsed at the first appearance of a handful of soldiers, were represented as the prelude to a vast Socialist revolution from which the coup d'etat, and that alone, had saved France. Terrified by the re-appearance of the Red Spectre, the French nation proceeded on the 20th of December to pass its judgment on the accomplished usurpation. The question submitted for the plébiscite was, whether the people desired the maintenance of Louis Napoleon's authority and committed to him the necessary powers for establishing a Constitution on the basis laid down in his proclamation of December 2nd. Seven million votes answered this question in the affirmative, less than one-tenth of that number in the negative. The result was made known on the last day of the year 1851. On the first day of the new year Louis Napoleon attended a service of thanksgiving at Notre Dame, took possession of the Tuileries, and restored the eagle as the military emblem of France. He was now in all but name an absolute sovereign. The Church, the army, the ever-servile body of the civil administration, waited impatiently for the revival of the Imperial title. Nor was the saviour of society the man to shrink from further responsibilities. Before the year closed the people was once more called upon to express its will. Seven millions of votes pronounced for hereditary power; and on the anniversary of the coup d'etat Napoleon III. was proclaimed Emperor of the French.

CHAPTER XXI.

England and France in 1851-Russia under Nicholas-The Hungarian Refugees-Dispute between France and Russia on the Holy Places-Nicholas and the British Ambassador-Lord Stratford de Redcliffe-Menschikoff's Mission-Russian Troops enter the Danubian Principalities-Lord Aberdeen's Cabinet-Movements of the Fleets-The Vienna Note-The Fleets pass the Dardanelles-Turkish Squadron destroyed at Sinope-Declaration of War-Policy of Austria-Policy of Prussia-The Western Powers and the European Concert-Siege of Silistria-The Principalities evacuated-Further objects of the Western Powers-Invasion of the Crimea-Battle of the Alma-The Flank March-Balaclava-Inkermann-Winter in the Crimea-Death of Nicholas-Conference of Vienna-Austria-Progress of the Siege-Plans of Napoleon III.-Canrobert and Pélissier-Unsuccessful Assault-Battle of the Tchernaya-Capture of the Malakoff-Fall of Sebastopol-Fall of Kars-Negotiations for Peace-The Conference of Paris-Treaty of Paris -The Danubian Principalities-Continued discord in the Ottoman Empire-Revision of the Treaty of Paris in 1871.

[England in 1851.]

The year 1851 was memorable in England as that of the Great Exhibition. Thirty-six years of peace, marked by an enormous development of manufacturing industry, by the introduction of railroads, and by the victory of the principle of Free Trade, had culminated in a spectacle so impressive and so novel that to many it seemed the emblem and harbinger of a new epoch in the history of mankind, in which war should cease, and the rivalry of nations should at length find its true scope in the advancement of the arts of peace. The apostles of Free Trade had idealised the cause for which they contended. The unhappiness and the crimes of nations had, as they held, been due principally to the action of governments, which plunged harmless millions into war for dynastic ends, and paralysed human energy by their own blind and senseless interference with the natural course of exchange. Compassion for the poor and the suffering, a just resentment against laws which in the supposed interest of a minority condemned the mass of the nation to a life of want, gave moral fervour and elevation to the teaching of Cobden and those who shared his spirit. Like others who have been constrained by a noble enthusiasm, they had their visions; and in their sense of the greatness of that new force which was ready to operate upon human life, they both forgot the incompleteness of their own doctrine, and under-estimated the influences which worked, and long must work, upon mankind in an opposite direction. In perfect sincerity the leader of English economical reform at the middle of this century looked forward to a reign of peace as the result of unfettered intercourse between the members of the European family. What the man of genius and conviction had proclaimed the charlatan repeated in his turn. Louis Napoleon appreciated the charm which schemes of commercial development exercised upon the trading classes in France. He was ready to salute the Imperial eagles as objects of worship and to invoke the memories of Napoleon's glory when addressing soldiers; when it concerned him to satisfy the commercial world, he was the very embodiment of peace and of peaceful industry. "Certain persons," he said, in an address at Bordeaux, shortly before assuming the title of Emperor, "say that the Empire is war. I say that the Empire is peace; for France desires peace, and when France is satisfied the world is tranquil. We have waste territories to cultivate, roads to open, harbours to dig, a system of railroads to complete; we have to bring all our great western ports into connection with the American continent by a rapidity of communication which we still want. We have ruins to restore, false gods to overthrow, truths to make triumphant. This is the sense that I attach to the Empire; these are the conquests which I contemplate." Never had the ideal of industrious peace been more impressively set before mankind than in the years which succeeded the convulsion of 1848. Yet the epoch on which Europe was then about to enter proved to be pre-eminently an epoch of war. In the next quarter of a century there was not one of the Great Powers which was not engaged in an armed struggle with its rivals. Nor were the wars of this period in any sense the result of accident, or disconnected with the stream of political tendencies which makes the history of the age. With one exception they left in their train great changes for which the time was ripe, changes which for more than a generation had been the recognised objects of national desire, but which persuasion and revolution had equally failed to bring into effect. The Crimean War alone was barren in positive results of a lasting nature, and may seem only to have postponed, at enormous cost of life, the fall of a doomed and outworn Power. But the time has not yet arrived when the real bearing of the overthrow of Russia in 1854 on the destiny of the Christian races of Turkey can be confidently expressed. The victory of the Sultan's protectors delayed the emancipation of these races for twenty years; the victory, or the unchecked aggression, of Russia in 1854 might possibly have closed to them for ever the ways to national independence.

[Russian policy under Nicholas.]

The plans formed by the Empress Catherine in the last century for the restoration of the Greek Empire under a prince of the Russian House had long been abandoned at St. Petersburg. The later aim of Russian policy found its clearest expression in the Treaty of Unkiar Skelessi, extorted from Sultan Mahmud in 1833 in the course of the first war against Mehemet Ali. This Treaty, if it had not been set aside by the Western Powers, would have made the Ottoman Empire a vassal State under the Czar's protection. In the concert of Europe which was called into being by the second war of Mehemet Ali against the Sultan in 1840, Nicholas had considered it his interest to act with England and the German Powers in defence of the Porte against its Egyptian rival and his French ally. A policy of moderation had been imposed upon Russia by the increased watchfulness and activity now displayed by the other European States in all that related to the Ottoman Empire. Isolated aggression had become impracticable; it was necessary for Russia to seek the countenance or support of some ally before venturing on the next step in the extension of its power southwards.

[Nicholas in England, 1844.]

In 1844 Nicholas visited England. The object of his journey was to sound the Court and Government, and to lay the foundation for concerted action between Russia and England, to the exclusion of France, when circumstances should bring about the dissolution of the Ottoman Empire, an event which the Czar believed to be not far off. Peel was then Prime Minister; Lord Aberdeen was Foreign Secretary. Aberdeen had begun his political career in a diplomatic mission to the Allied Armies in 1814. His feelings towards Russia were those of a loyal friend towards an old ally; and the remembrance of the epoch of 1814, when the young Nicholas had made acquaintance with Lord Aberdeen in France, appears to have given to the Czar a peculiar sense of confidence in the goodwill of the English Minister towards himself. Nicholas spoke freely with Aberdeen, as well as with Peel and Wellington, on the impending fall of the Ottoman Empire. "We have," he said, "a sick, a dying man on our hands. We must keep him alive so long as it is possible to do so, but we must frankly take into view all contingencies. I wish for no inch of Turkish soil myself, but neither will I permit any other Power to seize an inch of it. France, which has designs upon Africa, upon the Mediterranean, and upon the East, is the only Power to be feared. An understanding between England and Russia will preserve the peace of Europe." If the Czar pursued his speculations further into detail, of which there is no evidence, he elicited no response. He was heard with caution, and his visit appears to have produced nothing more than the formal expression of a desire on the part of the British Government that the existing treaty-rights of Russia should be respected by the Porte, together with an unmeaning promise that, if unexpected events should occur in Turkey, Russia and England should enter into counsel as to the best course of action to be pursued in common.  [455]

[Nicholas in 1848.]

[The Hungarian refugees, 1849.]

Nicholas, whether from policy or from a sense of kingly honour which at most times powerfully influenced him, did not avail himself of the prostration of the Continental Powers in 1848 to attack Turkey. He detested revolution, as a crime against the divinely ordered subjection of nations to their rulers, and would probably have felt himself degraded had he, in the spirit of his predecessor Catherine, turned the calamities of his brother-monarchs to his own separate advantage. It accorded better with his proud nature, possibly also with the schemes of a far-reaching policy, for Russia to enter the field as the protector of the Hapsburgs against the rebel Hungarians than for its armies to snatch from the Porte what the lapse of time and the goodwill of European allies would probably give to Russia at no distant date without a struggle. Disturbances at Bucharest and at Jassy led indeed to a Russian intervention in the Danubian Principalities in the interests of a despotic system of government; but Russia possessed by treaty protectorial rights over these Provinces. The military occupation which followed the revolt against the Hospodars was the subject of a convention between Turkey and Russia; it was effected by the armies of the two Powers jointly; and at the expiration of two years the Russian forces were peacefully withdrawn. More serious were the difficulties which arose from the flight of Kossuth and other Hungarian leaders into Turkey after the subjugation of Hungary by the allied Austrian and Russian armies. The Courts of Vienna and St. Petersburg united in demanding from the Porte the surrender of these refugees; the Sultan refused to deliver them up, and he was energetically supported by Great Britain, Kossuth's children on their arrival at Constantinople being received and cared for at the British Embassy. The tyrannous demand of the two Emperors, the courageous resistance of the Sultan, excited the utmost interest in Western Europe. By a strange turn of fortune, the Power which at the end of the last century had demanded from the Court of Vienna the Greek leader Rhegas, and had put him to death as soon as he was handed over by the Austrian police, was now gaining the admiration of all free nations as the last barrier that sheltered the champions of European liberty from the vengeance of despotic might. The Czar and the Emperor of Austria had not reckoned with the forces of public indignation aroused against them in the West by their attempt to wrest their enemies from the Sultan's hand. They withdrew their ambassadors from Constantinople and threatened to resort to force. But the appearance of the British and French fleets at the Dardanelles gave a new aspect to the dispute. The Emperors learnt that if they made war upon Turkey for the question at issue they would have to fight also against the Western Powers. The demand for the surrender of the refugees was withdrawn; and in undertaking to keep the principal of them under surveillance for a reasonable period, the Sultan gave to the two Imperial Courts such satisfaction as they could, without loss of dignity, accept.  [456]

[Dispute between France and Russia on the Holy Places, 1850-2.]

The coup d'état of Louis Napoleon at the end of the year 1851 was witnessed by the Czar with sympathy and admiration as a service to the cause of order; but the assumption of the Imperial title by the Prince displeased him exceedingly. While not refusing to recognise Napoleon III., he declined to address him by the term (mon frère) usually employed by monarchs in writing to one another. In addition to the question relating to the Hungarian refugees, a dispute concerning the Holy Places in Palestine threatened to cause strife between France and Russia. The same wave of religious and theological interest which in England produced the Tractarian movement brought into the arena of political life in France an enthusiasm for the Church long strange to the Legislature and the governing circles of Paris. In the Assembly of 1849 Montalembert, the spokesman of this militant Catholicism, was one of the foremost figures. Louis Napoleon, as President, sought the favour of those whom Montalembert led; and the same Government which restored the Pope to Rome demanded from the Porte a stricter enforcement of the rights of the Latin Church in the East. The earliest Christian legends had been localised in various spots around Jerusalem. These had been in the ages of faith the goal of countless pilgrimages, and in more recent centuries they had formed the object of treaties between the Porte and France. Greek monks, however, disputed with Latin monks for the guardianship of the Holy Places; and as the power of Russia grew, the privileges of the Greek monks had increased. The claims of the rival brotherhoods, which related to doors, keys, stars and lamps, might probably have been settled to the satisfaction of all parties within a few hours by an experienced stage-manager; in the hands of diplomatists bent on obtaining triumphs over one another they assumed dimensions that overshadowed the peace of Europe. The French and the Russian Ministers at Constantinople alternately tormented the Sultan in the character of aggrieved sacristans, until, at the beginning of 1852, the Porte compromised itself with both parties by adjudging to each rights which it professed also to secure to the other. A year more, spent in prevarications, in excuses, and in menaces, ended with the triumph of the French, with the evasion of the promises made by the Sultan to Russia, and with the discomfiture of the Greek Church in the person of the monks who officiated at the Holy Sepulchre and the Shrine of the Nativity.  [457]

[Nicholas and Sir H. Seymour, Jan., Feb., 1853.]

Nicholas treated the conduct of the Porte as an outrage upon himself. A conflict which had broken out between the Sultan and the Montenegrins, and which now threatened to take a deadly form, confirmed the Czar in his belief that the time for resolute action had arrived. At the beginning of the year 1853 he addressed himself to Hamilton Seymour, British ambassador at St. Petersburg, in terms much stronger and clearer than those which he had used towards Lord Aberdeen nine years before. "The Sick Man," he said, "was in extremities; the time had come for a clear understanding between England and Russia. The occupation of Constantinople by Russian troops might be necessary, but the Czar would not hold it permanently. He would not permit any other Power to establish itself at the Bosphorus, neither would he permit the Ottoman Empire to be broken up into Republics to afford a refuge to the Mazzinis and the Kossuths of Europe. The Danubian Principalities were already independent States under Russian protection. The other possessions of the Sultan north of the Balkans might be placed on the same footing. England might annex Egypt and Crete." After making this communication to the British ambassador, and receiving the reply that England declined to enter into any schemes based on the fall of the Turkish Empire and disclaimed all desire for the annexation of any part of the Sultan's dominions, Nicholas despatched Prince Menschikoff to Constantinople, to demand from the Porte not only an immediate settlement of the questions relating to the Holy Places, but a Treaty guaranteeing to the Greek Church the undisturbed enjoyment of all its ancient rights and the benefit of all privileges that might be accorded by the Porte to any other Christian communities.  [458]

[The Claims of Russia.]

The Treaty which Menschikoff was instructed to demand would have placed the Sultan and the Czar in the position of contracting parties with regard to the entire body of rights and privileges enjoyed by the Sultan's subjects of the Greek confession, and would so have made the violation of these rights in the case of any individual Christian a matter entitling Russia to interfere, or to claim satisfaction as for the breach of a Treaty engagement. By the Treaty of Kainardjie (1774) the Sultan had indeed bound himself "to protect the Christian religion and its Churches"; but this phrase was too indistinct to create specific matter of Treaty-obligation; and if it had given to Russia any general right of interference on behalf of members of the Greek Church, it would have given it the same right in behalf of all the Roman Catholics and all the Protestants in the Sultan's dominions, a right which the Czars had never professed to enjoy. Moreover, the Treaty of Kainardjie itself forbade by implication any such construction, for it mentioned by name one ecclesiastical building for whose priests the Porte did concede to Russia the right of addressing representations to the Sultan. Over the Danubian Principalities Russia possessed by the Treaty of Adrianople undoubted protectorial rights; but these Provinces stood on a footing quite different from that of the remainder of the Empire. That the Greek Church possessed by custom and by enactment privileges which it was the duty of the Sultan to respect, no one contested: the novelty of Menschikoff's claim was that the observation of these rights should be made matter of Treaty with Russia. The importance of the demand was proved by the fact that Menschikoff strictly forbade the Turkish Ministers to reveal it to the other Powers, and that Nicholas caused the English Government to be informed that the mission of his envoy had no other object than the final adjustment of the difficulties respecting the Holy Places.  [459]

[Lord Stratford de Redcliffe.]

[Menschikoff leaves Constantinople, May 21.]

[Russian troops enter the Principalities.]

When Menschikoff reached Constantinople the British Embassy was in the hands of a subordinate officer. The Ambassador, Sir Stratford Canning, had recently returned to England. Stratford Canning, a cousin of the Premier, had been employed in the East at intervals since 1810. There had been a period in his career when he had desired to see the Turk expelled from Europe as an incurable barbarian; but the reforms of Sultan Mahmud had at a later time excited his warm interest and sympathy, and as Ambassador at Constantinople from 1842 to 1852 he had laboured strenuously for the regeneration of the Turkish Empire, and for the improvement of the condition of the Christian races under the Sultan's rule. His dauntless, sustained energy, his noble presence, the sincerity of his friendship towards the Porte, gave him an influence at Constantinople seldom, if ever, exercised by a foreign statesman. There were moments when he seemed to be achieving results of some value; but the task which he had attempted was one that surpassed human power; and after ten years so spent as to win for him the fame of the greatest ambassador by whom England has been represented in modern times, he declared that the prospects of Turkish reform were hopeless, and left Constantinople, not intending to return.  [460] Before his successor had been appointed, the mission of Prince Menschikoff, the violence of his behaviour at Constantinople, and a rumour that he sought far more than his ostensible object, alarmed the British Government. Canning was asked to resume his post. Returning to Constantinople as Lord Stratford de Redcliffe, he communicated on his journey with the Courts of Paris and Vienna, and carried with him authority to order the Admiral of the fleet at Malta to hold his ships in readiness to sail for the East. He arrived at the Bosphorus on April 5th, learnt at once the real situation of affairs, and entered into negotiation with Menschikoff. The Russian, a mere child in diplomacy in comparison with his rival, suffered himself to be persuaded to separate the question of the Holy Places from that of the guarantee of the rights of the Greek Church. In the first matter Russia had a good cause; in the second it was advancing a new claim. The two being dissociated, Stratford had no difficulty in negotiating a compromise on the Holy Places satisfactory to the Czar's representative; and the demand for the Protectorate over the Greek Christians now stood out unobscured by those grievances of detail with which it had been at first interwoven. Stratford encouraged the Turkish Government to reject the Russian proposal. Knowing, nevertheless, that Menschikoff would in the last resort endeavour to intimidate the Sultan personally, he withheld from the Ministers, in view of this last peril, the strongest of all his arguments; and seeking a private audience with the Sultan on the 9th of May, he made known to him with great solemnity the authority which he had received to order the fleet at Malta to be in readiness to sail. The Sultan placed the natural interpretation on this statement, and ordered final rejection of Menschikoff's demand, though the Russian had consented to a modification of its form, and would now have accepted a note declaratory of the intentions of the Sultan towards the Greek Church instead of a regular Treaty. On the 21st of May Menschikoff quitted Constantinople; and the Czar, declaring that some guarantee must be held by Russia for the maintenance of the rights of the Greek Christians, announced that he should order his army to occupy the Danubian Provinces. After an interval of some weeks the Russian troops crossed the Pruth, and spread themselves over Moldavia and Wallachia. (June 22nd.)  [461]

[English Policy.]

In the ordinary course of affairs the invasion of the territory of one Empire by the troops of another is, and can be nothing else than, an act of war, necessitating hostilities as a measure of defence on the part of the Power invaded. But the Czar protested that in taking the Danubian Principalities in pledge he had no intention of violating the peace; and as yet the common sense of the Turks, as well as the counsels that they received from without, bade them hesitate before issuing a declaration of war. Since December, 1852, Lord Aberdeen had been Prime Minister of England, at the head of a Cabinet formed by a coalition between followers of Sir Robert Peel and the Whig leaders Palmerston and Russell.  [462] There was no man in England more pacific in disposition, or more anxious to remain on terms of honourable friendship with Russia, than Lord Aberdeen. The Czar had justly reckoned on the Premier's own forbearance; but he had failed to recognise the strength of those forces which, both within and without the Cabinet, set in the direction of armed resistance to Russia. Palmerston was keen for action. Lord Stratford appears to have taken it for granted from the first that, if a war should arise between the Sultan and the Czar in consequence of the rejection of Menschikoff's demand, Great Britain would fight in defence of the Ottoman Empire. He had not stated this in express terms, but the communication which he made to the Sultan regarding his own instructions could only have been intended to convey this impression. If the fleet was not to defend the Sultan, it was a mere piece of deceit to inform him that the Ambassador had powers to place it in readiness to sail; and such deceit was as alien to the character of Lord Stratford as the assumption of a virtual engagement towards the Sultan was in keeping with his imperious will and his passionate conviction of the duty of England. From the date of Lord Stratford's visit to the Palace, although no Treaty or agreement was in existence, England stood bound in honour, so long as the Turks should pursue the policy laid down by her envoy, to fulfil the expectations which this envoy had held out.

[British and French fleets moved to Besika Bay, July, 1853.]

[The Vienna Note, July 28.]

[Constantinople in September.]

[British and French fleets pass the Dardanelles, Oct. 22.]

Had Lord Stratford been at the head of the Government, the policy and intentions of Great Britain would no doubt have been announced with such distinctness that the Czar could have fostered no misapprehension as to the results of his own acts. Palmerston, as Premier, would probably have adopted the same clear course, and war would either have been avoided by this nation or have been made with a distinct purpose and on a definite issue. But the Cabinet of Lord Aberdeen was at variance with itself. Aberdeen was ready to go to all lengths in negotiation, but he was not sufficiently master of his colleagues and of the representatives of England abroad to prevent acts and declarations which in themselves brought war near; above all, he failed to require from Turkey that abstention from hostilities on which, so long as negotiations lasted, England and the other Powers which proposed to make the cause of the Porte their own ought unquestionably to have insisted. On the announcement by the Czar that his army was about to enter the Principalities, the British Government despatched the fleet to Besika Bay near the entrance to the Dardanelles, and authorised Stratford to call it to the Bosphorus, in case Constantinople should be attacked.  [463] The French fleet, which had come into Greek waters on Menschikoff's appearance at Constantinople, took up the same position. Meanwhile European diplomacy was busily engaged in framing schemes of compromise between the Porte and Russia. The representatives of the four Powers met at Vienna, and agreed upon a note which, as they considered, would satisfy any legitimate claims of Russia on behalf of the Greek Church, and at the same time impose upon the Sultan no further obligations towards Russia than those which already existed.  [464] This note, however, was ill drawn, and would have opened the door to new claims on the part of Russia to a general Protectorate not sanctioned by its authors. The draft was sent to St. Petersburg, and was accepted by the Czar. At Constantinople its ambiguities were at once recognised; and though Lord Stratford in his official capacity urged its acceptance under a European guarantee against misconstruction, the Divan, now under the pressure of strong patriotic forces, refused to accept the note unless certain changes were made in its expressions. France, England, and Austria united in recommending to the Court of St. Petersburg the adoption of these amendments. The Czar, however, declined to admit them, and a Russian document, which obtained a publicity for which it was not intended, proved that the construction of the note which the amendments were expressly designed to exclude was precisely that which Russia meant to place upon it. The British Ministry now refused to recommend the note any longer to the Porte.  [465] Austria, while it approved of the amendments, did not consider that their rejection by the Czar justified England in abandoning the note as the common award of the European Powers; and thus the concert of Europe was interrupted, England and France combining in a policy which Austria and Prussia were not willing to follow. In proportion as the chances of joint European action diminished, the ardour of the Turks themselves, and of those who were to be their allies, rose higher. Tumults, organised by the heads of the war-party, broke out at Constantinople; and although Stratford scorned the alarms of his French colleagues, who reported that a massacre of the Europeans in the capital was imminent, he thought it necessary to call up two vessels of war in order to provide for the security of the English residents and of the Sultan himself. In England Palmerston and the men of action in the Cabinet dragged Lord Aberdeen with them. The French Government pressed for vigorous measures, and in conformity with its desire instructions were sent from London to Lord Stratford to call the fleet to the Bosphorus, and to employ it in defending the territory of the Sultan against aggression. On the 22nd of October the British and French fleets passed the Dardanelles.

[The ultimatum of Omar Pasha rejected, Oct. 10.]

[Turkish squadron destroyed at Sinope, Nov. 30.]

The Turk, sure of the protection of the Western Powers, had for some weeks resolved upon war; and yet the possibilities of a diplomatic settlement were not yet exhausted. Stratford himself had forwarded to Vienna the draft of an independent note which the Sultan was prepared to accept. This had not yet been seen at St. Petersburg. Other projects of conciliation filled the desks of all the leading politicians of Europe. Yet, though the belief generally existed that some scheme could be framed by which the Sultan, without sacrifice of his dignity and interest, might induce the Czar to evacuate the Principalities, no serious attempt was made to prevent the Turks from coming into collision with their enemies both by land and sea. The commander of the Russian troops in the Principalities having, on the 10th of October, rejected an ultimatum requiring him to withdraw within fifteen days, this answer was taken as the signal for the commencement of hostilities. The Czar met the declaration of war with a statement that he would abstain from taking the offensive, and would continue merely to hold the Principalities as a material guarantee. Omar Pasha, the Ottoman commander in Bulgaria, was not permitted to observe the same passive attitude. Crossing the Danube, he attacked and defeated the Russians at Oltenitza. Thus assailed, the Czar considered that his engagement not to act on the offensive was at an end, and the Russian fleet, issuing from Sebastopol, attacked and destroyed a Turkish squadron in the harbour of Sinope on the southern coast of the Black Sea (November 30). The action was a piece of gross folly on the part of the Russian authorities if they still cherished the hopes of pacification which the Czar professed; but others also were at fault. Lord Stratford and the British Admiral, if they could not prevent the Turkish ships from remaining in the Euxine, where they were useless against the superior force of Russia, might at least in exercise of the powers given to them have sent a sufficient escort to prevent an encounter. But the same ill-fortune and incompleteness that had marked all the diplomacy of the previous months attended the counsels of the Admirals at the Bosphorus; and the disaster of Sinope rendered war between the Western Powers and Russia almost inevitable.[466]

[Effect of the action at Sinope.]

[Russian ships required to enter port, December.]

[England and France declare war, March 27, 1854.]

The Turks themselves had certainly not understood the declaration of the Emperor Nicholas as assuring their squadron at Sinope against attack; and so far was the Ottoman Admiral from being the victim of a surprise that he had warned his Government some days before of the probability of his own destruction. But to the English people, indignant with Russia since its destruction of Hungarian liberty and its tyrannous demand for the surrender of the Hungarian refugees, all that now passed heaped up the intolerable sum of autocratic violence and deceit. The cannonade which was continued against the Turkish crews at Sinope long after they had become defenceless gave to the battle the aspect of a massacre; the supposed promise of the Czar to act only on the defensive caused it to be denounced as an act of flagrant treachery; the circumstance that the Turkish fleet was lying within one of the Sultan's harbours, touching as it were the territory which the navy of England had undertaken to protect, imparted to the attack the character of a direct challenge and defiance to England. The cry rose loud for war. Napoleon, eager for the alliance with England, eager in conjunction with England to play a great part before Europe, even at the cost of a war from which France had nothing to gain, proposed that the combined fleets should pass the Bosphorus and require every Russian vessel sailing on the Black Sea to re-enter port. His proposal was adopted by the British Government. Nicholas learnt that the Russian flag was swept from the Euxine. It was in vain that a note upon which the representatives of the Powers at Vienna had once more agreed was accepted by the Porte and forwarded to St. Petersburg (December 31). The pride of the Czar was wounded beyond endurance, and at the beginning of February he recalled his ambassadors from London and Paris. A letter written to him by Napoleon III., demanding in the name of himself and the Queen of England the evacuation of the Principalities, was answered by a reference to the campaign of Moscow, Austria now informed the Western Powers that if they would fix a delay for the evacuation of the Principalities, the expiration of which should be the signal for hostilities, it would support the summons; and without waiting to learn whether Austria would also unite with them in hostilities in the event of the summons being rejected, the British and French Governments despatched their ultimatum to St. Petersburg. Austria and Prussia sought, but in vain, to reconcile the Court of St. Petersburg to the only measure by which peace could now be preserved. The ultimatum remained without an answer, and on the 27th of March England and France declared war.

[Policy of Austria.]

The Czar had at one time believed that in his Eastern schemes he was sure of the support of Austria; and he had strong reasons for supposing himself entitled to its aid. But his mode of thought was simpler than that of the Court of Vienna. Schwarzenberg, when it was remarked that the intervention of Russia in Hungary would bind the House of Hapsburg too closely to its protector, had made the memorable answer, "We will astonish the world by our ingratitude." It is possible that an instance of Austrian gratitude would have astonished the world most of all; but Schwarzenberg's successors were not the men to sacrifice a sound principle to romance. Two courses of Eastern policy have, under various modifications, had their advocates in rival schools of statesmen at Vienna. The one is that of expansion southward in concert with Russia; the other is that of resistance to the extension of Russian power, and the consequent maintenance of the integrity of the Ottoman Empire. During Metternich's long rule, inspired as this was by a faith in the Treaties and the institutions of 1815, and by the dread of every living, disturbing force, the second of these systems had been consistently followed. In 1854 the determining motive of the Court of Vienna was not a decided political conviction, but the certainty that if it united with Russia it would be brought into war with the Western Powers. Had Russia and Turkey been likely to remain alone in the arena, an arrangement for territorial compensation would possibly, as on some other occasions, have won for the Czar an Austrian alliance. Combination against Turkey was, however, at the present time, too perilous an enterprise for the Austrian monarchy; and, as nothing was to be gained through the war, it remained for the Viennese diplomatists to see that nothing was lost and as little as possible wasted. The presence of Russian troops in the Principalities, where they controlled the Danube in its course between the Hungarian frontier and the Black Sea, was, in default of some definite understanding, a danger to Austria; and Count Buol, the Minister at Vienna, had therefore every reason to thank the Western Powers for insisting on the evacuation of this district. When France and England were burning to take up arms, it would have been a piece of superfluous brutality towards the Czar for Austria to attach to its own demand for the evacuation of the Principalities the threat of war. But this evacuation Austria was determined to enforce. It refused, as did Prussia, to give to the Czar the assurance of its neutrality; and, inasmuch as the free navigation of the Danube as far as the Black Sea had now become recognised as one of the commercial interests of Germany at large, Prussia and the German Federation undertook to protect the territory of Austria, if, in taking the measures necessary to free the Principalities, it should itself be attacked by Russia.  [467]

[Prussia.]

The King of Prussia, clouded as his mind was by political and religious phantasms, had nevertheless at times a larger range of view than his neighbours; and his opinion as to the true solution of the difficulties between Nicholas and the Porte, at the time of Menschikoff's mission, deserved more attention than it received. Frederick William proposed that the rights of the Christian subjects of the Sultan should be placed by Treaty under the guarantee of all the Great Powers. This project was opposed by Lord Stratford and the Turkish Ministers as an encroachment on the Sultan's sovereignty, and its rejection led the King to write with some asperity to his ambassador in London that he should seek the welfare of Prussia in absolute neutrality.  [468] At a later period the King demanded from England, as the condition of any assistance from himself, a guarantee for the maintenance of the frontiers of Germany and Prussia. He regarded Napoleon III. as the representative of a revolutionary system, and believed that under him French armies would soon endeavour to overthrow the order of Europe established in 1815. That England should enter into a close alliance with this man excited the King's astonishment and disgust; and unless the Cabinet of London were prepared to give a guarantee against any future attack on Germany by the French Emperor, who was believed to be ready for every political adventure, it was vain for England to seek Prussia's aid. Lord Aberdeen could give no such guarantee; still less could he gratify the King's strangely passionate demand for the restoration of his authority in the Swiss canton of Neuchâtel, which before 1848 had belonged in name to the Hohenzollerns. Many influences were brought to bear upon the King from the side both of England and of Russia. The English Court and Ministers, strenuously supported by Bunsen, the Prussian ambassador, strove to enlist the King in an active concert of Europe against Russia by dwelling on the duties of Prussia as a Great Power and the dangers arising to it from isolation. On the other hand, the admiration felt by Frederick William for the Emperor Nicholas, and the old habitual friendship between Prussia and Russia, gave strength to the Czar's advocates at Berlin. Schemes for a reconstruction of Europe, which were devised by Napoleon, and supposed to receive some countenance from Palmerston, reached the King's ear.  [469] He heard that Austria was to be offered the Danubian Provinces upon condition of giving up northern Italy; that Piedmont was to receive Lombardy, and in return to surrender Savoy to France; that, if Austria should decline to unite actively with the Western Powers, revolutionary movements were to be stirred up in Italy and in Hungary. Such reports kindled the King's rage. "Be under no illusion," he wrote to his ambassador; "tell the British Ministers in their private ear and on the housetops that I will not suffer Austria to be attacked by the revolution without drawing the sword in its defence. If England and France let loose revolution as their ally, be it where it may, I unite with Russia for life and death." Bunsen advocated the participation of Prussia in the European concert with more earnestness than success. While the King was declaiming against the lawlessness which was supposed to have spread from the Tuileries to Downing Street, Bunsen, on his own authority, sent to Berlin a project for the annexation of Russian territory by Prussia as a reward for its alliance with the Western Courts. This document fell into the hands of the Russian party at Berlin, and it roused the King's own indignation. Bitter reproaches were launched against the authors of so felonious a scheme. Bunsen could no longer retain his office. Other advocates of the Western alliance were dismissed from their places, and the policy of neutrality carried the day at Berlin.

[Relation of the Western Powers to the European Concert.]

The situation of the European Powers in April, 1854, was thus a very strange one. All the Four Powers were agreed in demanding the evacuation of the Principalities by Russia, and in the resolution to enforce this, if necessary, by arms. Protocols witnessing this agreement were signed on the 9th of April and the 23rd of May,  [470] and it was moreover declared that the Four Powers recognised the necessity of maintaining the independence and the integrity of the Ottoman Empire. But France and England, while they made the presence of the Russians in the Principalities the avowed cause of war, had in reality other intentions than the mere expulsion of the intruder and the restoration of the state of things previously existing. It was their desire so to cripple Russia that it should not again be in a condition to menace the Ottoman Empire. This intention made it impossible for the British Cabinet to name, as the basis of a European league, that single definite object for which, and for which alone, all the Powers were in May, 1854, ready to unite in arms. England, the nation and the Government alike, chose rather to devote itself, in company with France, to the task of indefinitely weakening Russia than, in company with all Europe, to force Russia to one humiliating but inevitable act of submission. Whether in the prosecution of their ulterior objects the Western Courts might or might not receive some armed assistance from Austria and Prussia no man could yet predict with confidence. That Austria would to some extent make common cause with the Allies seemed not unlikely; that Prussia would do so there was no real ground to believe; on the contrary, fair warning had been given that there were contingencies in which Prussia might ultimately be found on the side of the Czar. Striving to the utmost to discover some principle, some object, or even some formula which might expand the purely defensive basis accepted by Austria and Prussia into a common policy of reconstructive action, the Western Powers could obtain nothing more definite from the Conference at Vienna than the following shadowy engagement:-"The Four Governments engage to endeavour in common to discover the guarantees most likely to attach the existence of the Ottoman Empire to the general equilibrium of Europe. They are ready to deliberate as to the employment of means calculated to accomplish the object of their agreement." This readiness to deliberate, so cautiously professed, was a quality in which during the two succeeding years the Courts of Vienna and Berlin were not found wanting; but the war in which England and France now engaged was one which they had undertaken at their own risk, and they discovered little anxiety on any side to share their labour.

[Siege of Silistria, May.]

[The Principalities evacuated, June.]

During the winter of 1853 and the first weeks of the following year hostilities of an indecisive character continued between the Turks and the Russians on the Danube. At the outbreak of the war Nicholas had consulted the veteran Paskiewitsch as to the best road by which to march on Constantinople. Paskiewitsch, as a strategist, knew the danger to which a Russian force crossing the Danube would be exposed from the presence of Austrian armies on its flank; as commander in the invasion of Hungary in 1849 he had encountered, as he believed, ill faith and base dealing on the part of his ally, and had repaid it with insult and scorn; he had learnt better than any other man the military and the moral weakness of the Austrian Empire in its eastern part. His answer to the Czar's inquiries was, "The road to Constantinople lies through Vienna." But whatever bitterness the Czar might have felt at the ingratitude of Francis Joseph, he was not ready for a war with Austria, in which he could hardly have avoided the assistance of revolutionary allies; moreover, if the road to Constantinople lay through Vienna, it might be urged that the road to Vienna lay through Berlin. The simpler plan was adopted of a march on the Balkans by way of Shumla, to which the capture of Silistria was to be the prelude. At the end of March the Russian vanguard passed the Danube at the lowest point where a crossing could be made, and advanced into the Dobrudscha. In May the siege of Silistria was undertaken by Paskiewitsch himself. But the enterprise began too late, and the strength employed both in the siege and in the field operations farther east was insufficient. The Turkish garrison, schooled by a German engineer and animated by two young English officers, maintained a stubborn and effective resistance. French and English troops had already landed at Gallipoli for the defence of Constantinople, and finding no enemy within range had taken ship for Varna on the north of the Balkans. Austria, on the 3rd of June, delivered its summons requiring the evacuation of the Principalities. Almost at the same time Paskiewitsch received a wound that disabled him, and was forced to surrender his command into other hands. During the succeeding fortnight the besiegers of Silistria were repeatedly driven back, and on the 22nd they were compelled to raise the siege. The Russians, now hard pressed by an enemy whom they had despised, withdrew to the north of the Danube. The retreating movement was continued during the succeeding weeks, until the evacuation of the Principalities was complete, and the last Russian soldier had recrossed the Pruth. As the invader retired, Austria sent its troops into these provinces, pledging itself by a convention with the Porte to protect them until peace should be concluded, and then to restore them to the Sultan.

[Further objects of the Western Powers.]

With the liberation of the Principalities the avowed ground of war passed away; but the Western Powers had no intention of making peace without further concessions on the part of Russia. As soon as the siege of Silistria was raised instructions were sent to the commanders of the allied armies at Varna, pressing, if not absolutely commanding, them to attack Sebastopol, the headquarters of Russian maritime power in the Euxine. The capture of Sebastopol had been indicated some months before by Napoleon III. as the most effective blow that could be dealt to Russia. It was from Sebastopol that the fleet had issued which destroyed the Turks at Sinope: until this arsenal had fallen, the growing naval might which pressed even more directly upon Constantinople than the neighbourhood of the Czar's armies by land could not be permanently laid low. The objects sought by England and France were now gradually brought into sufficient clearness to be communicated to the other Powers, though the more precise interpretation of the conditions laid down remained open for future discussion. It was announced that the Protectorate of Russia over the Danubian Principalities and Servia must be abolished; that the navigation of the Danube at its mouths must be freed from all obstacles; that the Treaty of July, 1841, relating to the Black Sea and the Dardanelles, must be revised in the interest of the balance of power in Europe; and that the claim to any official Protectorate over Christian subjects of the Porte, of whatever rite, must be abandoned by the Czar. Though these conditions, known as the Four Points, were not approved by Prussia, they were accepted by Austria in August, 1854, and were laid before Russia as the basis of any negotiation for peace. The Czar declared in answer that Russia would only negotiate on such a basis when at the last extremity. The Allied Governments, measuring their enemy's weakness by his failure before Silistria, were determined to accept nothing less; and the attack upon Sebastopol, ordered before the evacuation of the Principalities, was consequently allowed to take its course.  [471]

[Sebastopol.]

[The Allies land in the Crimea, Sept. 14.]

[Battle of the Alma, Sept. 20.]

The Roadstead, or Great Harbour, of Sebastopol runs due eastwards inland from a point not far from the south-western extremity of the Crimea. One mile from the open sea its waters divide, the larger arm still running eastwards till it meets the River Tchernaya, the smaller arm, known as the Man-of-War Harbour, bending sharply to the south. On both sides of this smaller harbour Sebastopol is built. To the seaward, that is from the smaller harbour westwards, Sebastopol and its approaches were thoroughly fortified. On its landward, southern, side the town had been open till 1853, and it was still but imperfectly protected, most weakly on the south-eastern side. On the north of the Great Harbour Fort Constantine at the head of a line of strong defences guarded the entrance from the sea; while on the high ground immediately opposite Sebastopol and commanding the town there stood the Star Fort with other military constructions. The general features of Sebastopol were known to the Allied commanders; they had, however, no precise information as to the force by which it was held, nor as to the armament of its fortifications. It was determined that the landing should be made in the Bay of Eupatoria, thirty miles north of the fortress. Here, on the 14th of September, the Allied forces, numbering about thirty thousand French, twenty-seven thousand English, and seven thousand Turks, effected their disembarkation without meeting any resistance. The Russians, commanded by Prince Menschikoff, lately envoy at Constantinople, had taken post ten miles further south on high ground behind the River Alma. On the 20th of September they were attacked in front by the English, while the French attempted a turning movement from the sea. The battle was a scene of confusion, and for a moment the assault of the English seemed to be rolled back. But it was renewed with ever increasing vigour, and before the French had made any impression on the Russian left Lord Raglan's troops had driven the enemy from their positions. Struck on the flank when their front was already broken, outnumbered and badly led, the Russians gave up all for lost. The form of an orderly retreat was maintained only long enough to disguise from the conquerors the completeness of their victory. When night fell the Russian army abandoned itself to total disorder, and had the pursuit been made at once it could scarcely have escaped destruction. But St. Arnaud, who was in the last stage of mortal illness, refused, in spite of the appeal of Lord Raglan, to press on his wearied troops. Menschikoff, abandoning the hope of checking the advance of the Allies in a second battle, and anxious only to prevent the capture of Sebastopol by an enemy supposed to be following at his heels, retired into the fortress, and there sank seven of his war-ships as a barrier across the mouth of the Great Harbour, mooring the rest within. The crews were brought on shore to serve in the defence by land; the guns were dragged from the ships to the bastions and redoubts. Then, when it appeared that the Allies lingered, the Russian commander altered his plan. Leaving Korniloff, the Vice-Admiral, and Todleben, an officer of engineers, to man the existing works and to throw up new ones where the town was undefended, Menschikoff determined to lead off the bulk of his army into the interior of the Crimea, in order to keep open his communications with Russia, to await in freedom the arrival of reinforcements, and, if Sebastopol should not at once fall, to attack the Allies at his own time and opportunity. (September 24th.)

[Flank march to south of Sebastopol.]

[Ineffectual Bombardment, Sept. 17-25.]

The English had lost in the battle of the Alma about two thousand men, the French probably less than half that number. On the morning after the engagement Lord Raglan proposed that the two armies should march straight against the fortifications lying on the north of the Great Harbour, and carry these by storm, so winning a position where their guns would command Sebastopol itself. The French, supported by Burgoyne, the chief of the English engineers, shrank from the risk of a front attack on works supposed to be more formidable than they really were, and induced Lord Raglan to consent to a long circuitous march which would bring the armies right round Sebastopol to its more open southern side, from which, it was thought, an assault might be successfully made. This flank-march, which was one of extreme risk, was carried out safely, Menschikoff himself having left Sebastopol, and having passed along the same road in his retreat into the interior a little before the appearance of the Allies. Pushing southward, the English reached the sea at Balaclava, and took possession of the harbour there, accepting the exposed eastward line between the fortress and the Russia is outside; the French, now commanded by Canrobert, continued their march westwards round the back of Sebastopol, and touched the sea at Kasatch Bay. The two armies were thus masters of the broken plateau which, rising westwards from the plain of Balaclava and the valley of the Tchernaya, overlooks Sebastopol on its southern side. That the garrison, which now consisted chiefly of sailors, could at this moment have resisted the onslaught of the fifty thousand troops who had won the battle of the Alma, the Russians themselves did not believe;  [472] but once more the French staff, with Burgoyne, urged caution, and it was determined to wait for the siege-guns, which were still at sea. The decision was a fatal one. While the Allies chose positions for their heavy artillery and slowly landed and placed their guns, Korniloff and Todleben made the fortifications on the southern side of Sebastopol an effective barrier before an enemy. The sacrifice of the Russian fleet had not been in vain. The sailors were learning all the duties of a garrison: the cannon from the ships proved far more valuable on land. Three weeks of priceless time were given to leaders who knew how to turn every moment to account. When, on the 17th of October, the bombardment which was to precede the assault on Sebastopol began, the French artillery, operating on the south-west, was overpowered by that of the defenders. The fleets in vain thundered against the solid sea-front of the fortress. At the end of eight days' cannonade, during which the besiegers' batteries poured such a storm of shot and shell upon Sebastopol as no fortress had yet withstood, the defences were still unbroken.

[Battle of Balaclava, Oct. 25.]

Menschikoff in the meantime had received the reinforcements which he expected, and was now ready to fall upon the besiegers from the east. His point of attack was the English port of Balaclava and the fortified road lying somewhat east of this, which formed the outer line held by the English and their Turkish supports. The plain of Balaclava is divided by a low ridge into a northern and a southern valley. Along this ridge runs the causeway, which had been protected by redoubts committed to a weak Turkish guard. On the morning of the 25th the Russians appeared in the northern valley. They occupied the heights rising from it on the north and east, attacked the causeway, captured three of the redoubts, and drove off the Turks, left to meet their onset alone. Lord Raglan, who watched these operations from the edge of the western plateau, ordered up infantry from a distance, but the only English troops on the spot were a light and a heavy brigade of cavalry, each numbering about six hundred men. The Heavy Brigade, under General Scarlett, was directed to move towards Balaclava itself, which was now threatened. While they were on the march, a dense column of Russian cavalry, about three thousand strong, appeared above the crest of the low ridge, ready, as it seemed, to overwhelm the weak troops before them. But in their descent from the ridge the Russians halted, and Scarlett with admirable courage and judgment formed his men for attack, and charged full into the enemy with the handful who were nearest to him. They cut their way into the very heart of the column; and before the Russians could crush them with mere weight the other regiments of the same brigade hurled themselves on the right and on the left against the huge inert mass. The Russians broke and retreated in disorder before a quarter of their number, leaving to Scarlett and his men the glory of an action which ranks with the Prussian attack at Mars-la-Tour in 1870 as the most brilliant cavalry operation in modern warfare. The squadrons of the Light Brigade, during the peril and the victory of their comrades, stood motionless, paralysed by the same defect of temper or intelligence in command which was soon to devote them to a fruitless but ever-memorable act of self-sacrifice. Russian infantry were carrying off the cannon from the conquered redoubts on the causeway, when an aide-de-camp from the general-in-chief brought to the Earl of Lucan, commander of the cavalry, an order to advance rapidly to the front, and save these guns. Lucan, who from his position could see neither the enemy nor the guns, believed himself ordered to attack the Russian artillery at the extremity of the northern valley, and he directed the Light Brigade to charge in this direction. It was in vain that the leader of the Light Brigade, Lord Cardigan, warned his chief, in words which were indeed but too weak, that there was a battery in front, a battery on each flank, and that the ground was covered with Russian riflemen. The order was repeated as that of the head of the army, and it was obeyed. Thus

"Into the valley of Death
Rode the Six Hundred."

How they died there, the remnant not turning till they had hewn their way past the guns and routed the enemy's cavalry behind them, the English people will never forget.[473]

[Battle of Inkermann, Nov. 5.]

The day of Balaclava brought to each side something of victory and something of failure. The Russians remained masters of the road that they had captured, and carried off seven English guns; the English, where they had met the enemy, proved that they could defeat overwhelming numbers. Not many days passed before our infantry were put to the test which the cavalry had so victoriously undergone. The siege-approaches of the French had been rapidly advanced, and it was determined that on the 5th of November the long-deferred assault on Sebastopol should be made. On that very morning, under cover of a thick mist, the English right was assailed by massive columns of the enemy. Menschikoff's army had now risen to a hundred thousand men; he had thrown troops into Sebastopol, and had planned the capture of the English positions by a combined attack from Sebastopol itself, and by troops advancing from the lower valley of the Tchernaya across the bridge of Inkermann. The battle of the 5th of November, on the part of the English, was a soldier's battle, without generalship, without order, without design. The men, standing to their ground whatever their own number and whatever that of the foe, fought, after their ammunition was exhausted, with bayonets, with the butt ends of their muskets, with their fists and with stones. For hours the ever-surging Russian mass rolled in upon them; but they maintained the unequal struggle until the arrival of French regiments saved them from their deadly peril and the enemy were driven in confusion from the field. The Russian columns, marching right up to the guns, had been torn in pieces by artillery-fire. Their loss in killed and wounded was enormous, their defeat one which no ingenuity could disguise. Yet the battle of Inkermann had made the capture of Sebastopol, as it had been planned by the Allies, impossible. Their own loss was too great, the force which the enemy had displayed was too vast, to leave any hope that the fortress could be mastered by a sudden assault. The terrible truth soon became plain that the enterprise on which the armies had been sent had in fact failed, and that another enterprise of a quite different character, a winter siege in the presence of a superior enemy, a campaign for which no preparations had been made, and for which all that was most necessary was wanting, formed the only alternative to an evacuation of the Crimea.

[Storm of Nov. 14.]

[Winter in the Crimea.]

On the 14th of November the Euxine winter began with a storm which swept away the tents on the exposed plateau, and wrecked twenty-one vessels bearing stores of ammunition and clothing. From this time rain and snow turned the tract between the camp and Balaclava into a morass. The loss of the paved road which had been captured by the Russians three weeks before now told with fatal effect on the British army. The only communication with the port of Balaclava was by a hillside track, which soon became impassable by carts. It was necessary to bring up supplies on the backs of horses; but the horses perished from famine and from excessive labour. The men were too few, too weak, too destitute of the helpful ways of English sailors, to assist in providing for themselves. Thus penned up on the bleak promontory, cholera-stricken, mocked rather than sustained during their benumbing toil with rations of uncooked meat and green coffee-berries, the British soldiery wasted away. Their effective force sank at mid-winter to eleven thousand men. In the hospitals, which even at Scutari were more deadly to those who passed within them than the fiercest fire of the enemy, nine thousand men perished before the end of February. The time indeed came when the very Spirit of Mercy seemed to enter these abodes of woe, and in the presence of Florence Nightingale nature at last regained its healing power, pestilence no longer hung in the atmosphere which the sufferers breathed, and death itself grew mild. But before this new influence had vanquished routine the grave had closed over whole regiments of men whom it had no right to claim. The sufferings of other armies have been on a greater scale, but seldom has any body of troops furnished a heavier tale of loss and death in proportion to its numbers than the British army during the winter of the Crimean War. The unsparing exposure in the Press of the mismanagement under which our soldiers were perishing excited an outburst of indignation which overthrew Lord Aberdeen's Ministry and placed Palmerston in power. It also gave to Europe at large an impression that Great Britain no longer knew how to conduct a war, and unduly raised the reputation of the French military administration, whose shortcomings, great as they were, no French journalist dared to describe. In spite of Alma and Inkermann, the military prestige of England was injured, not raised, by the Crimean campaign; nor was it until the suppression of the Indian Mutiny that the true capacity of the nation in war was again vindicated before the world.

[Death of Nicholas, March 2, 1855.]

[Conference of Vienna, March-May, 1855.]

[Austria.]

"I have two generals who will not fail me," the Czar is reported to have said when he heard of Menschikoff's last defeat, "Generals January and February." General February fulfilled his task, but he smote the Czar too. In the first days of March a new monarch inherited the Russian crown.  [474] Alexander II. ascended the throne, announcing that he would adhere to the policy of Peter the Great, of Catherine, and of Nicholas. But the proud tone was meant rather for the ear of Russia than of Europe, since Nicholas had already expressed his willingness to treat for peace on the basis laid down by the Western Powers in August, 1854. This change was not produced wholly by the battles of Alma and Inkermann. Prussia, finding itself isolated in Germany, had after some months of hesitation given a diplomatic sanction to the Four Points approved by Austria as indispensable conditions of peace. Russia thus stood forsaken, as it seemed, by its only friend, and Nicholas could no longer hope to escape with the mere abandonment of those claims which had been the occasion of the war. He consented to treat with his enemies on their own terms. Austria now approached still more closely to the Western Powers, and bound itself by treaty, in the event of peace not being concluded by the end of the year on the stated basis, to deliberate with France and England upon effectual means for obtaining the object of the Alliance.  [475] Preparations were made for a Conference at Vienna, from which Prussia, still declining to pledge itself to warlike action in case of the failure of the negotiations, was excluded. The sittings of the Conference began a few days after the accession of Alexander II. Russia was represented by its ambassador, Prince Alexander Gortschakoff, who, as Minister of later years, was to play so conspicuous a part in undoing the work of the Crimean epoch. On the first two Articles forming the subject of negotiation, namely the abolition of the Russian Protectorate over Servia and the Principalities, and the removal of all impediments to the free navigation of the Danube, agreement was reached. On the third Article, the revision of the Treaty of July, 1841, relating to the Black Sea and the Dardanelles, the Russian envoy and the representatives of the Western Powers found themselves completely at variance. Gortschakoff had admitted that the Treaty of 1841 must be so revised as to put an end to the preponderance of Russia in the Black Sea;  [476] but while the Western Governments insisted upon the exclusion of Russian war-vessels from these waters, Gortschakoff would consent only to the abolition of Russia's preponderance by the free admission of the war-vessels of all nations, or by some similar method of counterpoise. The negotiations accordingly came to an end, but not before Austria, disputing the contention of the Allies that the object of the third Article could be attained only by the specific means proposed by them, had brought forward a third scheme based partly upon the limitation of the Russian navy in the Euxine, partly upon the admission of war-ships of other nations. This scheme was rejected by the Western Powers, whereupon Austria declared that its obligations under the Treaty of December 2nd, 1854, had now been fulfilled, and that it returned in consequence to the position of a neutral.

Great indignation was felt and was expressed at London and Paris at this so-called act of desertion, and at the subsequent withdrawal of Austrian regiments from the positions which they had occupied in anticipation of war. It was alleged that in the first two conditions of peace Austria had seen its own special interests effectually secured; and that as soon as the Court of St. Petersburg had given the necessary assurances on these heads the Cabinet of Vienna was willing to sacrifice the other objects of the Alliance and to abandon the cause of the Maritime Powers, in order to regain, with whatever loss of honour, the friendship of the Czar. Though it was answered with perfect truth that Austria had never accepted the principle of the exclusion of Russia from the Black Sea, and was still ready to take up arms in defence of that system by which it considered that Russia's preponderance in the Black Sea might be most suitably prevented, this argument sounded hollow to combatants convinced of the futility of all methods for holding Russia in check except their own. Austria had grievously injured its own position and credit with the Western Powers. On the other hand it had wounded Russia too deeply to win from the Czar the forgiveness which it expected. Its policy of balance, whether best described as too subtle or as too impartial, had miscarried. It had forfeited its old, without acquiring new friendships. It remained isolated in Europe, and destined to meet without support and without an ally the blows which were soon to fall upon it.

[Progress of the siege, January-May, 1855.]

[Canrobert succeeded by Pélissier, May.]

[Unsuccessful assault, June 18.]

[Battle of the Tchernaya, Aug. 16.]

[Capture of the Malakoff, Sept. 8.]

[Fall of Sebastopol, Sept. 9.]

The prospects of the besieging armies before Sebastopol were in some respects better towards the close of January, 1855, than they were when the Conference of Vienna commenced its sittings six weeks later. Sardinia, under the guidance of Cavour, had joined the Western Alliance, and was about to send fifteen thousand soldiers to the Crimea. A new plan of operations, which promised excellent results, had been adopted at headquarters. Up to the end of 1854 the French had directed their main attack against the Flagstaff bastion, a little to the west of the head of the Man-of-War Harbour. They were now, however, convinced by Lord Raglan that the true keystone to the defences of Sebastopol was the Malakoff, on the eastern side, and they undertook the reduction of this formidable work, while the British directed their efforts against the neighbouring Redan.  [477] The heaviest fire of the besiegers being thus concentrated on a narrow line, it seemed as if Sebastopol must soon fall. But at the beginning of February a sinister change came over the French camp. General Niel arrived from Paris vested with powers which really placed him in control of the general-in-chief; and though Canrobert was but partially made acquainted with the Emperor's designs, he was forced to sacrifice to them much of his own honour and that of the army. Napoleon had determined to come to the Crimea himself, and at the fitting moment to end by one grand stroke the war which had dragged so heavily in the hands of others. He believed that Sebastopol could only be taken by a complete investment; and it was his design to land with a fresh army on the south-eastern coast of the Crimea, to march across the interior of the peninsula, to sweep Menschikoff's forces from their position above the Tchernaya, and to complete the investment of Sebastopol from the north. With this scheme of operations in view, all labour expended in the attack on Sebastopol from the south was effort thrown away. Canrobert, who had promised his most vigorous co-operation to Lord Raglan, was fettered and paralysed by the Emperor's emissary at headquarters. For three successive months the Russians not only held their own, but by means of counter-approaches won back from the French some of the ground that they had taken. The very existence of the Alliance was threatened when, after Canrobert and Lord Raglan had despatched a force to seize the Russian posts on the Sea of Azof, the French portion of this force was peremptorily recalled by the Emperor, in order that it might be employed in the march northwards across the Crimea. At length, unable to endure the miseries of the position, Canrobert asked to be relieved of his command. He was succeeded by General Pélissier. Pélissier, a resolute, energetic soldier, one moreover who did not owe his promotion to complicity in the coup d'état, flatly refused to obey the Emperor's orders. Sweeping aside the flimsy schemes evolved at the Tuileries, he returned with all his heart to the plan agreed upon by the Allied commanders at the beginning of the year; and from this time, though disasters were still in store, they were not the result of faltering or disloyalty at the headquarters of the French army. The general assault on the Malakoff and the Redan was fixed for the 18th of June. It was bravely met by the Russians; the Allies were driven back with heavy loss, and three months more were added to the duration of the siege. Lord Raglan did not live to witness the last stage of the war. Exhausted by his labours, heartsick at the failure of the great attack, he died on the 28th of June, leaving the command to General Simpson, an officer far his inferior. As the lines of the besiegers approached nearer and nearer to the Russian fortifications, the army which had been defeated at Inkermann advanced for one last effort. Crossing the Tchernaya, it gave battle on the 16th of August. The French and the Sardinians, with little assistance from the British army, won a decisive victory. Sebastopol could hope no longer for assistance from without, and on the 8th of September the blow which had failed in June was dealt once more. The French, throwing themselves in great strength upon the Malakoff, carried this fortress by storm, and frustrated every effort made for its recovery; the British, attacking the Redan with a miserably weak force, were beaten and overpowered. But the fall of the Malakoff was in itself equivalent to the capture of Sebastopol. A few more hours passed, and a series of tremendous explosions made known to the Allies that the Russian commander was blowing up his magazines and withdrawing to the north of the Great Harbour. The prize was at length won, and at the end of a siege of three hundred and fifty days what remained of the Czar's great fortress passed into the hands of his enemies.

[Exhaustion of Russia.]

[Fall of Kars, Nov. 28.]

[Negotiations for peace.]

The Allies had lost since their landing in the Crimea not less than a hundred thousand men. An enterprise undertaken in the belief that it would be accomplished in the course of a few weeks, and with no greater sacrifice of life than attends every attack upon a fortified place, had proved arduous and terrible almost beyond example. Yet if the Crimean campaign was the result of error and blindness on the part of the invaders, it was perhaps even more disastrous to Russia than any warfare in which an enemy would have been likely to engage with fuller knowledge of the conditions to be met. The vast distances that separated Sebastopol from the military depôts in the interior of Russia made its defence a drain of the most fearful character on the levies and the resources of the country. What tens of thousands sank in the endless, unsheltered march without ever nearing the sea, what provinces were swept of their beasts of burden, when every larger shell fired against the enemy had to be borne hundreds of miles by oxen, the records of the war but vaguely make known. The total loss of the Russians should perhaps be reckoned at three times that of the Allies. Yet the fall of Sebastopol was not immediately followed by peace. The hesitation of the Allies in cutting off the retreat of the Russian army had enabled its commander to retain his hold upon the Crimea; in Asia, the delays of a Turkish relieving army gave to the Czar one last gleam of success in the capture of Kars, which, after a strenuous resistance, succumbed to famine on the 28th of November. But before Kars had fallen negotiations for peace had commenced. France was weary of the war. Napoleon, himself unwilling to continue it except at the price of French aggrandisement on the Continent, was surrounded by a band of palace stock-jobbers who had staked everything on the rise of the funds that would result from peace. It was known at every Court of Europe that the Allies were completely at variance with one another; that while the English nation, stung by the failure of its military administration during the winter, by the nullity of its naval operations in the Baltic, and by the final disaster at the Redan, was eager to prove its real power in a new campaign, the ruler of France, satisfied with the crowning glory of the Malakoff, was anxious to conclude peace on any tolerable terms. Secret communications from St. Petersburg were made at Paris by Baron Seebach, envoy of Saxony, a son-in-law of the Russian Chancellor: the Austrian Cabinet, still bent on acting the part of arbiter, but hopeless of the results of a new Conference, addressed itself to the Emperor Napoleon singly, and persuaded him to enter into a negotiation which was concealed for a while from Great Britain. The two intrigues were simultaneously pursued by our ally, but Seebach's proposals were such that even the warmest friends of Russia at the Tuileries could scarcely support them, and the Viennese diplomatists won the day. It was agreed that a note containing Preliminaries of Peace should be presented by Austria at St. Petersburg as its own ultimatum, after the Emperor Napoleon should have won from the British Government its assent to these terms without any alteration. The Austrian project embodied indeed the Four Points which Britain had in previous months fixed as the conditions of peace, and in substance it differed little from what, even after the fall of Sebastopol, British statesmen were still prepared to accept; but it was impossible that a scheme completed without the participation of Britain and laid down for its passive acceptance should be thus uncomplainingly adopted by its Government. Lord Palmerston required that the Four Articles enumerated should be understood to cover points not immediately apparent on their surface, and that a fifth Article should be added reserving to the Powers the right of demanding certain further special conditions, it being understood that Great Britain would require under this clause only that Russia should bind itself to leave the Åland Islands in the Baltic Sea unfortified. Modified in accordance with the demand of the British Government, the Austrian draft was presented to the Czar at the end of December, with the notification that if it as not accepted by the 16th of January the Austrian ambassador would quit St. Petersburg. On the 15th a Council was held in the presence of the Czar. Nesselrode, who first gave his opinion, urged that the continuance of the war would plunge Russia into hostilities with all Europe, and advised submission to a compact which would last only until Russia had recovered its strength or new relations had arisen among the Powers. One Minister after another declared that Poland, Finland, the Crimea, and the Caucasus would be endangered if peace were not now made; the Chief of the Finances stated that Russia could not go through another campaign without bankruptcy.  [478] At the end of the discussion the Council declared unanimously in favour of accepting the Austrian propositions; and although the national feeling was still in favour of resistance, there appears to have been one Russian statesman alone, Prince Gortschakoff, ambassador at Vienna, who sought to dissuade the Czar from making peace. His advice was not taken. The vote of the Council was followed by the despatch of plenipotentiaries to Paris, and here, on the 25th of February, 1856, the envoys of all the Powers, with the exception of Prussia, assembled in Conference, in order to frame the definitive Treaty of Peace.  [479]

[Conference of Paris, Feb. 25, 1856.]

[Treaty of Paris, March 30, 1856.]

In the debates which now followed, and which occupied more than a month, Lord Clarendon, who represented Great Britain, discovered that in each contested point he had to fight against the Russian and the French envoys combined, so completely was the Court of the Tuileries now identified with a policy of conciliation and friendliness towards Russia.  [480] Great firmness, great plainness of speech was needed on the part of the British Government, in order to prevent the recognised objects of the war from being surrendered by its ally, not from a conviction that they were visionary or unattainable, but from unsteadiness of purpose and from the desire to convert a defeated enemy into a friend. The end, however, was at length reached, and on the 30th of March the Treaty of Paris was signed. The Black Sea was neutralised; its waters and ports, thrown open to the mercantile marine of every nation, were formally and in perpetuity interdicted to the war-ships both of the Powers possessing its coasts and of all other Powers. The Czar and the Sultan undertook not to establish or maintain upon its coasts any military or maritime arsenal. Russia ceded a portion of Bessarabia, accepting a frontier which excluded it from the Danube. The free navigation of this river, henceforth to be effectively maintained by an international Commission, was declared part of the public law of Europe. The Powers declared the Sublime Porte admitted to participate in the advantages of the public law and concert of Europe, each engaging to respect the independence and integrity of the Ottoman Empire, and all guaranteeing in common the strict observance of this engagement, and promising to consider any act tending to its violation as a question of general interest. The Sultan "having, in his constant solicitude for the welfare of his subjects, issued a firman recording his generous intentions towards the Christian population of his empire,  [481] and having communicated it to the Powers," the Powers "recognised the high value of this communication," declaring at the same time "that it could not, in any case, give to them the right to interfere, either collectively or separately, in the relations of the Sultan to his subjects, or in the internal administration of his empire." The Danubian Principalities, augmented by the strip of Bessarabia taken from Russia, were to continue to enjoy, under the suzerainty of the Porte and under the guarantee of the Powers, all the privileges and immunities of which they were in possession, no exclusive protection being exercised by any of the guaranteeing Powers.  [482]

[Agreement of the Conference on rights of neutrals.]

Passing beyond the immediate subjects of negotiation, the Conference availed itself of its international character to gain the consent of Great Britain to a change in the laws of maritime war. England had always claimed, and had always exercised, the right to seize an enemy's goods on the high sea though conveyed in a neutral vessel, and to search the merchant-ships of neutrals for this purpose. The exercise of this right had stirred up against England the Maritime League of 1800, and was condemned by nearly the whole civilised world. Nothing short of an absolute command of the seas made it safe or possible for a single Power to maintain a practice which threatened at moments of danger to turn the whole body of neutral States into its enemies. Moreover, if the seizure of belligerents' goods in neutral ships profited England when it was itself at war, it injured England at all times when it remained at peace during the struggles of other States. Similarly by the issue of privateers England inflicted great injury on its enemies; but its own commerce, exceeding that of every other State, offered to the privateers of its foes a still richer booty. The advantages of the existing laws of maritime war were not altogether on the side of England, though mistress of the seas; and in return for the abolition of privateering, the British Government consented to surrender its sharpest, but most dangerous, weapon of offence, and to permit the products of a hostile State to find a market in time of war. The rule was laid down that the goods of an enemy other than contraband of war should henceforth be safe under a neutral flag. Neutrals' goods discovered on an enemy's ship were similarly made exempt from capture.

[Fictions of the Treaty of Paris as to Turkey.]

The enactments of the Conference of Paris relating to commerce in time of hostilities have not yet been subjected to the strain of a war between England and any European State; its conclusions on all other subjects were but too soon put to the test, and have one after another been found wanting. If the Power which calls man into his moment of life could smile at the efforts and the assumptions of its creature, such smile might have been moved by the assembly of statesmen who, at the close of the Crimean War, affected to shape the future of Eastern Europe. They persuaded themselves that by dint of the iteration of certain phrases they could convert the Sultan and his hungry troop of Pashas into the chiefs of a European State. They imagined that the House of Osman, which in the stages of a continuous decline had successively lost its sway over Hungary, over Servia, over Southern Greece and the Danubian Provinces, and which would twice within the last twenty-five years have seen its Empire dashed to pieces by an Egyptian vassal but for the intervention of Europe, might be arrested in its decadence by an incantation, and be made strong enough and enlightened enough to govern to all time the Slavic and Greek populations which had still the misfortune to be included within its dominions. Recognising-so ran the words which read like bitter irony, but which were meant for nothing of the kind-the value of the Sultan's promises of reform, the authors of the Treaty of Paris proceeded, as if of set purpose, to extinguish any vestige of responsibility which might have been felt at Constantinople, and any spark of confidence that might still linger among the Christian populations, by declaring that, whether the Sultan observed or broke his promises, in no case could any right of intervention by Europe arise. The helmsman was given his course; the hatches were battened down. If words bore any meaning, if the Treaty of Paris was not an elaborate piece of imposture, the Christian subjects of the Sultan had for the future, whatever might be their wrongs, no redress to look for but in the exertion of their own power. The terms of the Treaty were in fact such as might have been imposed if the Western Powers had gone to war with Russia for some object of their own, and had been rescued, when defeated and overthrown, by the victorious interposition of the Porte. All was hollow, all based on fiction and convention. The illusions of nations in time of revolutionary excitement, the shallow, sentimental commonplaces of liberty and fraternity have afforded just matter for satire; but no democratic platitudes were ever more palpably devoid of connection with fact, more flagrantly in contradiction to the experience of the past, or more ignominiously to be refuted by each succeeding act of history, than the deliberate consecration of the idol of an Ottoman Empire as the crowning act of European wisdom in 1856.

[The Danubian Principalities.]

[Alexander Cuza Hospodar of both Provinces.]

[Complete Union, 1862.]

[Charles of Hohenzollern, Hereditary Prince, 1866.]

Among the devotees of the Turk the English Ministers were the most impassioned, having indeed in the possession of India some excuse for their fervour on behalf of any imaginable obstacle that would keep the Russians out of Constantinople. The Emperor of the French had during the Conferences at Paris revived his project of incorporating the Danubian Principalities with Austria in return for the cession of Lombardy, but the Viennese Government had declined to enter into any such arrangement. Napoleon consequently entered upon a new Eastern policy. Appreciating the growing force of nationality in European affairs, and imagining that in the championship of the principle of nationality against the Treaties of 1815 he would sooner or later find means for the aggrandisement of himself and France, he proposed that the Provinces of Moldavia and Wallachia, while remaining in dependence upon the Sultan, should be united into a single State under a prince chosen by themselves. The English Ministry would not hear of this union. In their view the creation of a Roumanian Principality under a chief not appointed by the Porte was simply the abstraction from the Sultan of six million persons who at present acknowledged his suzerainty, and whose tribute to Constantinople ought, according to Lord Clarendon, to be increased.  [483] Austria, fearing the effect of a Roumanian national movement upon its own Roumanian subjects in Transylvania, joined in resistance to Napoleon's scheme, and the political organisation of the Principalities was in consequence reserved by the Conference of Paris for future settlement. Elections were held in the spring of 1857 under a decree from the Porte, with the result that Moldavia, as it seemed, pronounced against union with the sister province. But the complaint at once arose that the Porte had falsified the popular vote. France and Russia had now established relations of such amity that their ambassadors jointly threatened to quit Constantinople if the elections were not annulled. A visit paid by the French Emperor to Queen Victoria, with the object of smoothing over the difficulties which had begun to threaten the Western alliance, resulted rather in increased misunderstandings between the two Governments as to the future of the Principalities than in any real agreement. The elections were annulled. New representative bodies met at Bucharest and Jassy, and pronounced almost unanimously for union (October, 1857). In the spring of 1858 the Conference of Paris reassembled in order to frame a final settlement of the affairs of the Principalities. It determined that in each Province there should be a Hospodar elected for life, a separate judicature, and a separate legislative Assembly, while a central Commission, formed by representatives of both Provinces, should lay before the Assemblies projects of law on matters of joint interest. In accordance with these provisions, Assemblies were elected in each Principality at the beginning of 1859. Their first duty was to choose the two Hospodars, but in both Provinces a unanimous vote fell upon the same person, Prince Alexander Cuza. The efforts of England and Austria to prevent union were thus baffled by the Roumanian people itself, and after three years the elaborate arrangements made by the Conference were similarly swept away, and a single Ministry and Assembly took the place of the dual Government. It now remained only to substitute a hereditary Prince for a Hospodar elected for life; and in 1866, on the expulsion of Alexander Cuza by his subjects, Prince Charles of Hohenzollern-Sigmaringen, a distant kinsman of the reigning Prussian sovereign, was recognised by all Europe as Hereditary Prince of Roumania. The suzerainty of the Porte, now reduced to the bare right to receive a fixed tribute, was fated to last but for a few years longer.

[Continued discord in Turkish Empire.]

[Revision of the Treaty of Paris, 1871.]

Europe had not to wait for the establishment of Roumanian independence in order to judge of the foresight and the statesmanship of the authors of the Treaty of Paris. Scarcely a year passed without the occurrence of some event that cast ridicule upon the fiction of a self-regenerated Turkey, and upon the profession of the Powers that the epoch of external interference in its affairs was at an end. The active misgovernment of the Turkish authorities themselves, their powerlessness or want of will to prevent flagrant outrage and wrong among those whom they professed to rule, continued after the Treaty of Paris to be exactly what they had been before it. In 1860 massacres and civil war in Mount Lebanon led to the occupation of Syria by French troops. In 1861 Bosnia and Herzegovina took up arms. In 1863 Servia expelled its Turkish garrisons. Crete, rising in the following year, fought long for its independence, and seemed for a moment likely to be united with Greece under the auspices of the Powers, but it was finally abandoned to its Ottoman masters. At the end of fourteen years from the signature of the Peace of Paris, the downfall of the French Empire enabled Russia to declare that it would no longer recognise the provisions of the Treaty which excluded its war-ships and its arsenals from the Black Sea. It was for this, and for this almost alone, that England had gone through the Crimean War. But for the determination of Lord Palmerston to exclude Russia from the Black Sea, peace might have been made while the Allied armies were still at Varna. This exclusion was alleged to be necessary in the interests of Europe at large; that it was really enforced not in the interest of Europe but in the interest of England was made sufficiently clear by the action of Austria and Prussia, whose statesmen, in spite of the discourses so freely addressed to them from London, were at least as much alive to the interests of their respective countries as Lord Palmerston could be on their behalf. Nor had France in 1854 any interest in crippling the power of Russia, or in Eastern affairs generally, which could be remotely compared with those of the possessors of India. The personal needs of Napoleon III. made him, while he seemed to lead, the instrument of the British Government for enforcing British aims, and so gave to Palmerston the momentary shaping of a new and superficial concert of the Powers. Masters of Sebastopol, the Allies had experienced little difficulty in investing their own conclusions with the seeming authority of Europe at large; but to bring the representatives of Austria and Prussia to a Council-table, to hand them the pen to sign a Treaty dictated by France and England, was not to bind them to a policy which was not their own, or to make those things interests of Austria and Prussia which were not their interests before. Thus when in 1870 the French Empire fell, England stood alone as the Power concerned in maintaining the exclusion of Russia from the Euxine, and this exclusion it could enforce no longer. It was well that Palmerston had made the Treaty of Paris the act of Europe, but not for the reasons which Palmerston had imagined. The fiction had engendered no new relation in fact; it did not prolong for one hour the submission of Russia after it had ceased to be confronted in the West by a superior force; but it enabled Great Britain to retire without official humiliation from a position which it had conquered only through the help of an accidental Alliance, and which it was unable to maintain alone. The ghost of the Conference of 1856 was, as it were, conjured up in the changed world of 1871. The same forms which had once stamped with the seal of Europe the instrument of restraint upon Russia now as decorously executed its release. Britain accepted what Europe would not resist; and below the slopes where lay the countless dead of three nations Sebastopol rose from its ruins, and the ensign of Russia floated once more over its ships of war.

CHAPTER XXII.

Piedmont after 1849-Ministry of Azeglio-Cavour Prime Minister-Designs of Cavour-His Crimean Policy-Cavour at the Conference of Paris-Cavour and Napoleon III.-The Meeting at Plombières-Preparations in Italy-Treaty of January, 1859-Attempts at Mediation-Austrian Ultimatum-Campaign of 1859-Magenta-Movement in Central Italy-Solferino-Napoleon and Prussia -Interview of Villafranca-Cavour resigns-Peace of Zürich-Central Italy after Villafranca-The Proposed Congress-"The Pope and the Congress"- Cavour resumes office-Cavour and Napoleon-Union of the Duchies and the Romagna with Piedmont-Savoy and Nice added to France-Cavour on this cession-European opinion-Naples-Sicily-Garibaldi lands at Marsala- Capture of Palermo-The Neapolitans evacuate Sicily-Cavour and the Party of Action-Cavour's Policy as to Naples-Garibaldi on the Mainland-Persano and Villamarina at Naples-Garibaldi at Naples-The Piedmontese Army enters Umbria and the Marches-Fall of Ancona-Garibaldi and Cavour-The Armies on the Volturno-Fall of Gaeta-Cavour's Policy with regard to Rome and Venice-Death of Cavour-The Free Church in the Free State.

[Piedmont after 1849.]

In the gloomy years that followed 1849 the kingdom of Sardinia had stood out in bright relief as a State which, though crushed on the battle-field, had remained true to the cause of liberty while all around it the forces of reaction gained triumph after triumph. Its King had not the intellectual gifts of the maker of a great State, but he was one with whom those possessed of such gifts could work, and on whom they could depend. With certain grave private faults Victor Emmanuel had the public virtues of intense patriotism, of loyalty to his engagements and to his Ministers, of devotion to a single great aim. Little given to speculative thought, he saw what it most concerned him to see, that Piedmont by making itself the home of liberty could become the Master-State of Italy. His courage on the battle-field, splendid and animating as it was, distinguished him less than another kind of courage peculiarly his own. Ignorant and superstitious, he had that rare and masculine quality of soul which in the anguish of bereavement and on the verge of the unseen world remains proof against the appeal and against the terrors of a voice speaking with more than human authority. Rome, not less than Austria, stood across the path that led to Italian freedom, and employed all its art, all its spiritual force, to turn Victor Emmanuel from the work that lay before him. There were moments in his life when a man of not more than common weakness might well have flinched from the line of conduct on which he had resolved in hours of strength and of insight; there were times when a less constant mind might well have wavered and cast a balance between opposing systems of policy. It was not through heroic greatness that Victor Emmanuel rendered his priceless services to Italy. He was a man not conspicuously cast in a different mould from many another plain, strong nature, but the qualities which he possessed were precisely those which Italy required. Fortune, circumstance, position favoured him and made his glorious work possible; but what other Italian prince of this century, though placed on the throne of Piedmont, and numbering Cavour among his subjects, would have played the part, the simple yet all momentous part, which Victor Emmanuel played so well? The love and the gratitude of Italy have been lavished without stint on the memory of its first sovereign, who served his nation with qualities of so homely a type, and in whose life there was so much that needed pardon. The colder judgment of a later time will hardly contest the title of Victor Emmanuel to be ranked among those few men without whom Italian union would not have been achieved for another generation.

[Ministry of Azeglio, 1849-52.]

[Cavour Prime Minister, 1852.]

On the conclusion of peace with Austria after the campaign of Novara, the Government and the Parliament of Turin addressed themselves to the work of emancipating the State from the system of ecclesiastical privilege and clerical ascendency which had continued in full vigour down to the last year of Charles Albert's reign. Since 1814 the Church had maintained, or had recovered, both in Piedmont and in the island of Sardinia, rights which had been long wrested from it in other European societies, and which were out of harmony with the Constitution now taking root under Victor Emmanuel. The clergy had still their own tribunals, and even in the case of criminal offences were not subject to the jurisdiction of the State. The Bishops possessed excessive powers and too large a share of the Church revenues; the parochial clergy lived in want; monasteries and convents abounded. It was not in any spirit of hostility towards the Church that Massimo d'Azeglio, whom the King called to office after Novara, commenced the work of reform by measures subjecting the clergy to the law-courts of the State, abolishing the right of sanctuary in monasteries, and limiting the power of corporations to acquire landed property. If the Papacy would have met Victor Emmanuel in a fair spirit his Government would gladly have avoided a dangerous and exasperating struggle; but all the forces and the passions of Ultramontanism were brought to bear against the proposed reforms. The result was that the Minister, abandoned by a section of the Conservative party on whom he had relied, sought the alliance of men ready for a larger and bolder policy, and called to office the foremost of those from whom he had received an independent support in the Chamber, Count Cavour. Entering the Cabinet in 1850 as Minister of Commerce, Cavour rapidly became the master of all his colleagues. On his own responsibility he sought and won the support of the more moderate section of the Opposition, headed by Rattazzi; and after a brief withdrawal from office, caused by divisions within the Cabinet, he returned to power in October, 1852, as Prime Minister.

[Cavour.]

Cavour, though few men have gained greater fame as diplomatists, had not been trained in official life. The younger son of a noble family, he had entered the army in 1826, and served in the Engineers; but his sympathies with the liberal movement of 1830 brought him into extreme disfavour with his chiefs. He was described by Charles Albert, then Prince of Carignano, as the most dangerous man in the kingdom, and was transferred at the instance of his own father to the solitary Alpine fortress of Bard. Too vigorous a nature to submit to inaction, too buoyant and too sagacious to resort to conspiracy, he quitted the army, and soon afterwards undertook the management of one of the family estates, devoting himself to scientific agriculture on a large scale. He was a keen and successful man of business, but throughout the next twelve years, which he passed in fruitful private industry, his mind dwelt ardently on public affairs. He was filled with a deep discontent at the state of society which he saw around him in Piedmont, and at the condition of Italy at large under foreign and clerical rule. Repeated visits to France and England made him familiar with the institutions of freer lands, and gave definiteness to his political and social aims.  [484] In 1847, when changes were following fast, he founded with some other Liberal nobles the journal Risorgimento, devoted to the cause of national revival; and he was one of the first who called upon King Charles Albert to grant a Constitution. During the stormy days of 1848 he was at once the vigorous advocate of war with Austria and the adversary of Republicans and Extremists who for their own theories seemed willing to plunge Italy into anarchy. Though unpopular with the mob, he was elected to the Chamber by Turin, and continued to represent the capital after the peace. Up to this time there had been little opportunity for the proof of his extraordinary powers, but the inborn sagacity of Victor Emmanuel had already discerned in him a man who could not remain in a subordinate position. "You will see him turn you all out of your places," the King remarked to his Ministers, as he gave his assent to Cavour's first appointment to a seat in the Cabinet.

[Plans of Cavour.]

[Cavour's Crimean policy.]

The Ministry of Azeglio had served Piedmont with honour from 1849 to 1852, but its leader scarcely possessed the daring and fertility of mind which the time required. Cavour threw into the work of government a passion and intelligence which soon produced results visible to all Europe. His devotion to Italy was as deep, as all-absorbing, as that of Mazzini himself, though the methods and schemes of the two men were in such complete antagonism. Cavour's fixed purpose was to drive Austria out of Italy by defeat in the battle-field, and to establish, as the first step towards national union, a powerful kingdom of Northern Italy under Victor Emmanuel. In order that the military and naval forces of Piedmont might be raised to the highest possible strength and efficiency, he saw that the resources of the country must be largely developed; and with this object he negotiated commercial treaties with Foreign Powers, laid down railways, and suppressed the greater part of the monasteries, selling their lands to cultivators, and devoting the proceeds of sale not to State-purposes but to the payment of the working clergy. Industry advanced; the heavy pressure of taxation was patiently borne; the army and the fleet grew apace. But the cause of Piedmont was one with that of the Italian nation, and it became its Government to demonstrate this day by day with no faltering voice or hand. Protection and support were given to fugitives from Austrian and Papal tyranny; the Press was laid open to every tale of wrong; and when, after an unsuccessful attempt at insurrection in Milan in 1853, for which Mazzini and the Republican exiles were alone responsible, the Austrian Government sequestrated the property of its subjects who would not return from Piedmont, Cavour bade his ambassador quit Vienna, and appealed to every Court in Europe. Nevertheless, Cavour did not believe that Italy, even by a simultaneous rising, could permanently expel the Austrian armies or conquer the Austrian fortresses. The experience of forty years pointed to the opposite conclusion; and while Mazzini in his exile still imagined that a people needed only to determine to be free in order to be free, Cavour schemed for an alliance which should range against the Austrian Emperor armed forces as numerous and as disciplined as his own. It was mainly with this object that Cavour plunged Sardinia into the Crimean War. He was not without just causes of complaint against the Czar; but the motive with which he sent the Sardinian troops to Sebastopol was not that they might take vengeance on Russia, but that they might fight side by side with the soldiers of England and France. That the war might lead to complications still unforeseen was no doubt a possibility present to Cavour's mind, and in that case it was no small thing that Sardinia stood allied to the two Western Powers; but apart from these chances of the future, Sardinia would have done ill to stand idle when at any moment, as it seemed, Austria might pass from armed neutrality into active concert with England and France. Had Austria so drawn the sword against Russia whilst Piedmont stood inactive, the influence of the Western Powers must for some years to come have been ranged on the side of Austria in the maintenance of its Italian possessions, and Piedmont could at the best have looked only to St. Petersburg for sympathy or support. Cavour was not scrupulous in his choice of means when the liberation of Italy was the end in view, and the charge was made against him that in joining the coalition against Russia he lightly entered into a war in which Piedmont had no direct concern. But reason and history absolve, and far more than absolve, the Italian statesman. If the cause of European equilibrium, for which England and France took up arms, was a legitimate ground of war in the case of these two Powers, it was not less so in the case of their ally; while if the ulterior results rather than the motive of a war are held to constitute its justification, Cavour stands out as the one politician in Europe whose aims in entering upon the Crimean War have been fulfilled, not mocked, by events. He joined in the struggle against Russia not in order to maintain the Ottoman Empire, but to gain an ally in liberating Italy. The Ottoman Empire has not been maintained; the independence of Italy has been established, and established by means of the alliance which Cavour gained. His Crimean policy is one of those excessively rare instances of statesmanship where action has been determined not by the driving and half-understood necessities of the moment, but by a distinct and true perception of the future. He looked only in one direction, but in that direction he saw clearly. Other statesmen struck blindfold, or in their vision of a regenerated Turkey fought for an empire of mirage. It may with some reason be asked whether the order of Eastern Europe would now be different if our own English soldiers who fell at Balaclava had been allowed to die in their beds: every Italian whom Cavour sent to perish on the Tchernaya or in the cholera-stricken camp died as directly for the cause of Italian independence as if he had fallen on the slopes of Custozza or under the walls of Rome.

[Cavour at the Conference of Paris.]

[Change of Austrian policy, 1856.]

At the Conference of Paris in 1856 the Sardinian Premier took his place in right of alliance by the side of the representatives of the great Powers; and when the main business of the Conference was concluded, Count Buol, the Austrian Minister, was forced to listen to a vigorous denunciation by Cavour of the misgovernment that reigned in Central and Southern Italy, of the Austrian occupation which rendered this possible. Though the French were still in Rome, their presence might by courtesy be described as a measure of precaution rendered necessary by the intrusion of the Austrians farther north; and both the French and English plenipotentiaries at the Conference supported Cavour in his invective. Cavour returned to Italy without any territorial reward for the services that Piedmont had rendered to the Allies; but his object was attained. He had exhibited Austria isolated and discredited before Europe; he had given to his country a voice that it had never before had in the Councils of the Powers; he had produced a deep conviction throughout Italy that Piedmont not only could and would act with vigour against the national enemy, but that in its action it would have the help of allies. From this time the Republican and Mazzinian societies lost ground before the growing confidence in the House of Savoy, in its Minister and its army.  [485] The strongest evidence of the effect of Cavour's Crimean policy and of his presence at the Conference of Paris was seen in the action of the Austrian Government itself. From 1849 to 1856 its rule in Northern Italy had been one not so much of severity as of brutal violence. Now all was changed. The Emperor came to Milan to proclaim a general amnesty and to win the affection of his subjects. The sequestrated estates were restored to their owners. Radetzky, in his ninety-second year, was at length allowed to pass into retirement; the government of the sword was declared at an end; Maximilian, the gentlest and most winning of the Hapsburgs, was sent with his young bride to charm away the sad memories of the evil time. But it was too late. The recognition shown by the Lombards of the Emperor's own personal friendliness indicated no reconciliation with Austria; and while Francis Joseph was still in Milan, King Victor Emmanuel, in the presence of a Lombard deputation, laid the first stone of the monument erected by subscriptions from all Italy in memory of those who had fallen in the campaigns of 1848 and 1849, the statue of a foot-soldier waving his sword towards the Austrian frontier. The Sardinian Press redoubled its attacks on Austria and its Italian vassals. The Government of Vienna sought satisfaction; Cavour sharply refused it; and diplomatic relations between the two Courts, which had been resumed since the Conference of Paris, were again broken off.

[Cavour and Napoleon III.]

[Meeting at Plombières, July, 1858.]

Of the two Western Powers, Cavour would have preferred an alliance with Great Britain, which had no objects of its own to seek in Italy; but when he found that the Government of London would not assist him by arms against Austria, he drew closer to the Emperor Napoleon, and supported him throughout his controversy with England and Austria on the settlement of the Danubian Principalities. Napoleon, there is no doubt, felt a real interest in Italy. His own early political theories formed on a study of the Napoleonic Empire, his youthful alliance with the Carbonari, point to a sympathy with the Italian national cause which was genuine if not profound, and which was not altogether lost in 1849, though France then acted as the enemy of Roman independence. If Napoleon intended to remould the Continental order and the Treaties of 1815 in the interests of France and of the principle of nationality, he could make no better beginning than by driving Austria from Northern Italy. It was not even necessary for him to devise an original policy. Early in 1848, when it seemed probable that Piedmont would be increased by Lombardy and part of Venetia, Lamartine had laid it down that France ought in that case to be compensated by Savoy, in order to secure its frontiers against so powerful a neighbour as the new Italian State. To this idea Napoleon returned. Savoy had been incorporated with France from 1792 to 1814; its people were more French than Italian; its annexation would not directly injure the interests of any great Power. Of the three directions in which France might stretch towards its old limits of the Alps and the Rhine, the direction of Savoy was by far the least dangerous. Belgium could not be touched without certain loss of the English alliance, with which Napoleon could not yet dispense; an attack upon the Rhenish Provinces would probably be met by all the German Powers together; in Savoy alone was there the chance of gaining territory without raising a European coalition against France. No sooner had the organisation of the Danubian Principalities been completed by the Conference which met in the spring of 1858 than Napoleon began to develop his Italian plans. An attempt of a very terrible character which was made upon his life by Orsini, a Roman exile, though at the moment it threatened to embroil Sardinia with France, probably stimulated him to action. In the summer of 1858 he invited Cavour to meet him at Plombières. The negotiations which there passed were not made known by the Emperor to his Ministers; they were communicated by Cavour to two persons only besides Victor Emmanuel. It seems that no written engagement was drawn up; it was verbally agreed that if Piedmont could, without making a revolutionary war, and without exposing Napoleon to the charge of aggression, incite Austria to hostilities, France would act as its ally. Austria was then to be expelled from Venetia as well as from Lombardy. Victor Emmanuel was to become sovereign of North-Italy, with the Roman Legations and Marches; the remainder of the Papal territory, except Rome itself and the adjacent district, was to be added to Tuscany, so constituting a new kingdom of Central Italy. The two kingdoms, together with Naples and Rome, were to form an Italian Confederation under the presidency of the Pope. France was to receive Savoy and possibly Nice. A marriage between the King's young daughter Clotilde and the Emperor's cousin Prince Jerome Napoleon was discussed, if not actually settled.  [486]

[Cavour in view of the French Alliance.]

From this moment Cavour laboured night and day for war. His position was an exceedingly difficult one. Not only had he to reckon with the irresolution of Napoleon, and his avowed unwillingness to take up arms unless with the appearance of some good cause; but even supposing the goal of war reached, and Austria defeated, how little was there in common between Cavour's aims for Italy and the traditional policy of France! The first Napoleon had given Venice to Austria at Campo Formio; even if the new Napoleon should fulfil his promise and liberate all Northern Italy, his policy in regard to the centre and south of the Peninsula would probably be antagonistic to any effective union or to any further extension of the influence of the House of Savoy. Cavour had therefore to set in readiness for action national forces of such strength that Napoleon, even if he desired to draw back, should find it difficult to do so, and that the shaping of the future of the Italian people should be governed not by the schemes which the Emperor might devise at Paris, but by the claims and the aspirations of Italy itself. It was necessary for him not only to encourage and subsidise the National Society-a secret association whose branches in the other Italian States were preparing to assist Piedmont in the coming war, and to unite Italy under the House of Savoy-but to enter into communication with some of the Republican or revolutionary party who had hitherto been at enmity with all Crowns alike. He summoned Garibaldi in secrecy to Turin, and there convinced him that the war about to be waged by Victor Emmanuel was one in which he ought to take a prominent part. As the foremost defender of the Roman Republic and a revolutionary hero, Garibaldi was obnoxious to the French Emperor. Cavour had to conceal from Napoleon the fact that Garibaldi would take the field at the head of a free-corps by the side of the Allied armies; he had similarly to conceal from Garibaldi that one result of the war would be the cession of Nice, his own birthplace, to France. Thus plunged in intrigue, driving his Savoyards to the camp and raising from them the last farthing in taxation, in order that after victory they might be surrendered to a Foreign Power; goading Austria to some act of passion; inciting, yet checking and controlling, the Italian revolutionary elements; bargaining away the daughter of his sovereign to one of the most odious of mankind, Cavour staked all on the one great end of his being, the establishment of Italian independence. Words like those which burst from Danton in the storms of the Convention-"Perish my name, my reputation, so that France be free"-were the calm and habitual expression of Cavour's thought when none but an intimate friend was by to hear.  [487] Such tasks as Cavour's are not to be achieved without means which, to a man noble in view as Cavour really was, it would have been more agreeable to leave unemployed. Those alone are entitled to pronounce judgment upon him who have made a nation, and made it with purer hands. It was well for English statesmen and philanthropists, inheritors of a world-wide empire, to enforce the ethics of peace and to plead for a gentlemanlike frankness and self-restraint in the conduct of international relations. English women had not been flogged by Austrian soldiers in the market-place; the treaties of 1815 had not consecrated a foreign rule over half our race. To Cavour the greatest crime would have been to leave anything undone which might minister to Italy's liberation.  [488]

[Treaty of January, 1859.]

[Attempts at mediation.]

[Austrian ultimatum, April 23.]

Napoleon seems to have considered that he would be ready to begin war in the spring of 1859. At the reception at the Tuileries on the 1st of January he addressed the Austrian ambassador in words that pointed to an approaching conflict; a few weeks later a marriage-contract was signed between Prince Napoleon and Clotilde, daughter of Victor Emmanuel, and part of the agreement made at Plombières was embodied in a formal Treaty. Napoleon undertook to support Sardinia in a war that might arise from any aggressive act on the part of Austria, and, if victorious, to add both Lombardy and Venetia to Victor Emmanuel's dominions. France was in return to receive Savoy, the disposal of Nice being reserved till the restoration of peace.  [489] Even before the Treaty was signed Victor Emmanuel had thrown down the challenge to Austria, declaring at the opening of the Parliament of Turin that he could not be insensible to the cry of suffering that rose from Italy. In all but technical form the imminence of war had been announced, when, under the influence of diplomatists and Ministers about him, and of a financial panic that followed his address to the Austrian ambassador, the irresolute mind of Napoleon shrank from its purpose, and months more of suspense were imposed upon Italy and Europe, to be terminated at last not by any effort of Napoleon's will but by the rash and impolitic action of Austria itself. At the instance of the Court of Vienna the British Government had consented to take steps towards mediation. Lord Cowley, Ambassador at Paris, was sent to Vienna with proposals which, it was believed, might form the basis for an amicable settlement of Italian affairs. He asked that the Papal States should be evacuated by both Austrian and French troops; that Austria should abandon the Treaties which gave it a virtual Protectorate over Modena and Parma; and that it should consent to the introduction of reforms in all the Italian Governments. Negotiations towards this end had made some progress when they were interrupted by a proposal sent from St. Petersburg, at the instance of Napoleon, that Italian affairs should be submitted to a European Congress. Austria was willing under certain conditions to take part in a Congress, but it required, as a preliminary measure, that Sardinia should disarm. Napoleon had now learnt that Garibaldi was to fight at the head of the volunteers for Victor Emmanuel. His doubts as to the wisdom of his own policy seem to have increased hour by hour; from Britain, whose friendship he still considered indispensable to him, he received the most urgent appeals against war; it was necessary that Cavour himself should visit Paris in order to prevent the Emperor from acquiescing in Austria's demand. In Cavour's presence Napoleon seems to have lost some of his fears, or to have been made to feel that it was not safe to provoke his confidant of Plombières;  [490] but Cavour had not long left Paris when a proposal was made from London, that in lieu of the separate disarmament of Sardinia the Powers should agree to a general disarmament, the details to be settled by a European Commission. This proposal received Napoleon's assent. He telegraphed to Cavour desiring him to join in the agreement. Cavour could scarcely disobey, yet at one stroke it seemed that all his hopes when on the very verge of fulfilment were dashed to the ground, all his boundless efforts for the liberation of Italy through war with Austria lost and thrown away. For some hours he appeared shattered by the blow. Strung to the extreme point of human endurance by labour scarcely remitted by day or night for weeks together, his strong but sanguine nature gave way, and for a while the few friends who saw him feared that he would take his own life. But the crisis passed: Cavour accepted, as inevitable, the condition of general disarmament; and his vigorous mind had already begun to work upon new plans for the future, when the report of a decision made at Vienna, which was soon confirmed by the arrival of an Austrian ultimatum, threw him into joy as intense as his previous despair. Ignoring the British proposal for a general disarmament, already accepted at Turin, the Austrian Cabinet demanded, without qualifications and under threat of war within three days, that Sardinia should separately disarm. It was believed at Vienna that Napoleon was merely seeking to gain time; that a conflict was inevitable; and that Austria now stood better prepared for immediate action than its enemies. Right or wrong in its judgment of Napoleon's real intentions, the Austrian Government had undeniably taken upon itself the part of the aggressor. Cavour had only to point to his own acceptance of the plan of a general disarmament, and to throw upon his enemy the responsibility for a disturbance of European peace. His reply was taken as the signal for hostilities, and on the 29th of April Austrian troops crossed the Ticino. A declaration of war from Paris followed without delay.  [491]

[Campaign of 1859.]

[Battle of Magenta, June 4.]

For months past Austria had been pouring its troops into Northern Italy. It had chosen its own time for the commencement of war; a feeble enemy stood before it, its more powerful adversary could not reach the field without crossing the Alps or the mountain-range above Genoa. Everything pointed to a vigorous offensive on the part of the Austrian generals, and in Piedmont itself it was believed that Turin must fall before French troops could assist in its defence. From Turin as a centre the Austrians could then strike with ease, and with superior numbers, against the detachments of the French army as they descended the mountains at any points in the semicircle from Genoa to Mont Cenis. There has seldom been a case where the necessity and the advantages of a particular line of strategy have been so obvious; yet after crossing the Ticino the Austrians, above a hundred thousand strong, stood as if spell-bound under their incompetent chief, Giulay. Meanwhile French detachments crossed Mont Cenis; others, more numerous, landed with the Emperor at Genoa, and established communications with the Piedmontese, whose headquarters were at Alessandria. Giulay now believed that the Allies would strike upon his communications in the direction of Parma. The march of Bonaparte upon Piacenza in 1796, as well as the campaign of Marengo, might well inspire this fear; but the real intention of Napoleon III. was to outflank the Austrians from the north and so to gain Milan. Garibaldi was already operating at the extreme left of the Sardinian line in the neighbourhood of Como. While the Piedmontese maintained their positions in the front, the French from Genoa marched northwards behind them, crossed the Po, and reached Vercelli before the Austrians discovered their manoeuvre. Giulay, still lingering between the Sesia and the Ticino, now called up part of his forces northwards, but not in time to prevent the Piedmontese from crossing the Sesia and defeating the troops opposed to them at Palestro (May 30). While the Austrians were occupied at this point, the French crossed the river farther north, and moved eastwards on the Ticino. Giulay was thus outflanked and compelled to fall back. The Allies followed him, and on the 4th of June attacked the Austrian army in its positions about Magenta on the road to Milan. The assault of Macmahon from the north gave the Allies victory after a hard-fought day. It was impossible for the Austrians to defend Milan; they retired upon the Adda and subsequently upon the Mincio, abandoning all Lombardy to the invaders, and calling up their troops from Bologna and the other occupied towns in the Papal States, in order that they might take part in the defence of the Venetian frontier and the fortresses that guarded it.

[Movement in Central Italy.]

The victory of the Allies was at once felt throughout Central Italy. The Grand Duke of Tuscany had already fled from his dominions, and the Dictatorship for the period of the war had been offered by a Provisional Government to Victor Emmanuel, who, while refusing this, had allowed his envoy, Boncampagni, to assume temporary powers at Florence as his representative. The Duke of Modena and the Duchess of Parma now quitted their territories. In the Romagna the disappearance of the Austrians resulted in the immediate overthrow of Papal authority. Everywhere the demand was for union with Piedmont. The calamities of the last ten years had taught their lesson to the Italian people. There was now nothing of the disorder, the extravagance, the childishness of 1848. The populations who had then been so divided, so suspicious, so easy a prey to demagogues, were now watchful, self-controlled, and anxious for the guidance of the only real national Government. As at Florence, so in the Duchies and in the Romagna, it was desired that Victor Emmanuel should assume the Dictatorship. The King adhered to the policy which he had adopted towards Tuscany, avoiding any engagement that might compromise him with Europe or his ally, but appointing Commissioners to enrol troops for the common war against Austria and to conduct the necessary work of administration in those districts. Farini, the historian of the Roman States, was sent to Modena; Azeglio, the ex-Minister, to Bologna. Each of these officers entered on his task in a spirit worthy of the time; each understood how much might be won for Italy by boldness, how much endangered or lost by untimely scruples.  [492]

[Battle of Solferino, June 24.]

In his proclamations at the opening of the war Napoleon had declared that Italy must be freed up to the shore of the Adriatic. His address to the Italian people on entering Milan with Victor Emmanuel after the victory of Magenta breathed the same spirit. As yet, however, Lombardy alone had been won. The advance of the allied armies was accordingly resumed after an interval of some days, and on the 23rd of June they approached the positions held by the Austrians a little to the west of the Mincio. Francis Joseph had come from Vienna to take command of the army. His presence assisted the enemy, inasmuch as he had no plan of his own, and wavered from day to day between the antagonistic plans of the generals at headquarters. Some wished to make the Mincio the line of defence, others to hold the Chiese some miles farther west. The consequence was that the army marched backwards and forwards across the space between the two rivers according as one or another general gained for the moment the Emperor's confidence. It was while the Austrians were thus engaged that the allied armies came into contact with them about Solferino. On neither side was it known that the whole force of the enemy was close at hand. The battle of Solferino, one of the bloodiest of recent times, was fought almost by accident. About a hundred and fifty thousand men were present under Napoleon and Victor Emmanuel; the Austrians had a slight superiority in force. On the north, where Benedek with the Austrian right was attacked by the Piedmontese at San Martino, it seemed as if the task imposed on the Italian troops was beyond their power. Victor Emmanuel, fighting with the same courage as at Novara, saw the positions in front of his troops alternately won and lost. But the success of the French at Solferino in the centre decided the day, and the Austrians withdrew at last from their whole line with a loss in killed and wounded of fourteen thousand men. On the part of the Allies the slaughter was scarcely less.

[Napoleon and Prussia.]

[Interview of Villafranca, July 11.]

[Peace of Villafranca.]

[Treaty of Zürich, Nov. 10.]

Napoleon stood a conqueror, but a conqueror at terrible cost; and in front of him he saw the fortresses of the Quadrilateral, while new divisions were hastening from the north and east to the support of the still unbroken Austrian army. He might well doubt whether, even against his present antagonist alone, further success was possible. The fearful spectacle of Solferino, heightened by the effects of overpowering summer heat, probably affected a mind humane and sensitive and untried in the experience of war. The condition of the French army, there is reason to believe, was far different from that represented in official reports, and likely to make the continuance of the campaign perilous in the extreme. But beyond all this, the Emperor knew that if he advanced farther Prussia and all Germany might at any moment take up arms against him. There had been a strong outburst of sympathy for Austria in the south-western German States. National patriotism was excited by the attack of Napoleon on the chief of the German sovereigns, and the belief was widely spread that French conquest in Italy would soon be followed by French conquest on the Rhine. Prussia had hitherto shown reserve. It would have joined its arms with those of Austria if its own claims to an improved position in Germany had been granted by the Court of Vienna; but Francis Joseph had up to this time refused the concessions demanded. In the stress of his peril he might at any moment close with the offers which he had before rejected; even without a distinct agreement between the two Courts, and in mere deference to German public opinion, Prussia might launch against France the armies which it had already brought into readiness for the field. A war upon the Rhine would then be added to the war before the Quadrilateral, and from the risks of this double effort Napoleon might well shrink in the interest of France not less than of his own dynasty. He determined to seek an interview with Francis Joseph, and to ascertain on what terms peace might now be made. The interview took place at Villafranca, east of the Mincio, on the 11th of July. Francis Joseph refused to cede any part of Venetia without a further struggle. He was willing to give up Lombardy, and to consent to the establishment of an Italian Federation under the presidency of the Pope, of which Federation Venetia, still under Austria's rule, should be a member; but he required that Mantua should be left within his own frontier, and that the sovereigns of Tuscany and Modena should resume possession of their dominions. To these terms Napoleon assented, on obtaining a verbal agreement that the dispossessed princes should not be restored by foreign arms. Regarding Parma and the restoration of the Papal authority in the Romagna no stipulations were made. With the signature of the Preliminaries of Villafranca, which were to form the base of a regular Treaty to be negotiated at Zürich, and to which Victor Emmanuel added his name with words of reservation, hostilities came to a close. The negotiations at Zürich, though they lasted for several months, added nothing of importance to the matter of the Preliminaries, and decided nothing that had been left in uncertainty. The Italian Federation remained a scheme which the two Emperors, and they alone, undertook to promote. Piedmont entered into no engagement either with regard to the Duchies or with regard to Federation. Victor Emmanuel had in fact announced from the first that he would enter no League of which a province governed by Austria formed a part, and from this resolution he never swerved.  [493]

[Resignation of Cavour.]

[Central Italy.]

Though Lombardy was gained, the impression made upon the Italians by the peace of Villafranca was one of the utmost dismay. Napoleon had so confidently and so recently promised the liberation of all Northern Italy that public opinion ascribed to treachery or weakness what was in truth an act of political necessity. On the first rumour of the negotiations Cavour had hurried from Turin, but the agreement was signed before his arrival. The anger and the grief of Cavour are described by those who then saw him as terrible to witness.  [494] Napoleon had not the courage to face him; Victor Emmanuel bore for two hours the reproaches of his Minister, who had now completely lost his self-control. Cavour returned to Turin, and shortly afterwards withdrew from office, his last act being the despatch of ten thousand muskets to Farini at Modena. In accordance with the terms of peace, instructions, which were probably not meant to be obeyed, were sent by Cavour's successor, Rattazzi, to the Piedmontese Commissioners in Central Italy, bidding them to return to Turin and to disband any forces that they had collected. Farini, on receipt of this order, adroitly divested himself of his Piedmontese citizenship, and, as an honorary burgher of Modena, accepted the Dictatorship from his fellow-townsmen. Azeglio returned to Turin, but took care before quitting the Romagna to place four thousand soldiers under competent leaders in a position to resist attack. It was not the least of Cavour's merits that he had gathered about him a body of men who, when his own hand was for a while withdrawn, could pursue his policy with so much energy and sagacity as was now shown by the leaders of the national movement in Central Italy. Venetia was lost for the present; but if Napoleon's promise was broken, districts which he had failed or had not intended to liberate might be united with the Italian Kingdom. The Duke of Modena, with six thousand men who had remained true to him, lay on the Austrian frontier, and threatened to march upon his capital. Farini mined the city gates, and armed so considerable a force that it became clear that the Duke would not recover his dominions without a serious battle. Parma placed itself under the same Dictatorship with Modena; in the Romagna a Provisional Government which Azeglio had left behind him continued his work. Tuscany, where Napoleon had hoped to find a throne for his cousin, pronounced for national union, and organised a common military force with its neighbours. During the weeks that followed the Peace of Villafranca, declarations signed by tens of thousands, the votes of representative bodies, and popular demonstrations throughout Central Italy, showed in an orderly and peaceful form how universal was the desire for union under the House of Savoy.

[Cavour's Plans before Villafranca.]

[Central Italy after Villafranca. July-November.]

[Mazzini and Garibaldi. August-November.]

Cavour, in the plans which he had made before 1859, had not looked for a direct and immediate result beyond the creation of an Italian Kingdom including the whole of the territory north of the Po. The other steps in the consolidation of Italy would, he believed, follow in their order. They might be close at hand, or they might be delayed for a while; but in the expulsion of Austria, in the interposition of a purely Italian State numbering above ten millions of inhabitants, mistress of the fortresses and of a powerful fleet, between Austria and those who had been its vassals, the essential conditions of Italian national independence would have been won. For the rest, Italy might be content to wait upon time and opportunity. But the Peace of Villafranca, leaving Venetia in the enemy's hands, completely changed this prospect. The fiction of an Italian Federation in which the Hapsburg Emperor, as lord of Venice, should forget his Austrian interests and play the part of Italian patriot, was too gross to deceive any one. Italy, on these terms, would either continue to be governed from Vienna, or be made a pawn in the hands of its French protector. What therefore Cavour had hitherto been willing to leave to future years now became the need of the present. "Before Villafranca," in his own words, "the union of Italy was a possibility; since Villafranca it is a necessity." Victor Emmanuel understood this too, and saw the need for action more clearly than Rattazzi and the Ministers who, on Cavour's withdrawal in July, stepped for a few months into his place. The situation was one that called indeed for no mean exercise of statesmanship. If Italy was not to be left dependent upon the foreigner and the reputation of the House of Savoy ruined, it was necessary not only that the Duchies of Modena and Parma, but that Central Italy, including Tuscany and at least the Romagna, should be united with the Kingdom of Piedmont; yet the accomplishment of this work was attended with the utmost danger. Napoleon himself was hoping to form Tuscany, with an augmented territory, into a rival Kingdom of Etruria or Central Italy, and to place his cousin on its throne. The Ultramontane party in France was alarmed and indignant at the overthrow of the Pope's authority in the Romagna, and already called upon the Emperor to fulfil his duties towards the Holy See. If the national movement should extend to Rome itself, the hostile intervention of France was almost inevitable. While the negotiations with Austria at Zürich were still proceeding, Victor Emmanuel could not safely accept the sovereignty that was offered him by Tuscany and the neighbouring provinces, nor permit his cousin, the Prince of Carignano, to assume the regency which, during the period of suspense, it was proposed to confer upon him. Above all, it was necessary that the Government should not allow the popular forces with which it was co-operating to pass beyond its own control. In the critical period that followed the armistice of Villafranca, Mazzini approached Victor Emmanuel, as thirty years before he had approached his father, and offered his own assistance in the establishment of Italian union under the House of Savoy. He proposed, as the first step, to overthrow the Neapolitan Government by means of an expedition headed by Garibaldi, and to unite Sicily and Naples to the King's dominions; but he demanded in return that Piedmont should oppose armed resistance to any foreign intervention occasioned by this enterprise; and he seems also to have required that an attack should be made immediately afterwards upon Rome and upon Venetia. To these conditions the King could not accede; and Mazzini, confirmed in his attitude of distrust towards the Court of Turin, turned to Garibaldi, who was now at Modena. At his instigation Garibaldi resolved to lead an expedition at once against Rome itself. Napoleon was at this very moment promising reforms on behalf of the Pope, and warning Victor Emmanuel against the annexation even of the Romagna (Oct. 20th). At the risk of incurring the hostility of Garibaldi's followers and throwing their leader into opposition to the dynasty, it was necessary for the Sardinian Government to check him in his course. The moment was a critical one in the history of the House of Savoy. But the soldier of Republican Italy proved more tractable than its prophet. Garibaldi was persuaded to abandon or postpone an enterprise which could only have resulted in disaster for Italy; and with expressions of cordiality towards the King himself, and of bitter contempt for the fox-like politicians who advised him, he resigned his command and bade farewell to his comrades, recommending them, however, to remain under arms, in full confidence that they would ere long find a better opportunity for carrying the national flag southwards.  [495]

[The proposed Congress.]

Soon after the Agreement of Villafranca, Napoleon had proposed to the British Government that a Congress of all the Powers should assemble at Paris in order to decide upon the many Italian questions which still remained unsettled. In taking upon himself the emancipation of Northern Italy Napoleon had, as it proved, attempted a task far beyond his own powers. The work had been abruptly broken off; the promised services had not been rendered, the stipulated reward had not been won. On the other hand, forces had been set in motion which he who raised them could not allay; populations stood in arms against the Governments which the Agreement of Villafranca purported to restore; the Pope's authority in the northern part of his dominions was at an end; the Italian League over which France and Austria were to join hands of benediction remained the laughing-stock of Europe. Napoleon's victories had added Lombardy to Piedmont; for the rest, except from the Italian point of view, they had only thrown affairs into confusion. Hesitating at the first between his obligations towards Austria and the maintenance of his prestige in Italy, perplexed between the contradictory claims of nationality and of Ultramontanism, Napoleon would gladly have cast upon Great Britain, or upon Europe at large, the task of extricating him from his embarrassment. But the Cabinet of London, while favourable to Italy, showed little inclination to entangle itself in engagements which might lead to war with Austria and Germany in the interest of the French Sovereign. Italian affairs, it was urged by Lord John Russell, might well be governed by the course of events within Italy itself; and, as Austria remained inactive, the principle of non-intervention really gained the day. The firm attitude of the population both in the Duchies and in the Romagna, their unanimity and self-control, the absence of those disorders which had so often been made a pretext for foreign intervention, told upon the mind of Napoleon and on the opinion of Europe at large. Each month that passed rendered the restoration of the fallen Governments a work of greater difficulty, and increased the confidence of the Italians in themselves. Napoleon watched and wavered. When the Treaty of Zürich was signed his policy was still undetermined. By the prompt and liberal concession of reforms the Papal Government might perhaps even now have turned the balance in its favour. But the obstinate mind of Pius IX. was proof against every politic and every generous influence. The stubbornness shown by Rome, the remembrance of Antonelli's conduct towards the French Republic in 1849, possibly also the discovery of a Treaty of Alliance between the Papal Government and Austria, at length overcame Napoleon's hesitation in meeting the national demand of Italy, and gave him courage to defy both the Papal Court and the French priesthood. He resolved to consent to the formation of an Italian Kingdom under Victor Emmanuel including the northern part of the Papal territories as well as Tuscany and the other Duchies, and to silence the outcry which this act of spoliation would excite among the clerical party in France by the annexation of Nice and Savoy.

["The Pope and the Congress," Dec. 24.]

[Change of Ministry at Paris, Jan. 5, 1860.]

[Cavour resumes office, Jan. 16.]

The decision of the Emperor was foreshadowed by the publication on the 24th of December of a pamphlet entitled "The Pope and the Congress." The doctrine advanced in this essay was that, although a temporal authority was necessary to the Pope's spiritual independence, the peace and unity which should surround the Vicar of Christ would be best attained when his temporal sovereignty was reduced within the narrowest possible limits. Rome and the territory immediately around it, if guaranteed to the Pope by the Great Powers, would be sufficient for the temporal needs of the Holy See. The revenue lost by the separation of the remainder of the Papal territories might be replaced by a yearly tribute of reverence paid by the Catholic Powers to the Head of the Church. That the pamphlet advocating this policy was written at the dictation of Napoleon was not made a secret. Its appearance occasioned an indignant protest at Rome. The Pope announced that he would take no part in the proposed Congress unless the doctrines advanced in the pamphlet were disavowed by the French Government. Napoleon in reply submitted to the Pope that he would do well to purchase the guarantee of the Powers for the remainder of his territories by giving up all claim to the Romagna, which he had already lost. Pius retorted that he could not cede what Heaven had granted, not to himself, but to the Church; and that if the Powers would but clear the Romagna of Piedmontese intruders he would soon reconquer the rebellious province without the assistance either of France or of Austria. The attitude assumed by the Papal Court gave Napoleon a good pretext for abandoning the plan of a European Congress, from which he could hardly expect to obtain a grant of Nice and Savoy. It was announced at Paris that the Congress would be postponed; and on the 5th of January, 1860, the change in Napoleon's policy was publicly marked by the dismissal of his Foreign Minister, Walewski, and the appointment in his place of Thouvenel, a friend to Italian union. Ten days later Rattazzi gave up office at Turin, and Cavour returned to power.

[Cavour and Napoleon, Jan-March.]

[Union of the Duchies and the Romagna with Piedmont, March.]

[Savoy and Nice ceded to France.]

Rattazzi, during the six months that he had conducted affairs, had steered safely past some dangerous rocks; but he held the helm with an unsteady and untrusted hand, and he appears to have displayed an unworthy jealousy towards Cavour, who, while out of office, had not ceased to render what services he could to his country. Cavour resumed his post, with the resolve to defer no longer the annexation of Central Italy, but with the heavy consciousness that Napoleon would demand in return for his consent to this union the cession of Nice and Savoy. No Treaty entitled France to claim this reward, for the Austrians still held Venetia; but Napoleon's troops lay at Milan, and by a march southwards they could easily throw Italian affairs again into confusion, and undo all that the last six months had effected. Cavour would perhaps have lent himself to any European combination which, while directed against the extension, of France, would have secured the existence of the Italian Kingdom; but no such alternative to the French alliance proved possible; and the subsequent negotiations between Paris and Turin were intended only to vest with a certain diplomatic propriety the now inevitable transfer of territory from the weaker to the stronger State. A series of propositions made from London with the view of withdrawing from Italy both French and Austrian influence led the Austrian Court to acknowledge that its army would not be employed for the restoration of the sovereigns of Tuscany and Modena. Construing this statement as an admission that the stipulations of Villafranca and Zürich as to the return of the fugitive princes had become impracticable, Napoleon now suggested that Victor Emmanuel should annex Parma and Modena, and assume secular power in the Romagna as Vicar of the Pope, leaving Tuscany to form a separate Government. The establishment of so powerful a kingdom on the confines of France was, he added, not in accordance with the traditions of French foreign policy, and in self-defence France must rectify its military frontier by the acquisition of Nice and Savoy (Feb. 24th). Cavour well understood that the mention of Tuscan independence, and the qualified recognition of the Pope's rights in the Romagna, were no more than suggestions of the means of pressure by which France might enforce the cessions it required. He answered that, although Victor Emmanuel could not alienate any part of his dominions, his Government recognised the same popular rights in Savoy and Nice as in Central Italy; and accordingly that if the population of these districts declared in a legal form their desire to be incorporated with France, the King would not resist their will. Having thus consented to the necessary sacrifice, and ignoring Napoleon's reservations with regard to Tuscany and the Pope, Cavour gave orders that a popular vote should at once be taken in Tuscany, as well as in Parma, Modena, and the Romagna, on the question of union with Piedmont. The voting took place early in March, and gave an overwhelming majority in favour of union. The Pope issued the major excommunication against the authors, abettors, and agents in this work of sacrilege, and heaped curses on curses; but no one seemed the worse for them. Victor Emmanuel accepted the sovereignty that was offered to him, and on the 2nd of April the Parliament of the united kingdom assembled at Turin. It had already been announced to the inhabitants of Nice and Savoy that the King had consented to their union with France. The formality of a plébiscite was enacted a few days later, and under the combined pressure of the French and Sardinian Governments the desired results were obtained. Not more than a few hundred persons protested by their vote against a transaction to which it was understood that the King had no choice but to submit.  [496]

[Cavour on the cession of Nice and Savoy.]

That Victor Emmanuel had at one time been disposed to resist Cavour's surrender of the home of his race is well known. Above a year, however, had passed since the project had been accepted as the basis of the French alliance; and if, during the interval of suspense after Villafranca, the King had cherished a hope that the sacrifice might be avoided without prejudice either to the cause of Italy or to his own relations with Napoleon, Cavour had entertained no such illusions. He knew that the cession was an indispensable link in the chain of his own policy, that policy which had made it possible to defeat Austria, and which, he believed, would lead to the further consolidation of Italy. Looking to Rome, to Palermo, where the smouldering fire might at any moment blaze out, he could not yet dispense with the friendship of Napoleon, he could not provoke the one man powerful enough to shape the action of France in defiance of Clerical and of Legitimist aims. Rattazzi might claim credit for having brought Piedmont past the Treaty of Zürich without loss of territory; Cavour, in a far finer spirit, took upon himself the responsibility for the sacrifice made to France, and bade the Parliament of Italy pass judgment upon his act. The cession of the border-provinces overshadowed what would otherwise have been the brightest scene in Italian history for many generations, the meeting of the first North-Italian Parliament at Turin. Garibaldi, coming as deputy from his birthplace, Nice, uttered words of scorn and injustice against the man who had made him an alien in Italy, and quitted the Chamber. Bitterly as Cavour felt, both now and down to the end of his life, the reproaches that were levelled against him, he allowed no trace of wounded feeling, of impatience, of the sense of wrong, to escape him in the masterly speech in which he justified his policy and won for it the ratification of the Parliament. It was not until a year later, when the hand of death was almost upon him, that fierce words addressed to him face to face by Garibaldi wrung from him the impressive answer, "The act that has made this gulf between us was the most painful duty of my life. By what I have felt myself I know what Garibaldi must have felt. If he refuses me his forgiveness I cannot reproach him for it."  [497]

[The cession in relation to Europe and Italy.]

The annexation of Nice and Savoy by Napoleon was seen with extreme displeasure in Europe generally, and most of all in England. It directly affected the history of Britain by the stimulus which it gave to the development of the Volunteer Forces. Owing their origin to certain demonstrations of hostility towards England made by the French army after Orsini's conspiracy and the acquittal of one of his confederates in London, the Volunteer Forces rose in the three months that followed the annexation of Nice and Savoy from seventy to a hundred and eighty thousand men. If viewed as an indication that the ruler of France would not be content with the frontiers of 1815, the acquisition of the Sub-Alpine provinces might with some reason excite alarm; on no other ground could their transfer be justly condemned. Geographical position, language, commercial interests, separated Savoy from Piedmont and connected it with France; and though in certain parts of the County of Nice the Italian character predominated, this district as a whole bore the stamp not of Piedmont or Liguria but of Provence. Since the separation from France in 1815 there had always been, both in Nice and Savoy, a considerable party which desired reunion with that country. The political and social order of the Sardinian Kingdom had from 1815 to 1848 been so backward, so reactionary, that the middle classes in the border-provinces looked wistfully to France as a land where their own grievances had been removed and their own ideals attained. The constitutional system of Victor Emmanuel, and the despotic system of Louis Napoleon had both been too recently introduced to reverse in the minds of the greater number the political tradition of the preceding thirty years. Thus if there were a few who, like Garibaldi, himself of Genoese descent though born at Nice, passionately resented separation from Italy, they found no considerable party either in Nice or in Savoy animated by the same feeling. On the other hand, the ecclesiastical sentiment of Savoy rendered its transfer to France an actual advantage to the Italian State. The Papacy had here a deeply-rooted influence. The reforms begun by Azeglio's Ministry had been steadily resisted by a Savoyard group of deputies in the interests of Rome. Cavour himself, in the prosecution of his larger plans, had always been exposed to the danger of a coalition between this ultra-Conservative party and his opponents of the other extreme. It was well that in the conflict with the Papacy, without which there could be no such thing as a Kingdom of United Italy, these influences of the Savoyard Church and Noblesse should be removed from the Parliament and the Throne. Honourable as the Savoyard party of resistance had proved themselves in Parliamentary life, loyal and faithful as they were to their sovereign, they were yet not a part of the Italian nation. Their interests were not bound up with the cause of Italian union; their leaders were not inspired with the ideal of Italian national life. The forces that threatened the future of the new State from within were too powerful for the surrender of a priest-governed and half-foreign element to be considered as a real loss.

[Naples.]

Nice and Savoy had hardly been handed over to Napoleon when Garibaldi set out from Genoa to effect the liberation of Sicily and Naples. King Ferdinand II., known to his subjects and to Western Europe as King Bomba, had died a few days before the battle of Magenta, leaving the throne to his son Francis II. In consequence of the friendship shown by Ferdinand to Russia during the Crimean War, and of his refusal to amend his tyrannical system of government, the Western Powers had in 1856 withdrawn their representatives from Naples. On the accession of Francis II. diplomatic intercourse was renewed, and Cavour, who had been at bitter enmity with Ferdinand, sought to establish relations of friendship with his son. In the war against Austria an alliance with Naples would have been of value to Sardinia as a counterpoise to Napoleon's influence, and this alliance Cavour attempted to obtain. He was, however, unsuccessful; and after the Peace of Villafranca the Neapolitan Court threw itself with ardour into schemes for the restoration of the fallen Governments and the overthrow of Piedmontese authority in the Romagna by means of a coalition with Austria and Spain and a counterrevolutionary movement in Italy itself. A rising on behalf of the fugitive Grand Duke of Tuscany was to give the signal for the march of the Neapolitan army northwards. This rising, however, was expected in vain, and the great Catholic design resulted in nothing. Baffled in its larger aims, the Bourbon Government proposed in the spring of 1860 to occupy Umbria and the Marches, in order to prevent the revolutionary movement from spreading farther into the Papal States. Against this Cavour protested, and King Francis yielded to his threat to withdraw the Sardinian ambassador from Naples. Knowing that a conspiracy existed for the restoration of the House of Murat to the Neapolitan throne, which would have given France the ascendency in Southern Italy, Cavour now renewed his demand that Francis II. should enter into alliance with Piedmont, accepting a constitutional system of government and the national Italian policy of Victor Emmanuel. But neither the summons from Turin, nor the agitation of the Muratists, nor the warnings of Great Britain that the Bourbon dynasty could only avert its fall by reform, produced any real change in the spirit of the Neapolitan Court. Ministers were removed, but the absolutist and anti-national system remained the same. Meanwhile Garibaldi was gathering his followers round him in Genoa. On the 15th of April Victor Emmanuel wrote to King Francis that unless his fatal system of policy was immediately abandoned the Piedmontese Government itself might shortly be forced to become the agent of his destruction. Even this menace proved fruitless; and after thus fairly exposing to the Court of Naples the consequence of its own stubbornness, Victor Emmanuel let loose against it the revolutionary forces of Garibaldi.

[Sicily.]

[Garibaldi starts for Sicily, May 5.]

[Garibaldi at Marsala, May 11.]

Since the campaign of 1859 insurrectionary committees had been active in the principal Sicilian towns. The old desire of the Sicilian Liberals for the independence of the island had given place, under the influence of the events of the past year, to the desire for Italian union. On the abandonment of Garibaldi's plan for the march on Rome in November, 1859, the liberation of Sicily had been suggested to him as a more feasible enterprise, and the general himself wavered in the spring of 1860 between the resumption of his Roman project and an attack upon the Bourbons of Naples from the south. The rumour spread through Sicily that Garibaldi would soon appear there at the head of his followers. On the 3rd of April an attempt at insurrection was made at Palermo. It was repressed without difficulty; and although disturbances broke out in other parts of the island, the reports which reached Garibaldi at Genoa as to the spirit and prospects of the Sicilians were so disheartening that for a while he seemed disposed to abandon the project of invasion as hopeless for the present. It was only when some of the Sicilian exiles declared that they would risk the enterprise without him that he resolved upon immediate action. On the night of the 5th of May two steamships lying in the harbour of Genoa were seized, and on these Garibaldi with his Thousand put to sea. Cavour, though he would have preferred that Sicily should remain unmolested until some progress had been made in the consolidation of the North Italian Kingdom, did not venture to restrain Garibaldi's movements, with which he was well acquainted. He required, however, that the expedition should not touch at the island of Sardinia, and gave ostensible orders to his admiral, Persano, to seize the ships of Garibaldi if they should put into any Sardinian port. Garibaldi, who had sheltered the Sardinian Government from responsibility at the outset by the fiction of a sudden capture of the two merchant-ships, continued to spare Victor Emmanuel unnecessary difficulties by avoiding the fleet which was supposed to be on the watch for him off Cagliari in Sardinia, and only interrupted his voyage by a landing at a desolate spot on the Tuscan coast in order to take up artillery and ammunition which were waiting for him there. On the 11th of May, having heard from some English merchantmen that there were no Neapolitan vessels of war at Marsala, he made for this harbour. The first of his two ships entered it in safety and disembarked her crew; the second, running on a rock, lay for some time within range of the guns of a Neapolitan war-steamer which was bearing up towards the port. But for some unknown reason the Neapolitan commander delayed opening fire, and the landing of Garibaldi's followers was during this interval completed without loss.  [498]

[Garibaldi captures Palermo, May 26.]

On the following day the little army, attired in the red shirts which are worn by cattle-ranchers in South America, marched eastwards from Marsala. Bands of villagers joined them as they moved through the country, and many unexpected adherents were gained among the priests. On the third day's march Neapolitan troops were seen in position at Calatafimi. They were attacked by Garibaldi, and, though far superior in number, were put to the rout. The moral effects of this first victory were very great. The Neapolitan commander retired into Palermo, leaving Garibaldi master of the western portion of the island. Insurrection spread towards the interior; the revolutionary party at Palermo itself regained its courage and prepared to co-operate with Garibaldi on his approach. On nearing the city Garibaldi determined that he could not risk a direct assault upon the forces which occupied it. He resolved, if possible, to lure part of the defenders into the mountains, and during their absence to throw himself into the city and to trust to the energy of its inhabitants to maintain himself there. This strategy succeeded. While the officer in command of some of the Neapolitan battalions, tempted by an easy victory over the ill-disciplined Sicilian bands opposed to him, pursued his beaten enemy into the mountains, Garibaldi with the best of his troops fought his way into Palermo on the night of May 26th. Fighting continued in the streets during the next two days, and the cannon of the forts and of the Neapolitan vessels in harbour ineffectually bombarded the city. On the 30th, at the moment when the absent battalions were coming again into sight, an armistice was signed on board the British man-of-war Hannibal. The Neapolitan commander gave up to Garibaldi the bank and public buildings, and withdrew into the forts outside the town. But the Government at Naples was now becoming thoroughly alarmed; and considering Palermo as lost, it directed the troops to be shipped to Messina and to Naples itself. Garibaldi was thus left in undisputed possession of the Sicilian capital. He remained there for nearly two months, assuming the government of Sicily as Dictator in the name of Victor Emmanuel, appointing Ministers, and levying taxes. Heavy reinforcements reached him from Italy. The Neapolitans, driven from the interior as well as from the towns occupied by the invader, now held only the north-eastern extremity of the island. On the 20th of July Garibaldi, operating both by land and sea, attacked and defeated them at Milazzo on the northern coast. The result of this victory was that Messina itself, with the exception of the citadel, was evacuated by the Neapolitans without resistance. Garibaldi, whose troops now numbered eighteen thousand, was master of the island from sea to sea, and could with confidence look forward to the overthrow of Bourbon authority on the Italian mainland.

[The Party of Action.]

During Garibaldi's stay at Palermo the antagonism between the two political creeds which severed those whose devotion to Italy was the strongest came clearly into view. This antagonism stood embodied in its extreme form in the contrast between Mazzini and Cavour. Mazzini, handling moral and political conceptions with something of the independence of a mathematician, laid it down as the first duty of the Italian nation to possess itself of Rome and Venice, regardless of difficulties that might be raised from without. By conviction he desired that Italy should be a Republic, though under certain conditions he might be willing to tolerate the monarchy of Victor Emmanuel. Cavour, accurately observing the play of political forces in Europe, conscious above all of the strength of those ties which still bound Napoleon to the clerical cause, knew that there were limits which Italy could not at present pass without ruin. The centre of Mazzini's hopes, an advance upon Rome itself, he knew to be an act of self-destruction for Italy, and this advance he was resolved at all costs to prevent. Cavour had not hindered the expedition to Sicily; he had not considered it likely to embroil Italy with its ally; but neither had he been the author of this enterprise. The liberation of Sicily might be deemed the work rather of the school of Mazzini than of Cavour. Garibaldi indeed was personally loyal to Victor Emmanuel; but around him there were men who, if not Republicans, were at least disposed to make the grant of Sicily to Victor Emmanuel conditional upon the king's fulfilling the will of the so-called Party of Action, and consenting to an attack upon Rome. Under the influence of these politicians Garibaldi, in reply to a deputation expressing to him the desire of the Sicilians for union with the Kingdom of Victor Emmanuel, declared that he had come to fight not for Sicily alone but for all Italy, and that if the annexation of Sicily was to take place before the union of Italy was assured, he must withdraw his hand from the work and retire. The effect produced by these words of Garibaldi was so serious that the Ministers whom he had placed in office resigned. Garibaldi endeavoured to substitute for them men more agreeable to the Party of Action, but a demonstration in Palermo itself forced him to nominate Sicilians in favour of immediate annexation. The public opinion of the island was hostile to Republicanism and to the friends of Mazzini; nor could the prevailing anarchy long continue without danger of a reactionary movement. Garibaldi himself possessed no glimmer of administrative faculty. After weeks of confusion and misgovernment he saw the necessity of accepting direction from Turin, and consented to recognise as Pro-Dictator of the island a nominee of Cavour, the Piedmontese Depretis. Under the influence of Depretis a commencement was made in the work of political and social reorganisation.  [499]

[Cavour's policy with regard to Naples.]

[Garibaldi crosses to the mainland, Aug. 19.]

Cavour, during Garibaldi's preparation for his descent upon Sicily and until the capture of Palermo, had affected to disavow and condemn the enterprise as one undertaken by individuals in spite of the Government, and at their own risk. The Piedmontese ambassador was still at Naples as the representative of a friendly Court; and in reply to the reproaches of Germany and Russia, Cavour alleged that the title of Dictator of Sicily in the name of Victor Emmanuel had been assumed by Garibaldi without the knowledge or consent of his sovereign. But whatever might be said to Foreign Powers, Cavour, from the time of the capture of Palermo, recognised that the hour had come for further steps towards Italian union; and, without committing himself to any definite line of action, he began already to contemplate the overthrow of the Bourbon dynasty at Naples. It was in vain that King Francis now released his political prisoners, declared the Constitution of 1848 in force, and tendered to Piedmont the alliance which he had before refused. Cavour, in reply to his overtures, stated that he could not on his own authority pledge Piedmont to the support of a dynasty now almost in the agonies of dissolution, and that the matter must await the meeting of Parliament at Turin. Thus far the way had not been absolutely closed to a reconciliation between the two Courts; but after the victory of Garibaldi at Milazzo and the evacuation of Messina at the end of July Cavour cast aside all hesitation and reserve. He appears to have thought a renewal of the war with Austria probable, and now strained every nerve to become master of Naples and its fleet before Austria could take the field. He ordered Admiral Persano to leave two ships of war to cover Garibaldi's passage to the mainland, and with one ship to proceed to Naples himself, and there excite insurrection and win over the Neapolitan fleet to the flag of Victor Emmanuel. Persano reached Naples on the 3rd of August, and on the next day the negotiations between the two Courts were broken off. On the 19th Garibaldi crossed from Sicily to the mainland. His march upon the capital was one unbroken triumph.

[Persano and Villamarina at Naples.]

[Departure of King Francis, Sept. 6.]

[Garibaldi enters Naples, Sept. 7.]

It was the hope of Cavour that before Garibaldi could reach Naples a popular movement in the city itself would force the King to take flight, so that Garibaldi on his arrival would find the machinery of government, as well as the command of the fleet and the army, already in the hands of Victor Emmanuel's representatives. If war with Austria was really impending, incalculable mischief might be caused by the existence of a semi-independent Government at Naples, reckless, in its enthusiasm for the march on Rome, of the effect which its acts might produce on the French alliance. In any case the control of Italian affairs could but half belong to the King and his Minister if Garibaldi, in the full glory of his unparalleled exploits, should add the Dictatorship of Naples to the Dictatorship of Sicily. Accordingly Cavour plied every art to accelerate the inevitable revolution. Persano and the Sardinian ambassador, Villamarina, had their confederates in the Bourbon Ministry and in the Royal Family itself. But their efforts to drive King Francis from Naples, and to establish the authority of Victor Emmanuel before Garibaldi's arrival, were baffled partly by the tenacity of the King and Queen, partly by the opposition of the committees of the Party of Action, who were determined that power should fall into no hands but those of Garibaldi himself. It was not till Garibaldi had reached Salerno, and the Bourbon generals had one after another declined to undertake the responsibility of command in a battle against him, that Francis resolved on flight. It was now feared that he might induce the fleet to sail with him, and even that he might hand it over to the Austrians. The crews, it was believed, were willing to follow the King; the officers, though inclined to the Italian cause, would be powerless to prevent them. There was not an hour to lose. On the night of September 5th, after the King's intention to quit the capital had become known, Persano and Villamarina disguised themselves, and in company with their partisans mingled with the crews of the fleet, whom they induced by bribes and persuasion to empty the boilers and to cripple the engines of their ships. When, on the 6th, King Francis, having announced his intention to spare the capital bloodshed, went on board a mail steamer and quitted the harbour, accompanied by the ambassadors of Austria, Prussia, and Spain, only one vessel of the fleet of followed him. An urgent summons was sent to Garibaldi, whose presence was now desired by all parties alike in order to prevent the outbreak of disorders. Leaving his troops at Salerno, Garibaldi came by railroad to Naples on the morning of the 7th, escorted only by some of his staff. The forts were still garrisoned by eight thousand of the Bourbon troops, but all idea of resistance had been abandoned, and Garibaldi drove fearlessly through the city in the midst of joyous crowds. His first act as Dictator was to declare the ships of war belonging to the State of the Two Sicilies united to those of King Victor Emmanuel under Admiral Persano's command. Before sunset the flag of Italy was hoisted by the Neapolitan fleet. The army was not to be so easily incorporated with the national forces. King Francis, after abandoning the idea of a battle between Naples and Salerno, had ordered the mass of his troops to retire upon Capua in order to make a final struggle on the line of the Volturno, and this order had been obeyed.  [500]

[The Piedmontese army enters Umbria and the Marches. Sept. 11.]

[Fall of Ancona, Sept. 25.]

As soon as it had become evident that the entry of Garibaldi into Naples could not be anticipated by the establishment of Victor Emmanuel's own authority, Cavour recognised that bold and aggressive action on the part of the National Government was now necessity. Garibaldi made no secret or his intention to carry the Italian arms to Rome. The time was past when the national movement could be checked at the frontiers of Naples and Tuscany. It remained only for Cavour to throw the King's own troops into the Papal States before Garibaldi could move from Naples, and, while winning for Italy the last foot of ground that could be won without an actual conflict with France, to stop short at those limits where the soldiers of Napoleon would certainly meet an invader with their fire. The Pope was still in possession of the Marches, of Umbria, and of the territory between the Apennines and the coast from Orvieto to Terracina. Cavour had good reason to believe that Napoleon would not strike on behalf of the Temporal Power until this last narrow district was menaced. He resolved to seize upon the Marches and Umbria, and to brave the consequences. On the day of Garibaldi's entry into Naples a despatch was sent by Cavour to the Papal Government requiring, in the name of Victor Emmanuel, the disbandment of the foreign mercenaries who in the previous spring had plundered Perugia, and whose presence was a continued menace to the peace of Italy. The announcement now made by Napoleon that he must break off diplomatic relations with the Sardinian Government in case of the invasion of the Papal States produced no effect. Cavour replied that by no other means could he prevent revolution from mastering all Italy, and on the 10th of September the French ambassador quitted Turin. Without waiting for Antonelli's answer to his ultimatum, Cavour ordered the King's troops to cross the frontier. The Papal army was commanded by Lamoricière, a French general who had gained some reputation in Algiers; but the resistance offered to the Piedmontese was unexpectedly feeble. The column which entered Umbria reached the southern limit without encountering any serious opposition except from the Irish garrison of Spoleto. In the Marches, where Lamoricière had a considerable force at his disposal, the dispersion of the Papal troops and the incapacity shown in their command brought the campaign to a rapid and inglorious end. The main body of the defenders was routed on the Musone, near Loreto, on the 19th of September. Other divisions surrendered, and Ancona alone remained to Lamoricière. Vigorously attacked in this fortress both by land and sea, Lamoricière surrendered after a siege of eight days. Within three weeks from Garibaldi's entry into Naples the Piedmontese army had completed the task imposed upon it, and Victor Emmanuel was master of Italy as far as the Abruzzi.

[Cavour, Garibaldi, and the Party of Action.]

Cavour's successes had not come a day too soon, for Garibaldi, since his entry into Naples, was falling more and more into the hands of the Party of Action, and, while protesting his loyalty to Victor Emmanuel, was openly announcing that he would march the Party of on Rome whether the King's Government permitted it or no. In Sicily the officials appointed by this Party were proceeding with such violence that Depretis, unable to obtain troops from Cavour, resigned his post. Garibaldi suddenly appeared at Palermo on the 11th of September, appointed a new Pro-Dictator, and repeated to the Sicilians that their union with the Kingdom of Victor Emmanuel must be postponed until all members of the Italian family were free. But even the personal presence and the angry words of Garibaldi were powerless to check the strong expression of Sicilian opinion in favour of immediate and unconditional annexation. His visit to Palermo was answered by the appearance of a Sicilian deputation at Turin demanding immediate union, and complaining that the island was treated by Garibaldi's officers like a conquered province. At Naples the rash and violent utterances of the Dictator were equally condemned. The Ministers whom he had himself appointed resigned. Garibaldi replaced them by others who were almost Republicans, and sent a letter to Victor Emmanuel requesting him to consent to the march upon Rome and to dismiss Cavour. It was known in Turin that at this very moment Napoleon was taking steps to increase the French force in Rome, and to garrison the whole of the territory that still remained to the Pope. Victor Emmanuel understood how to reply to Garibaldi's letter. He remained true to his Minister, and sent orders to Villamarina at Naples in case Garibaldi should proclaim the Republic to break off all relations with him and to secure the fleet. The fall of Ancona on September 28th brought a timely accession of popularity and credit to Cavour. He made the Parliament which assembled at Turin four days later arbiter in the struggle between Garibaldi and himself, and received from it an almost unanimous vote of confidence. Garibaldi would perhaps have treated lightly any resolution of Parliament which conflicted with his own opinion: he shrank from a breach with the soldier of Novara and Solferino. Now, as at other moments of danger, the character and reputation of Victor Emmanuel stood Italy in good stead. In the enthusiasm which Garibaldi's services to Italy excited in every patriotic heart, there was room for thankfulness that Italy possessed a sovereign and a statesman strong enough even to withstand its hero when his heroism endangered the national cause.  [501]

[The armies on the Volturno.]

[Meeting of Victor Emmanuel and Garibaldi, Oct. 26.]

[Fall of Gaeta, Feb. 14, 1861.]

The King of Naples had not yet abandoned the hope that one or more of the European Powers would intervene in his behalf. The trustworthy part of his army had gathered round the fortress of Capua on the Volturno, and there were indications that Garibaldi would here meet with far more serious resistance than he had yet encountered. While he was still in Naples, his troops, which had pushed northwards, sustained a repulse at Cajazzo. Emboldened by this success, the Neapolitan army at the beginning of October assumed the offensive. It was with difficulty that Garibaldi, placing himself again at the head of his forces, drove the enemy back to Capua. But the arms of Victor Emmanuel were now thrown into the scale. Crossing the Apennines, and driving before him the weak force that was intended to bar his way at Isernia, the King descended in the rear of the Neapolitan army. The Bourbon commander, warned of his approach, moved northwards on the line of the Garigliano, leaving a garrison to defend Capua. Garibaldi followed on his track, and in the neighbourhood of Teano met King Victor Emmanuel (October 26th). The meeting is said to have been cordial on the part of the King, reserved on the part of Garibaldi, who saw in the King's suite the men by whom he had been prevented from invading the Papal States in the previous year. In spite of their common patriotism the volunteers of Garibaldi and the army of Victor Emmanuel were rival bodies, and the relations between the chiefs of each camp were strained and difficult. Garibaldi himself returned to the siege of Capua, while the King marched northwards against the retreating Neapolitans. All that was great in Garibaldi's career was now in fact accomplished. The politicians about him had attempted at Naples, as in Sicily, to postpone the union with Victor Emmanuel's monarchy, and to convoke a Southern Parliament which should fix the conditions on which annexation would be permitted; but, after discrediting the General, they had been crushed by public opinion, and a popular vote which was taken at the end of October on the question of immediate union showed the majority in favour of this course to be overwhelming. After the surrender of Capua on the 2nd of November, Victor Emmanuel made his entry into Naples. Garibaldi, whose request for the Lieutenancy of Southern Italy for the space of a year with full powers was refused by the King,  [502] declined all minor honours and rewards, and departed to his home, still filled with resentment against Cavour, and promising his soldiers that he would return in the spring and lead them to Rome and Venice. The reduction of Gaeta, where King Francis II. had taken refuge, and of the citadel of Messina, formed the last act of the war. The French fleet for some time prevented the Sardinians from operating against Gaeta from the sea, and the siege in consequence made slow progress. It was not until the middle of January, 1861, that Napoleon permitted the French admiral to quit his station. The bombardment was now opened both by land and sea, and after a brave resistance Gaeta surrendered on the 14th of February. King Francis and his young Queen, a sister of the Empress of Austria, were conveyed in a French steamer to the Papal States, and there began their life-long exile. The citadel of Messina, commanded by one of the few Neapolitan officers who showed any soldierly spirit, maintained its obstinate defence for a month after the Bourbon flag had disappeared from the mainland.

[Cavour's policy with regard to Rome and Venice.]

[The Free Church in the Free State.]

Thus in the spring of 1861, within two years from the outbreak of war with Austria, Italy with the exception of Rome and Venice was united under Victor Emmanuel. Of all the European Powers, Great Britain alone watched the creation of the new Italian Kingdom with complete sympathy and approval. Austria, though it had made peace at Zürich, declined to renew diplomatic intercourse with Sardinia, and protested against the assumption by Victor Emmanuel of the title of King of Italy. Russia, the ancient patron of the Neapolitan Bourbons, declared that geographical conditions alone prevented its intervention against their despoilers. Prussia, though under a new sovereign, had not yet completely severed the ties which bound it to Austria. Nevertheless, in spite of wide political ill-will, and of the passionate hostility of the clerical party throughout Europe, there was little probability that the work of the Italian people would be overthrown by external force. The problem which faced Victor Emmanuel's Government was not so much the frustration of reactionary designs from without as the determination of the true line of policy to be followed in regard to Rome and Venice. There were few who, like Azeglio, held that Rome might be permanently left outside the Italian Kingdom; there were none who held this of Venice. Garibaldi might be mad enough to hope for victory in a campaign against Austria and against France at the head of such a troop as he himself could muster; Cavour would have deserved ill of his country if he had for one moment countenanced the belief that the force which had overthrown the Neapolitan Bourbons could with success, or with impunity to Italy, measure itself against the defenders of Venetia or of Rome. Yet the mind of Cavour was not one which could rest in mere passive expectancy as to the future, or in mere condemnation of the unwise schemes of others. His intelligence, so luminous, so penetrating, that in its utterances we seem at times to be listening to the very spirit of the age, ranged over wide fields of moral and of spiritual interests in its forecast of the future of Italy, and spent its last force in one of those prophetic delineations whose breadth and power the world can feel, though a later time alone can judge of their correspondence with the destined course of history. Venice was less to Europe than Rome; its transfer to Italy would, Cavour believed, be effected either by arms or negotiations so soon as the German race should find a really national Government, and refuse the service which had hitherto been exacted from it for the maintenance of Austrian interests. It was to Prussia, as the representative of nationality in Germany, that Cavour looked as the natural ally of Italy in the vindication of that part of the national inheritance which still lay under the dominion of the Hapsburg. Rome, unlike Venice, was not only defended by foreign arms, it was the seat of a Power whose empire over the mind of man was not the sport of military or political vicissitudes. Circumstances might cause France to relax its grasp on Rome, but it was not to such an accident that Cavour looked for the incorporation of Rome with Italy. He conceived that the time would arrive when the Catholic world would recognise that the Church would best fulfil its task in complete separation from temporal power. Rome would then assume its natural position as the centre of the Italian State; the Church would be the noblest friend, not the misjudging enemy, of the Italian national monarchy. Cavour's own religious beliefs were perhaps less simple than he chose to represent them. Occupying himself, however, with institutions, not with dogmas, he regarded the Church in profound earnestness as a humanising and elevating power. He valued its independence so highly that even on the suppression of the Piedmontese monasteries he had refused to give to the State the administration of the revenue arising from the sale of their lands, and had formed this into a fund belonging to the Church itself, in order that the clergy might not become salaried officers of the State. Human freedom was the principle in which he trusted; and looking upon the Church as the greatest association formed by men, he believed that here too the rule of freedom, of the absence of State-regulation, would in the end best serve man's highest interests. With the passing away of the Pope's temporal power, Cavour imagined that the constitution of the Church itself would become more democratic, more responsive to the movement of the modern world. His own effort in ecclesiastical reform had been to improve the condition and to promote the independence of the lower clergy. He had hoped that each step in their moral and material progress would make them more national at heart; and though this hope had been but partially fulfilled, Cavour had never ceased to cherish the ideal of a national Church which, while recognising its Head in Rome, should cordially and without reserve accept the friendship of the Italian State.  [503]

[Death of Cavour, June 6, 1861.]

[Free Church in Free State.]

It was in the exposition of these principles, in the enforcement of the common moral interest of Italian nationality and the Catholic Church, that Cavour gave his last counsels to the Italian Parliament. He was not himself to lead the nation farther towards the Promised Land. The immense exertions which he had maintained during the last three years, the indignation and anxiety caused to him by Garibaldi's attacks, produced an illness which Cavour's own careless habits of life and the unskilfulness of his doctors rendered fatal. With dying lips he repeated to those about him the words in which he had summed up his policy in the Italian Parliament: "A free Church in a free State."  [504] Other Catholic lands had adjusted by Concordats with the Papacy the conflicting claims of temporal and spiritual authority in such matters as the appointment of bishops, the regulation of schools, the family-rights of persons married without ecclesiastical form. Cavour appears to have thought that in Italy, where the whole nation was in a sense Catholic, the Church might as safely and as easily be left to manage its own affairs as in the United States, where the Catholic community is only one among many religious societies. His optimism, his sanguine and large-hearted tolerance, was never more strikingly shown than in this fidelity to the principle of liberty, even in the case of those who for the time declined all reconciliation with the Italian State. Whether Cavour's ideal was an impracticable fancy a later age will decide. The ascendency within the Church of Rome would seem as yet to have rested with the elements most opposed to the spirit of the time, most obstinately bent on setting faith and reason in irreconcilable enmity. In place of that democratic movement within the hierarchy and the priesthood which Cavour anticipated, absolutism has won a new crown in the doctrine of Papal Infallibility. Catholic dogma has remained impervious to the solvents which during the last thirty years have operated with perceptible success on the theology of Protestant lands. Each conquest made in the world of thought and knowledge is still noted as the next appropriate object of denunciation by the Vatican. Nevertheless the cautious spirit will be slow to conclude that hopes like those of Cavour were wholly vain. A single generation may see but little of the seed-time, nothing of the harvests that are yet to enrich mankind. And even if all wider interests be left out of view, enough remains to justify Cavour's policy of respect for the independence of the Church in the fact that Italy during the thirty years succeeding the establishment of its union has remained free from civil war. Cavour was wont to refer to the Constitution which the French National Assembly imposed upon the clergy in 1790 as the type of erroneous legislation. Had his own policy and that of his successors not been animated by a wiser spirit; had the Government of Italy, after overthrowing the Pope's temporal sovereignty, sought enemies among the rural priesthood and their congregations, the provinces added to the Italian Kingdom by Garibaldi would hardly have been maintained by the House of Savoy without a second and severer struggle. Between the ideal Italy which filled the thoughts not only of Mazzini but of some of the best English minds of that time-the land of immemorial greatness, touched once more by the divine hand and advancing from strength to strength as the intellectual and moral pioneer among nations-between this ideal and the somewhat hard and commonplace realities of the Italy of to-day there is indeed little enough resemblance. Poverty, the pressure of inordinate taxation, the physical and moral habits inherited from centuries of evil government,-all these have darkened in no common measure the conditions from which Italian national life has to be built up. If in spite of overwhelming difficulties each crisis has hitherto been surmounted; if, with all that is faulty and infirm, the omens for the future of Italy are still favourable, one source of its good fortune has been the impress given to its ecclesiastical policy by the great statesman to whom above all other men it owes the accomplishment of its union, and who, while claiming for Italy the whole of its national inheritance, yet determined to inflict no needless wound upon the conscience of Rome.

CHAPTER XXIII.

Germany after 1858-The Regency in Prussia-Army re-organisation-King William I.-Conflict between the Crown and the Parliament-Bismarck-The struggle continued-Austria from 1859-The October Diploma-Resistance of Hungary-The Reichsrath-Russia under Alexander II.-Liberation of the Serfs-Poland-The Insurrection of 1863-Agrarian measures in Poland-Schleswig-Holstein-Death of Frederick VII.-Plans of Bismarck-Campaign in Schleswig-Conference of London-Treaty of Vienna-England and Napoleon III.-Prussia and Austria-Convention of Gastein-Italy-Alliance of Prussia with Italy-Proposals for a Congress fail-War between Austria and Prussia-Napoleon III.-Königgrätz- Custozza-Mediation of Napoleon-Treaty of Prague-South Germany-Projects for compensation to France-Austria and Hungary-Deák-Establishment of the Dual System in Austria-Hungary.

[Germany from 1858.]

[The Regency in Prussia, Oct. 1858.]

Shortly before the events which broke the power of Austria in Italy, the German people believed themselves to have entered on a new political era. King Frederick William IV., who, since 1848, had disappointed every hope that had been fixed on Prussia and on himself, was compelled by mental disorder to withdraw from public affairs in the autumn of 1858. His brother, Prince William of Prussia, who had for a year acted as the King's representative, now assumed the Regency. In the days when King Frederick William still retained some vestiges of his reputation the Prince of Prussia had been unpopular, as the supposed head of the reactionary party; but the events of the last few years had exhibited him in a better aspect. Though strong in his belief both in the Divine right of kings in general, and in the necessity of a powerful monarchical rule in Prussia, he was disposed to tolerate, and even to treat with a certain respect, the humble elements of constitutional government which he found in existence. There was more manliness in his nature than in that of his brother, more belief in the worth of his own people. The espionage, the servility, the overdone professions of sanctity in Manteuffel's régime displeased him, but most of all he despised its pusillanimity in the conduct of foreign affairs. His heart indeed was Prussian, not German, and the destiny which created him the first Emperor of united Germany was not of his own making nor of his own seeking; but he felt that Prussia ought to hold a far greater station both in Germany and in Europe than it had held during his brother's reign, and that the elevation of the State to the position which it ought to occupy was the task that lay before himself. During the twelve months preceding the Regency the retirement of the King had not been treated as more than temporary, and the Prince of Prussia, though constantly at variance with Manteuffel's Cabinet, had therefore not considered himself at liberty to remove his brother's advisers. His first act on the assumption of the constitutional office of Regent was to dismiss the hated Ministry. Prince Antony of Hohenzollern-Sigmaringen was called to office, and posts in the Government were given to men well known as moderate Liberals. Though the Regent stated in clear terms that he had no intention of forming a Liberal party-administration, his action satisfied public opinion. The troubles and the failures of 1849 had inclined men to be content with far less than had been asked years before. The leaders of the more advanced sections among the Liberals preferred for the most part to remain outside Parliamentary life rather than to cause embarrassment to the new Government; and the elections of 1859 sent to Berlin a body of representatives fully disposed to work with the Regent and his Ministers in the policy of guarded progress which they had laid down.

[Revival of idea of German union.]

This change of spirit in the Prussian Government, followed by the events that established Italian independence, told powerfully upon public opinion throughout Germany. Hopes that had been crushed in 1849 now revived. With the collapse of military despotism in the Austrian Empire the clouds of reaction seemed everywhere to be passing away; it was possible once more to think of German national union and of common liberties in which all Germans should share. As in 1808 the rising of the Spaniards against Napoleon had inspired Blücher and his countrymen with the design of a truly national effort against their foreign oppressor, so in 1859 the work of Cavour challenged the Germans to prove that their national patriotism and their political aptitude were not inferior to those of the Italian people. Men who had been prominent in the National Assembly at Frankfort again met one another and spoke to the nation. In the Parliaments of several of the minor States resolutions were brought forward in favour of the creation of a central German authority. Protests were made against the infringement of constitutional rights that had been common during the last ten years; patriotic meetings and demonstrations were held; and a National Society, in imitation of that which had prepared the way for union with Piedmont in Central and Southern Italy, was formally established. There was indeed no such preponderating opinion in favour of Prussian leadership as had existed in 1848. The southern States had displayed a strong sympathy with Austria in its war with Napoleon III., and had regarded the neutrality of Prussia during the Italian campaign as a desertion of the German cause. Here there were few who looked with friendly eye upon Berlin. It was in the minor states of the north, and especially in Hesse-Cassel, where the struggle between the Elector and his subjects was once more breaking out, that the strongest hopes were directed towards the new Prussian ruler, and the measures of his government were the most anxiously watched.

[The Regent of Prussia and the army.]

[Scheme of reorganisation.]

The Prince Regent was a soldier by profession and habit. He was born in 1797, and had been present at the battle of Arcis-sur-Aube, the last fought by Napoleon against the Allies in 1814. During forty years he had served on every commission that had been occupied with Prussian military affairs; no man better understood the military organisation of his country, no man more clearly recognised its capacities and its faults. The defective condition of the Prussian army had been the principal, though not the sole, cause of the miserable submission to Austria at Olmütz in 1850, and of the abandonment of all claims to German leadership on the part of the Court of Berlin. The Prince would himself have risked all chances of disaster rather than inflict upon Prussia the humiliation with which King Frederick William then purchased peace; but Manteuffel had convinced his sovereign that the army could not engage in a campaign against Austria without ruin. Military impotence was the only possible justification for the policy then adopted, and the Prince determined that Prussia should not under his own rule have the same excuse for any political shortcomings. The work of reorganisation was indeed begun during the reign of Frederick William IV., through the enforcement of the three-years' service to which the conscript was liable by law, but which had fallen during the long period of peace to two-years' service. The number of troops with the colours was thus largely increased, but no addition had been made to the yearly levy, and no improvement attempted in the organisation of the Landwehr. When in 1859 the order for mobilisation was given in consequence of the Italian war, it was discovered that the Landwehr battalions were almost useless. The members of this force were mostly married men approaching middle life, who had been too long engaged in other pursuits to resume their military duties with readiness, and whose call to the field left their families without means of support and chargeable upon the public purse. Too much, in the judgment of the reformers of the Prussian army, was required from men past youth, not enough from youth itself. The plan of the Prince Regent was therefore to enforce in the first instance with far more stringency the law imposing the universal obligation to military service; and, while thus raising the annual levy from 40,000 to 60,000 men, to extend the period of service in the Reserve, into which the young soldier passed on the completion of his three years with the colours, from two to four years. Asserting with greater rigour its claim to seven years in the early life of the citizen, the State would gain, without including the Landwehr, an effective army of four hundred thousand men, and would practically be able to dispense with the service of those who were approaching middle life, except in cases of great urgency. In the execution of this reform the Government could on its own authority enforce the increased levy and the full three years' service in the standing army; for the prolongation of service in the Reserve, and for the greater expenditure entailed by the new system, the consent of Parliament was necessary.

[The Prussian Parliament and the army, 1859-1861.]

[Accession of King William, Jan., 1861.]

The general principles on which the proposed reorganisation was based were accepted by public opinion and by both Chambers of Parliament; it was, however, held by the Liberal leaders that the increase of expenditure might, without impairing the efficiency of the army, be avoided by returning to the system of two-years service with the colours, which during so long a period had been thought sufficient for the training of the soldier. The Regent, however, was convinced that the discipline and the instruction of three years were indispensable to the Prussian conscript, and he refused to accept the compromise suggested. The mobilisation of 1859 had given him an opportunity for forming additional battalions; and although the Landwehr were soon dismissed to their homes the new formation was retained, and the place of the retiring militiamen was filled by conscripts of the year. The Lower Chamber, in voting the sum required in 1860 for the increased numbers of the army, treated this arrangement as temporary, and limited the grant to one year; in spite of this the Regent, who on the death of his brother in January, 1861, became King of Prussia, formed the additional battalions into new regiments, and gave to these new regiments their names and colours. The year 1861 passed without bringing the questions at issue between the Government and the Chamber of Deputies to a settlement. Public feeling, disappointed in the reserved and hesitating policy which was still followed by the Court in German affairs, stimulated too by the rapid consolidation of the Italian monarchy, which the Prussian Government on its part had as yet declined to recognise, was becoming impatient and resentful. It seemed as if the Court of Berlin still shrank from committing itself to the national cause. The general confidence reposed in the new ruler at his accession was passing away; and when in the summer of 1861 the dissolution of Parliament took place, the elections resulted in the return not only of a Progressist majority, but of a majority little inclined to submit to measures of compromise, or to shrink from the assertion of its full constitutional rights.

[First Parliament of 1862.]

[Dissolution, May, 1862.]

[Second Parliament of 1862.]

[Bismarck becomes Minister, Sept., 1862.]

The new Parliament assembled at the beginning of 1862. Under the impulse of public opinion, the Government was now beginning to adopt a more vigorous policy in German affairs, and to re-assert Prussia's claims to an independent leadership in defiance of the restored Diet of Frankfort. But the conflict with the Lower Chamber was not to be averted by revived energy abroad. The Army Bill, which was passed at once by the Upper House, was referred to a hostile Committee on reaching the Chamber of Deputies, and a resolution was carried insisting on the right of the representatives of the people to a far more effective control over the Budget than they had hitherto exercised. The result of this vote was the dissolution of Parliament by the King, and the resignation of the Ministry, with the exception of General Roon, Minister of War, and two of the most conservative among his colleagues. Prince Hohenlohe, President of the Upper House, became chief of the Government. There was now an open and undisguised conflict between the Crown and the upholders of Parliamentary rights. "King or Parliament" was the expression in which the newly-appointed Ministers themselves summed up the struggle. The utmost pressure was exerted by the Government in the course of the elections which followed, but in vain. The Progressist Party returned in overwhelming strength to the new Parliament; the voice of the country seemed unmistakably to condemn the policy to which the King and his advisers were committed. After a long and sterile discussion in the Budget Committee, the debate on the Army Bill began in the Lower House on the 11th of September. Its principal clauses were rejected by an almost unanimous vote. An attempt made by General Roon to satisfy his opponents by a partial and conditional admission of the principle of two-years' service resulted only in increased exasperation on both sides. Hohenlohe resigned, and the King now placed in power, at the head of a Ministry of conflict, the most resolute and unflinching of all his friends, the most contemptuous scorner of Parliamentary majorities, Herr von Bismarck.  [505]

[Bismarck.]

The new Minister was, like Cavour, a country gentleman, and, like Cavour, he owed his real entry into public life to the revolutionary movement of 1848. He had indeed held some obscure official posts before that epoch, but it was as a member of the United Diet which assembled at Berlin in April, 1848, that he first attracted the attention of King or people. He was one of two Deputies who refused to join in the vote of thanks to Frederick William IV. for the Constitution which he had promised to Prussia. Bismarck, then thirty-three years old, was a Royalist of Royalists, the type, as it seemed, of the rough and masterful Junker, or Squire, of the older parts of Prussia, to whom all reforms from those of Stein downwards were hateful, all ideas but those of the barrack and the kennel alien. Others in the spring of 1848 lamented the concessions made by the Crown to the people; Bismarck had the courage to say so. When reaction came there were naturally many, and among them King Frederick William, who were interested in the man who in the heyday of constitutional enthusiasm had treated the whole movement as so much midsummer madness, and had remained faithful to monarchical authority as the one thing needful for the Prussian State. Bismarck continued to take a prominent part in the Parliaments of Berlin and Erfurt; it was not, however, till 1851 that he passed into the inner official circle. He was then sent as the representative of Prussia to the restored Diet of Frankfort. As an absolutist and a conservative, brought up in the traditions of the Holy Alliance, Bismarck had in earlier days looked up to Austria as the mainstay of monarchical order and the historic barrier against the flood of democratic and wind-driven sentiment which threatened to deluge Germany. He had even approved the surrender made at Olmütz in 1850, as a matter of necessity; but the belief now grew strong in his mind, and was confirmed by all he saw at Frankfort, that Austria under Schwarzenberg's rule was no longer the Power which had been content to share the German leadership with Prussia in the period before 1848, but a Power which meant to rule in Germany uncontrolled. In contact with the representatives of that outworn system which Austria had resuscitated at Frankfort, and with the instruments of the dominant State itself, Bismarck soon learnt to detest the paltriness of the one and the insolence of the other. He declared the so-called Federal system to be a mere device for employing the secondary German States for the aggrandisement of Austria and the humiliation of Prussia. The Court of Vienna, and with it the Diet of Frankfort, became in his eyes the enemy of Prussian greatness and independence. During the Crimean war he was the vigorous opponent of an alliance with the Western Powers, not only from distrust of France, and from regard towards Russia as on the whole the most constant and the most natural ally of his own country, but from the conviction that Prussia ought to assert a national policy wholly independent of that of the Court of Vienna. That the Emperor of Austria was approaching more or less nearly to union with France and England was, in Bismarck's view, a good reason why Prussia should stand fast in its relations of friendship with St. Petersburg.  [506] The policy of neutrality, which King Frederick William and Manteuffel adopted more out of disinclination to strenuous action than from any clear political view, was advocated by Bismarck for reasons which, if they made Europe nothing and Prussia everything, were at least inspired by a keen and accurate perception of Prussia's own interests in its present and future relations with its neighbours. When the reign of Frederick William ended, Bismarck, who stood high in the confidence of the new Regent, was sent as ambassador to St. Petersburg. He subsequently represented Prussia for a short time at the Court of Napoleon III., and was recalled by the King from Paris in the autumn of 1862 in order to be placed at the head of the Government. Far better versed in diplomacy than in ordinary administration, he assumed, together with the Presidency of the Cabinet, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs.

[Bismarck and the Lower Chamber, 1862.]

There were now at the head of the Prussian State three men eminently suited to work with one another, and to carry out, in their own rough and military fashion, the policy which was to unite Germany under the House of Hohenzollern. The King, Bismarck, and Roon were thoroughly at one in their aim, the enforcement of Prussia's ascendency by means of the army. The designs of the Minister, which expanded with success and which involved a certain daring in the choice of means, were at each new development so ably veiled or disclosed, so dexterously presented to the sovereign, as to overcome his hesitation on striking into many an unaccustomed path. Roon and his workmen, who, in the face of a hostile Parliament and a hostile Press, had to supply to Bismarck what a foreign alliance and enthusiastic national sentiment had supplied to Cavour, forged for Prussia a weapon of such temper that, against the enemies on whom it was employed, no extraordinary genius was necessary to render its thrust fatal. It was no doubt difficult for the Prime Minister, without alarming his sovereign and without risk of an immediate breach with Austria, to make his ulterior aims so clear as to carry the Parliament with him in the policy of military reorganisation. Words frank even to brutality were uttered by him, but they sounded more like menace and bluster than the explanation of a well-considered plan. "Prussia must keep its forces together," he said in one of his first Parliamentary appearances, "its boundaries are not those of a sound State. The great questions of the time are to be decided not by speeches and votes of majorities but by blood and iron." After the experience of 1848 and 1850, a not too despondent political observer might well have formed the conclusion that nothing less than the military overthrow of Austria could give to Germany any tolerable system of national government, or even secure to Prussia its legitimate field of action. This was the keystone of Bismarck's belief, but he failed to make his purpose and his motives intelligible to the representatives of the Prussian people. He was taken for a mere bully and absolutist of the old type. His personal characteristics, his arrogance, his sarcasm, his habit of banter, exasperated and inflamed. Roon was no better suited to the atmosphere of a popular assembly. Each encounter of the Ministers with the Chamber embittered the struggle and made reconciliation more difficult. The Parliamentary system of Prussia seemed threatened in its very existence when, after the rejection by the Chamber of Deputies of the clause in the Budget providing for the cost of the army-reorganisation, this clause was restored by the Upper House, and the Budget of the Government passed in its original form. By the terms of the Constitution the right of the Upper House in matters of taxation was limited to the approval or rejection of the Budget sent up to it from the Chamber of Representatives. It possessed no power of amendment. Bismarck, however, had formed the theory that in the event of a disagreement between the two Houses a situation arose for which the Constitution had not provided, and in which therefore the Crown was still possessed of its old absolute authority. No compromise, no negotiation between the two Houses, was, in his view, to be desired. He was resolved to govern and to levy taxes without a Budget, and had obtained the King's permission to close the session immediately the Upper House had given its vote. But before the order for prorogation could be brought down the President of the Lower Chamber had assembled his colleagues, and the unanimous vote of those present declared the action of the Upper House null and void. In the agitation attending this trial of strength between the Crown, the Ministry and the Upper House on one side and the Representative Chamber on the other the session of 1862 closed.  [507]

[King William.]

[The conflict continued, 1863.]

[Measures against the Press.]

The Deputies, returning to their constituencies, carried with them the spirit of combat, and received the most demonstrative proofs of popular sympathy and support. Representations of great earnestness were made to the King, but they failed to shake in the slightest degree his confidence in his Minister, or to bend his fixed resolution to carry out his military reforms to the end. The claim of Parliament to interfere with matters of military organisation in Prussia touched him in his most sensitive point. He declared that the aim of his adversaries was nothing less than the establishment of a Parliamentary instead of a royal army. In perfect sincerity he believed that the convulsions of 1848 were on the point of breaking out afresh. "You mourn the conflict between the Crown and the national representatives," he said to the spokesman of an important society; "do I not mourn it? I sleep no single night." The anxiety, the despondency of the sovereign were shared by the friends of Prussia throughout Germany; its enemies saw with wonder that Bismarck in his struggle with the educated Liberalism of the middle classes did not shrink from dalliance with the Socialist leaders and their organs. When Parliament reassembled at the beginning of 1863 the conflict was resumed with even greater heat. The Lower Chamber carried an address to the King, which, while dwelling on the loyalty of the Prussian people to their chief, charged the Ministers with violating the Constitution, and demanded their dismissal. The King refused to receive the deputation which was to present the address, and in the written communication in which he replied to it he sharply reproved the Assembly for their errors and presumption. It was in vain that the Army Bill was again introduced. The House, while allowing the ordinary military expenditure for the year, struck out the costs of the reorganisation, and declared Ministers personally answerable for the sums expended. Each appearance of the leading members of the Cabinet now became the signal for contumely and altercation. The decencies of debate ceased to be observed on either side. When the President attempted to set some limit to the violence of Bismarck and Roon, and, on resistance to his authority, terminated the sitting, the Ministers declared that they would no longer appear in a Chamber where freedom of speech was denied to them. Affairs came to a deadlock. The Chamber again appealed to the King, and insisted that reconciliation between the Crown and the nation was impossible so long as the present Ministers remained in office. The King, now thoroughly indignant, charged the Assembly with attempting to win for itself supreme power, expressed his gratitude to his Ministers for their resistance to this usurpation, and declared himself too confident in the loyalty of the Prussian people to be intimidated by threats. His reply was followed by the prorogation of the Assembly (May 26th). A dissolution would have been worse than useless, for in the actual state of public opinion the Opposition would probably have triumphed throughout the country. It only remained for Bismarck to hold his ground, and, having silenced the Parliament for a while, to silence the Press also by the exercise of autocratic power. The Constitution authorised the King, in the absence of the Chambers, to publish enactments on matters of urgency having the force of laws. No sooner had the session been closed than an edict was issued empowering the Government, without resort to courts of law, to suppress any newspaper after two warnings. An outburst of public indignation branded this return to the principles of pure despotism in Prussia; but neither King nor Minister was to be diverted by threats or by expostulations from his course. The Press was effectively silenced. So profound, however, was the distrust now everywhere felt as to the future of Prussia, and so deep the resentment against the Minister in all circles where Liberal influences penetrated, that the Crown Prince himself, after in vain protesting against a policy of violence which endangered his own prospective interests in the Crown, publicly expressed his disapproval of the action of Government. For this offence he was never forgiven.

[Austria from 1859.]

The course which affairs were taking at Berlin excited the more bitter regret and disappointment among all friends of Prussia as at this very time it seemed that constitutional government was being successfully established in the western part of the Austrian Empire. The centralised military despotism with which Austria emerged from the convulsions of 1848 had been allowed ten years of undisputed sway; at the end of this time it had brought things to such a pass that, after a campaign in which there had been but one great battle, and while still in possession of a vast army and an unbroken chain of fortresses, Austria stood powerless to move hand or foot. It was not the defeat of Solferino or the cession of Lombardy that exhibited the prostration of Austria's power, but the fact that while the conditions of the Peace of Zürich were swept away, and Italy was united under Victor Emmanuel in defiance of the engagements made by Napoleon III. at Villafranca, the Austrian Emperor was compelled to look on with folded arms. To have drawn the sword again, to have fired a shot in defence of the Pope's temporal power or on behalf of the vassal princes of Tuscany and Modena, would have been to risk the existence of the Austrian monarchy. The State was all but bankrupt; rebellion might at any moment break out in Hungary, which had already sent thousands of soldiers to the Italian camp. Peace at whatever price was necessary abroad, and at home the system of centralised despotism could no longer exist, come what might in its place. It was natural that the Emperor should but imperfectly understand at the first the extent of the concessions which it was necessary for him to make. He determined that the Provincial Councils which Schwarzenberg had promised in 1850 should be called into existence, and that a Council of the Empire (Reichsrath), drawn in part from these, should assemble at Vienna, to advise, though not to control, the Government in matters of finance. So urgent, however, were the needs of the exchequer, that the Emperor proceeded at once to the creation of the Central Council, and nominated its first members himself. (March, 1860.)

[Hungary.]

[Centralists and Federalists in the Council.]

[The Diploma of Oct 20, 1860.]

That the Hungarian members nominated by the Emperor would decline to appear at Vienna unless some further guarantee was given for the restoration of Hungarian liberty was well known. The Emperor accordingly promised to restore the ancient county-organisation, which had filled so great a space in Hungarian history before 1848, and to take steps for assembling the Hungarian Diet. This, with the repeal of an edict injurious to the Protestants, opened the way for reconciliation, and the nominated Hungarians took their place in the Council, though under protest that the existing arrangement could only be accepted as preparatory to the full restitution of the rights of their country. The Council continued in session during the summer of 1860. Its duties were financial; but the establishment of financial equilibrium in Austria was inseparable from the establishment of political stability and public confidence; and the Council, in its last sittings, entered on the widest constitutional problems. The non-German members were in the majority; and while all parties alike condemned the fallen absolutism, the rival declarations of policy submitted to the Council marked the opposition which was henceforward to exist between the German Liberals of Austria and the various Nationalist or Federalist groups. The Magyars, uniting with those who had been their bitterest enemies, declared that the ancient independence in legislation and administration of the several countries subject to the House of Hapsburg must be restored, each country retaining its own historical character. The German minority contended that the Emperor should bestow upon his subjects such institutions as, while based on the right of self-government should secure the unity of the Empire and the force of its central authority. All parties were for a constitutional system and for local liberties in one form or another; but while the Magyars and their supporters sought for nothing less than national independence, the Germans would at the most have granted a uniform system of provincial self-government in strict subordination to a central representative body drawn from the whole Empire and legislating for the whole Empire. The decision of the Emperor was necessarily a compromise. By a Diploma published on the 20th of October he promised to restore to Hungary its old Constitution, and to grant wide legislative rights to the other States of the Monarchy, establishing for the transaction of affairs common to the whole Empire an Imperial Council, and reserving for the non-Hungarian members of this Council a qualified right of legislation for all the Empire except Hungary.  [508]

[Hungary resists the establishment of a Central Council.]

The Magyars had conquered their King; and all the impetuous patriotism that had been crushed down since the ruin of 1849 now again burst into flame. The County Assemblies met, and elected as their officers men who had been condemned to death in 1849 and who were living in exile; they swept away the existing law-courts, refused the taxes, and proclaimed the legislation of 1848 again in force. Francis Joseph seemed anxious to avert a conflict, and to prove both in Hungary and in the other parts of the Empire the sincerity of his promises of reform, on which the nature of the provincial Constitutions which were published immediately after the Diploma of October had thrown some doubt. At the instance of his Hungarian advisers he dismissed the chief of his Cabinet, and called to office Schmerling, who, in 1848, had been Prime Minister of the German National Government at Frankfort. Schmerling at once promised important changes in the provincial systems drawn up by his predecessor, but in his dealings with Hungary he proved far less tractable than the Magyars had expected. If the Hungarians had recovered their own constitutional forms, they still stood threatened with the supremacy of a Central Council in all that related to themselves in common with the rest of the Empire, and against this they rebelled. But from the establishment of this Council of the Empire neither the Emperor nor Schmerling would recede. An edict of February 26th, 1861, while it made good the changes promised by Schmerling in the several provincial systems, confirmed the general provisions of the Diploma of October, and declared that the Emperor would maintain the Constitution of his dominions as now established against an attack.

[Conflict of Hungary with the Crown, 1861.]

In the following April the Provincial Diets met throughout the Austrian Empire, and the Diet of the Hungarian Kingdom assembled at Pesth. The first duty of each of these bodies was to elect representatives to the Council of the Empire which was to meet at Vienna. Neither Hungary nor Croatia, however, would elect such representatives, each claiming complete legislative independence, and declining to recognise any such external authority as it was now proposed to create. The Emperor warned the Hungarian Diet against the consequences of its action; but the national spirit of the Magyars was thoroughly roused, and the County Assemblies vied with one another in the violence of their addresses to the Sovereign. The Diet, reviving the Constitutional difficulties connected with the abdication of Ferdinand, declared that it would only negotiate for the coronation of Francis Joseph after the establishment of a Hungarian Ministry and the restoration of Croatia and Transylvania to the Hungarian Kingdom. Accepting Schmerling's contention that the ancient constitutional rights of Hungary had been extinguished by rebellion, the Emperor insisted on the establishment of a Council for the whole Empire, and refused to recede from the declarations which he had made in the edict of February. The Diet hereupon protested, in a long and vigorous address to the King, against the validity of all laws made without its own concurrence, and declared that Francis Joseph had rendered an agreement between the King and the nation impossible. A dissolution followed. The County Assemblies took up the national struggle. They in their turn were suppressed; their officers were dismissed, and military rule was established throughout the land, though with explicit declarations on the part of the King that it was to last only till the legally existing Constitution could be brought into peaceful working.  [509]

[The Reichsrath at Vienna, May, 1861-Dec., 1862.]

[Second session of the Reichsrath, 1863.]

[The Reichsrath at Vienna, May, 1861-Dec., 1862.]

[Second session of the Reichsrath, 1863.]

Meanwhile the Central Representative Body, now by enlargement of its functions and increase in the number of its members made into a Parliament of the Empire, assembled at Vienna. Its real character was necessarily altered by the absence of representatives from Hungary; and for some time the Government seemed disposed to limit its competence to the affairs of the Cis-Leithan provinces; but after satisfying himself that no accord with Hungary was possible, the Emperor announced this fact to the Assembly, and bade it perform its part as the organ of the Empire at large, without regard to the abstention of those who did not choose to exercise their rights. The Budget for the entire Empire was accordingly submitted to the Assembly, and for the first time the expenditure of the Austrian State was laid open to public examination and criticism. The first session of this Parliament lasted, with adjournments, from May, 1861, to December, 1862. In legislation it effected little, but its relations as a whole with the Government remained excellent, and its long-continued activity, unbroken by popular disturbances, did much to raise the fallen credit of the Austrian State and to win for it the regard of Germany. On the close of the session the Provincial Diets assembled, and throughout the spring of 1863 the rivalry of the Austrian nationalities gave abundant animation to many a local capital. In the next summer the Reichsrath reassembled at Vienna. Though Hungary remained in a condition not far removed from rebellion, the Parliamentary system of Austria was gaining in strength, and indeed, as it seemed, at the expense of Hungary itself; for the Roumanian and German population of Transylvania, rejoicing in the opportunity of detaching themselves from the Magyars, now sent deputies to Vienna. While at Berlin each week that passed sharpened the antagonism between the nation and its Government, and made the Minister's name more odious, Austria seemed to have successfully broken with the traditions of its past, and to be fast earning for itself an honourable place among States of the constitutional type.

One of the reproaches brought against Bismarck by the Progressist majority in the Parliament of Berlin was that he had isolated Prussia both in Germany and in Europe. That he had roused against the Government of his country the public opinion of Germany was true: that he had alienated Prussia from all Europe was not the case; on the contrary, he had established a closer relation between the Courts of Berlin and St. Petersburg than had existed at any time since the commencement of the Regency, and had secured for Prussia a degree of confidence and goodwill on the part of the Czar which, in the memorable years that were to follow, served it scarcely less effectively than an armed alliance. Russia, since the Crimean War, had seemed to be entering upon an epoch of boundless change. The calamities with which the reign of Nicholas had closed had excited in that narrow circle of Russian society where thought had any existence a vehement revulsion against the sterile and unchanging system of repression, the grinding servitude of the last thirty years. From the Emperor downwards all educated men believed not only that the system of government, but that the whole order of Russian social life, must be recast. The ferment of ideas which marks an age of revolution was in full course; but in what forms the new order was to be moulded, through what processes Russia was to be brought into its new life, no one knew. Russia was wanting in capable statesmen; it was even more conspicuously wanting in the class of serviceable and intelligent agents of Government of the second rank. Its monarch, Alexander II., humane and well-meaning, was irresolute and vacillating beyond the measure of ordinary men. He was not only devoid of all administrative and organising faculty himself, but so infirm of purpose that Ministers whose policy he had accepted feared to let him pass out of their sight, lest in the course of a single journey or a single interview he should succumb to the persuasions of some rival politician. In no country in Europe was there such incoherence, such self-contradiction, such absence of unity of plan and purpose in government as in Russia, where all nominally depended upon a single will. Pressed and tormented by all the rival influences that beat upon the centre of a great empire, Alexander seems at times to have played off against one another as colleagues in the same branch of Government the representatives of the most opposite schools of action, and, after assenting to the plans of one group of advisers, to have committed the execution of these plans, by way of counterpoise, to those who had most opposed them. But, like other weak men, he dreaded nothing so much as the reproach of weakness or inconstancy; and in the cloud of half-formed or abandoned purposes there were some few to which he resolutely adhered. The chief of these, the great achievement of his reign, was the liberation of the serfs.

[Liberation of the Serfs. March, 1861.]

It was probably owing to the outbreak of the revolution of 1848 that the serfs had not been freed by Nicholas. That sovereign had long understood the necessity for the change, and in 1847 he had actually appointed a Commission to report on the best means of effecting it. The convulsions of 1848, followed by the Hungarian and the Crimean Wars, threw the project into the background during the remainder of Nicholas's reign; but if the belief of the Russian people is well founded, the last injunction of the dying Czar to his successor was to emancipate the serfs throughout his empire. Alexander was little capable of grappling with so tremendous a problem himself; in the year 1859, however, he directed a Commission to make a complete inquiry into the subject, and to present a scheme of emancipation. The labours of the Commission extended over two years; its discussions were agitated, at times violent. That serfage must sooner or later be abolished all knew; the points on which the Commission was divided were the bestowal of land on the peasants and the regulation of the village community. European history afforded abundant precedents in emancipation, and under an infinite variety of detail three types of the process of enfranchisement were clearly distinguishable from one another. Maria Theresa, in liberating the serf, had required him to continue to render a fixed amount of labour to his lord, and had given him on this condition fixity of tenure in the land he occupied; the Prussian reformers had made a division of the land between the peasant and the lord, and extinguished all labour-dues; Napoleon, in enfranchising the serfs in the Duchy of Warsaw, had simply turned them into free men, leaving the terms of their occupation of land to be settled by arrangement or free contract with their former lords. This example had been followed in the Baltic Provinces of Russia itself by Alexander I. Of the three modes of emancipation, that based on free contract had produced the worst results for the peasant; and though many of the Russian landowners and their representatives in the Commission protested against a division of the land between themselves and their serfs as an act of agrarian revolution and spoliation, there were men in high office, and some few among the proprietors, who resolutely and successfully fought for the principle of independent ownership by the peasants. The leading spirit in this great work appears to have been Nicholas Milutine, Adjunct of the Minister of the Interior, Lanskoi. Milutine, who had drawn up the Municipal Charta of St. Petersburg, was distrusted by the Czar as a restless and uncompromising reformer. It was uncertain from day to day whether the views of the Ministry of the Interior or those of the territorial aristocracy would prevail; ultimately, however, under instructions from the Palace, the Commission accepted not only the principle of the division of the land, but the system of communal self-government by the peasants themselves. The determination of the amount of land to be held by the peasants of a commune and of the fixed rent to be paid to the lord was left in the first instance to private agreement; but where such agreement was not reached, the State, through arbiters elected at local assemblies of the nobles, decided the matter itself. The rent once fixed, the State enabled the commune to redeem it by advancing a capital sum to be recouped by a quit-rent to the State extending over forty-nine years. The Ukase of the Czar converting twenty-five millions of serfs into free proprietors, the greatest act of legislation of modern times, was signed on the 3rd of March, 1861, and within the next few weeks was read in every church of the Russian Empire. It was a strange comment on the system of government in Russia that in the very month in which the edict was published both Lanskoi and Milutine, who had been its principal authors, were removed from their posts. The Czar feared to leave them in power to superintend the actual execution of the law which they had inspired. In supporting them up to the final stage of its enactment Alexander had struggled against misgivings of his own, and against influences of vast strength alike at the Court, within the Government, and in the Provinces. With the completion of the Edict of Emancipation his power of resistance was exhausted, and its execution was committed by him to those who had been its opponents. That some of the evils which have mingled with the good in Russian enfranchisement might have been less had the Czar resolutely stood by the authors of reform and allowed them to complete their work in accordance with their own designs and convictions, is scarcely open to doubt.  [510]

[Poland, 1861, 1862.]

It had been the belief of educated men in Russia that the emancipation of the serf would be but the first of a series of great organic changes, bringing their country more nearly to the political and social level of its European neighbours. This belief was not fulfilled. Work of importance was done in the reconstruction of the judicial system of Russia, but in the other reforms expected little was accomplished. An insurrection which broke out in Poland at the beginning of 1863 diverted the energies of the Government from all other objects; and in the overpowering outburst of Russian patriotism and national feeling which it excited, domestic reforms, no less than the ideals of Western civilisation, lost their interest. The establishment of Italian independence, coinciding in time with the general unsettlement and expectation of change which marked the first years of Alexander's reign, had stirred once more the ill-fated hopes of the Polish national leaders. From the beginning of the year 1861 Warsaw was the scene of repeated tumults. The Czar was inclined, within certain limits, to a policy of conciliation. The separate Legislature and separate army which Poland had possessed from 1815 to 1830 he was determined not to restore; but he was willing to give Poland a large degree of administrative autonomy, to confide the principal offices in its Government to natives, and generally to relax something of that close union with Russia which had been enforced by Nicholas since the rebellion of 1831. But the concessions of the Czar, accompanied as they were by acts of repression and severity, were far from satisfying the demands of Polish patriotism. It was in vain that Alexander in the summer of 1862 sent his brother Constantine as Viceroy to Warsaw, established a Polish Council of State, placed a Pole, Wielopolski, at the head of the Administration, superseded all the Russian governors of Polish provinces by natives, and gave to the municipalities and the districts the right of electing local councils; these concessions seemed nothing, and were in fact nothing, in comparison with the national independence which the Polish leaders claimed. The situation grew worse and worse. An attempt made upon the life of the Grand Duke Constantine during his entry into Warsaw was but one among a series of similar acts which discredited the Polish cause and strengthened those who at St. Petersburg had from the first condemned the Czar's attempts at conciliation. At length the Russian Government took the step which precipitated revolt. A levy of one in every two hundred of the population throughout the Empire had been ordered in the autumn of 1862. Instructions were sent from St. Petersburg to the effect that in raising this levy in Poland the country population were to be spared, and that all persons who were known to be connected with the disorders in the towns were to be seized as soldiers. This terrible sentence against an entire political class was carried out, so far as it lay within the power of the authorities, on the night of January 14th, 1863. But before the imperial press-gang surrounded the houses of its victims a rumour of the intended blow had gone abroad. In the preceding hours, and during the night of the 14th, thousands fled from Warsaw and the other Polish towns into the forests. There they formed themselves into armed bands, and in the course of the next few days a guerilla warfare broke out wherever Russian troops were found in insufficient strength or off their guard.  [511]

[Poland and Russia.]

The classes in which the national spirit of Poland lived were the so-called noblesse, numbering hundreds of thousands, the town populations, and the priesthood. The peasants, crushed and degraded, though not nominally in servitude, were indifferent to the national cause. On the neutrality, if not on the support, of the peasants the Russian Government could fairly reckon; within the towns it found itself at once confronted by an invisible national Government whose decrees were printed and promulgated by unknown hands, and whose sentences of death were mercilessly executed against those whom it condemned as enemies or traitors to the national cause. So extraordinary was the secrecy which covered the action of this National Executive, that Milutine, who was subsequently sent by the Czar to examine into the affairs of Poland, formed the conclusion that it had possessed accomplices within the Imperial Government at St. Petersburg itself. The Polish cause retained indeed some friends in Russia even after the outbreak of the insurrection; it was not until the insurrection passed the frontier of the kingdom and was carried by the nobles into Lithuania and Podolia that the entire Russian nation took up the struggle with passionate and vindictive ardour as one for life or death. It was the fatal bane of Polish nationality that the days of its greatness had left it a claim upon vast territories where it had planted nothing but a territorial aristocracy, and where the mass of population, if not actually Russian, was almost indistinguishable from the Russians in race and language, and belonged like them to the Greek Church, which Catholic Poland had always persecuted. For ninety years Lithuania and the border provinces had been incorporated with the Czar's dominions, and with the exception of their Polish landowners they were now in fact thoroughly Russian. When therefore the nobles of these provinces declared that Poland must be reconstituted with the limits of 1772, and subsequently took up arms in concert with the insurrectionary Government at Warsaw, the Russian people, from the Czar to the peasant, felt the struggle to be nothing less than one for the dismemberment or the preservation of their own country, and the doom of Polish nationality, at least for some generations, was sealed. The diplomatic intervention of the Western Powers on behalf of the constitutional rights of Poland under the Treaty of Vienna, which was to some extent supported by Austria, only prolonged a hopeless struggle, and gave unbounded popularity to Prince Gortschakoff, by whom, after a show of courteous attention during the earlier and still perilous stage of the insurrection, the interference of the Powers was resolutely and unconditionally repelled. By the spring of 1864 the insurgents were crushed or exterminated. General Muravieff, the Governor of Lithuania, fulfilled his task against the mutinous nobles of this province with unshrinking severity, sparing neither life nor fortune so long as an enemy of Russia remained to be overthrown. It was at Wilna, the Lithuanian capital, not at Warsaw, that the terrors of Russian repression were the greatest. Muravieff's executions may have been less numerous than is commonly supposed; but in the form of pecuniary requisitions and fines he undoubtedly aimed at nothing less than the utter ruin of a great part of the class most implicated in the rebellion.

[Agrarian measures in Poland.]

[Agrarian measures in Poland, 1864.]

In Poland itself the Czar, after some hesitation, determined once and for all to establish a friend to Russia in every homestead of the kingdom by making the peasant owner of the land on which he laboured. The insurrectionary Government at the outbreak of the rebellion had attempted to win over the peasantry by promising enactments to this effect, but no one had responded to their appeal. In the autumn of 1863 the Czar recalled Milutine from his enforced travels and directed him to proceed to Warsaw, in order to study the affairs of Poland on the spot, and to report on the measures necessary to be taken for its future government and organisation. Milutine obtained the assistance of some of the men who had laboured most earnestly with him in the enfranchisement of the Russian serfs; and in the course of a few weeks he returned to St. Petersburg, carrying with him the draft of measures which were to change the face of Poland. He recommended on the one hand that every political institution separating Poland from the rest of the Empire should be swept away, and the last traces of Polish independence utterly obliterated; on the other hand, that the peasants, as the only class on which Russia could hope to count in the future, should be made absolute and independent owners of the land they occupied. Prince Gortschakoff, who had still some regard for the opinion of Western Europe, and possibly some sympathy for the Polish aristocracy, resisted this daring policy; but the Czar accepted Milutine's counsel, and gave him a free hand in the execution of his agrarian scheme. The division of the land between the nobles and the peasants was accordingly carried out by Milutine's own officers under conditions very different from those adopted in Russia. The whole strength of the Government was thrown on to the side of the peasant and against the noble. Though the population was denser in Poland than in Russia, the peasant received on an average four times as much land; the compensation made to the lords (which was paid in bonds which immediately fell to half their nominal value) was raised not by quit-rents on the peasants' lands alone, as in Russia, but by a general land-tax falling equally on the land left to the lords, who had thus to pay a great part of their own compensation: above all, the questions in dispute were settled, not as in Russia by arbiters elected at local assemblies of the nobles, but by officers of the Crown. Moreover, the division of landed property was not made once and for all, as in Russia, but the woods and pastures remaining to the lords continued subject to undefined common-rights of the peasants. These common-rights were deliberately left unsettled in order that a source of contention might always be present between the greater and the lesser proprietors, and that the latter might continue to look to the Russian Government as the protector or extender of their interests. "We hold Poland," said a Russian statesman, "by its rights of common."  [512]

[Russia and Polish nationality.]

Milutine, who, with all the fiery ardour of his national and levelling policy, seems to have been a gentle and somewhat querulous invalid, and who was shortly afterwards struck down by paralysis, to remain a helpless spectator of the European changes of the next six years, had no share in that warfare against the language, the religion, and the national culture of Poland with which Russia has pursued its victory since 1863. The public life of Poland he was determined to Russianise; its private and social life he would probably have left unmolested, relying on the goodwill of the great mass of peasants who owed their proprietorship to the action of the Czar. There were, however, politicians at Moscow and St. Petersburg who believed that the deep-lying instinct of nationality would for the first time be called into real life among these peasants by their very elevation from misery to independence, and that where Russia had hitherto had three hundred thousand enemies Milutine was preparing for it six millions. It was the dread of this possibility in the future, the apprehension that material interests might not permanently vanquish the subtler forces which pass from generation to generation, latent, if still unconscious, where nationality itself is not lost, that made the Russian Government follow up the political destruction of the Polish noblesse by measures directed against Polish nationality itself, even at the risk of alienating the class who for the present were effectively won over to the Czar's cause. By the side of its life-giving and beneficent agrarian policy Russia has pursued the odious system of debarring Poland from all means of culture and improvement associated with the use of its own language, and has aimed at eventually turning the Poles into Russians by the systematic impoverishment and extinction of all that is essentially Polish in thought, in sentiment, and in expression. The work may prove to be one not beyond its power; and no common perversity on the part of its Government would be necessary to turn against Russia the millions who in Poland owe all they have of prosperity and independence to the Czar: but should the excess of Russian propagandism, or the hostility of Church to Church, at some distant date engender a new struggle for Polish independence, this struggle will be one governed by other conditions than those of 1831 or 1863, and Russia will, for the first time, have to conquer on the Vistula not a class nor a city, but a nation.

[Berlin and St. Petersburg, 1863.]

It was a matter of no small importance to Bismarck and to Prussia that in the years 1863 and 1864 the Court of St. Petersburg found itself confronted with affairs of such seriousness in Poland. From the opportunity which was then presented to him of obliging an important neighbour, and of profiting by that neighbour's conjoined embarrassment and goodwill, Bismarck drew full advantage. He had always regarded the Poles as a mere nuisance in Europe, and heartily despised the Germans for the sympathy which they had shown towards Poland in 1848. When the insurrection of 1863 broke out, Bismarck set the policy of his own country in emphatic contrast with that of Austria and the Western Powers, and even entered into an arrangement with Russia for an eventual military combination in case the insurgents should pass from one side to the other of the frontier.  [513] Throughout the struggle with the Poles, and throughout the diplomatic conflict with the Western Powers, the Czar had felt secure in the loyalty of the stubborn Minister at Berlin; and when, at the close of the Polish revolt, the events occurred which opened to Prussia the road to political fortune, Bismarck received his reward in the liberty of action given him by the Russian Government. The difficulties connected with Schleswig-Holstein, which, after a short interval of tranquillity following the settlement of 1852, had again begun to trouble Europe, were forced to the very front of Continental affairs by the death of Frederick VII., King of Denmark, in November, 1863. Prussia had now at its head a statesman resolved to pursue to their extreme limit the chances which this complication offered to his own country; and, more fortunate than his predecessors of 1848, Bismarck had not to dread the interference of the Czar of Russia as the patron and protector of the interests of the Danish court.

[Schleswig-Holstein, 1852-1863.]

[The Patent of March 30, 1863.]

By the Treaty of London, signed on May 8th, 1852, all the great Powers, including Prussia, had recognised the principle of the integrity of the Danish Monarchy, and had pronounced Prince Christian of Glücksburg to be heir-presumptive to the whole dominions of the reigning King. The rights of the German Federation in Holstein were nevertheless declared to remain unprejudiced; and in a Convention made with Austria and Prussia before they joined in this Treaty, King Frederick VII. had undertaken to conform to certain rules in his treatment of Schleswig as well as of Holstein. The Duke of Augustenburg, claimant to the succession in Schleswig-Holstein through the male line, had renounced his pretensions in consideration of an indemnity paid to him by the King of Denmark. This surrender, however, had not received the consent of his son and of the other members of the House of Augustenburg, nor had the German Federation, as such, been a party to the Treaty of London. Relying on the declaration of the Great Powers in favour of the integrity of the Danish Kingdom, Frederick VII. had resumed his attempts to assimilate Schleswig, and in some degree Holstein, to the rest of the Monarchy; and although the Provincial Estates were allowed to remain in existence, a national Constitution was established in October, 1855, for the entire Danish State. Bitter complaints were made of the system of repression and encroachment with which the Government of Copenhagen was attempting to extinguish German nationality in the border provinces; at length, in November, 1858, under threat of armed intervention by the German Federation, Frederick consented to exclude Holstein from the operation of the new Constitution. But this did not produce peace, for the inhabitants of Schleswig, severed from the sister-province and now excited by the Italian war, raised all the more vigorous a protest against their own incorporation with Denmark; while in Holstein itself the Government incurred the charge of unconstitutional action in fixing the Budget without the consent of the Estates. The German Federal Diet again threatened to resort to force, and Denmark prepared for war. Prussia took up the cause of Schleswig in 1861; and even the British Government, which had hitherto shown far more interest in the integrity of Denmark than in the rights of the German provinces, now recommended that the Constitution of 1855 should be abolished, and that a separate legislation and administration should be granted to Schleswig as well as to Holstein. The Danes, however, were bent on preserving Schleswig as an integral part of the State, and the Government of King Frederick, while willing to recognise Holstein as outside Danish territory proper, insisted that Schleswig should be included within the unitary Constitution, and that Holstein should contribute a fixed share to the national expenditure. A manifesto to this effect, published by King Frederick on the 30th of March, 1863, was the immediate ground of the conflict now about to break out between Germany and Denmark. The Diet of Frankfort announced that if this proclamation were not revoked it should proceed to Federal execution, that is, armed intervention, against the King of Denmark as Duke of Holstein. Still counting upon foreign aid or upon the impotence of the Diet, the Danish Government refused to change its policy, and on the 29th of September laid before the Parliament at Copenhagen the law incorporating Schleswig with the rest of the Monarchy under the new Constitution. Negotiations were thus brought to a close, and on the 1st of October the Diet decreed the long-threatened Federal execution.  [514]

[Death of Frederick VII., November, 1863.]

[Federal execution in Holstein. December, 1863.]

Affairs had reached this stage, and the execution had not yet been put in force, when, on the 15th of November, King Frederick VII. died. For a moment it appeared possible that his successor, Prince Christian of Glücksburg, might avert the conflict with Germany by withdrawing from the position which his predecessor had taken up. But the Danish people and Ministry were little inclined to give way; the Constitution had passed through Parliament two days before King Frederick's death, and on the 18th of November it received the assent of the new monarch. German national feeling was now as strongly excited on the question of Schleswig-Holstein as it had been in 1848. The general cry was that the union of these provinces with Denmark must be treated as at an end, and their legitimate ruler, Frederick of Augustenburg, son of the Duke who had renounced his rights, be placed on the throne. The Diet of Frankfort, however, decided to recognise neither of the two rival sovereigns in Holstein until its own intervention should have taken place. Orders were given that a Saxon and a Hanoverian corps should enter the country; and although Prussia and Austria had made a secret agreement that the settlement of the Schleswig-Holstein question was to be conducted by themselves independently of the Diet, the tide of popular enthusiasm ran so high that for the moment the two leading Powers considered it safer not to obstruct the Federal authority, and the Saxon and Hanoverian troops accordingly entered Holstein as mandatories of the Diet at the end of 1863. The Danish Government, offering no resistance, withdrew its troops across the river Eider into Schleswig.

[Plans of Bismarck.]

[Union of Austria and Prussia.]

[Austrian and Prussian troops enter Schleswig. Feb., 1864.]

From this time the history of Germany is the history of the profound and audacious statecraft and of the overmastering will of Bismarck; the nation, except through its valour on the battle-field, ceases to influence the shaping of its own fortunes. What the German people desired in 1864 was that Schleswig-Holstein should be attached, under a ruler of its own, to the German Federation as it then existed; what Bismarck intended was that Schleswig-Holstein, itself incorporated more or less directly with Prussia, should be made the means of the destruction of the existing Federal system and of the expulsion of Austria from Germany. That another petty State, bound to Prussia by no closer tie than its other neighbours, should be added to the troop among whom Austria found its vassals and its instruments, would have been in Bismarck's eyes no gain but actual detriment to Germany. The German people desired one course of action; Bismarck had determined on something totally different; and with matchless resolution and skill he bore down all opposition of people and of Courts, and forced a reluctant nation to the goal which he had himself chosen for it. The first point of conflict was the apparent recognition by Bismarck of the rights of King Christian IX. as lawful sovereign in the Duchies as well as in the rest of the Danish State. By the Treaty of London Prussia had indeed pledged itself to this recognition; but the German Federation had been no party to the Treaty, and under the pressure of a vehement national agitation Bavaria and the minor States one after another recognised Frederick of Augustenburg as Duke of Schleswig-Holstein. Bismarck was accused alike by the Prussian Parliament and by the popular voice of Germany at large of betraying German interests to Denmark, of abusing Prussia's position as a Great Power, of inciting the nation to civil war. In vain he declared that, while surrendering no iota of German rights, the Government of Berlin must recognise those treaty-obligations with which its own legal title to a voice in the affairs of Schleswig was intimately bound up, and that the King of Prussia, not a multitude of irresponsible and ill-informed citizens, must be the judge of the measures by which German interests were to be effectually protected. His words made no single convert either in the Prussian Parliament or in the Federal Diet. At Frankfort the proposal made by the two leading Powers that King Christian should be required to annul the November Constitution, and that in case of his refusal Schleswig also should be occupied, was rejected, as involving an acknowledgment of the title of Christian as reigning sovereign. At Berlin the Lower Chamber refused the supplies which Bismarck demanded for operations in the Duchies, and formally resolved to resist his policy by every means at its command. But the resistance of Parliament and of Diet were alike in vain. By a masterpiece of diplomacy Bismarck had secured the support and co-operation of Austria in his own immediate Danish policy, though but a few months before he had incurred the bitter hatred of the Court of Vienna by frustrating its plans for a reorganisation of Germany by a Congress of princes at Frankfort, and had frankly declared to the Austrian ambassador at Berlin that if Austria did not transfer its political centre to Pesth and leave to Prussia free scope in Germany, it would find Prussia on the side of its enemies in the next war in which it might be engaged.  [515] But the democratic and impassioned character of the agitation in the minor States in favour of the Schleswig-Holsteiners and their Augustenburg pretender had enabled Bismarck to represent this movement to the Austrian Government as a revolutionary one, and by a dexterous appeal to the memories of 1848 to awe the Emperor's advisers into direct concert with the Court of Berlin, as the representative of monarchical order, in dealing with a problem otherwise too likely to be solved by revolutionary methods and revolutionary forces. Count Rechberg, the Foreign Minister at Vienna, was lured into a policy which, after drawing upon Austria a full share of the odium of Bismarck's Danish plans, after forfeiting for it the goodwill of the minor States with which it might have kept Prussia in check, and exposing it to the risk of a European war, was to confer upon its rival the whole profit of the joint enterprise, and to furnish a pretext for the struggle by which Austria was to be expelled alike from Germany and from what remained to it of Italy. But of the nature of the toils into which he was now taking the first fatal and irrevocable step Count Rechberg appears to have had no suspicion. A seeming cordiality united the Austrian and Prussian Governments in the policy of defiance to the will of all the rest of Germany and to the demands of their own subjects. It was to no purpose that the Federal Diet vetoed the proposed summons to King Christian and the proposed occupation of Schleswig. Austria and Prussia delivered an ultimatum at Copenhagen demanding the repeal of the November Constitution; and on its rejection their troops entered Schleswig, not as the mandatories of the German Federation, but as the instruments of two independent and allied Powers. (Feb. 1, 1864.)

[Campaign in Schleswig. Feb.-April, 1864.]

Against the overwhelming forces by which they were thus attacked the Danes could only make a brave but ineffectual resistance. Their first line of defence was the Danewerke, a fortification extending east and west towards the sea from the town of Schleswig. Prince Frederick Charles, who commanded the Prussian right, was repulsed in an attack upon the easternmost part of this work at Missunde; the Austrians, however, carried some positions in the centre which commanded the defenders' lines, and the Danes fell back upon the fortified post of Düppel, covering the narrow channel which separates the island of Alsen from the mainland. Here for some weeks they held the Prussians in check, while the Austrians, continuing the march northwards, entered Jutland. At length, on the 18th of April, after several hours of heavy bombardment, the lines of Düppel were taken by storm and the defenders driven across the channel into Alsen. Unable to pursue the enemy across this narrow strip of sea, the Prussians joined their allies in Jutland, and occupied the whole of the Danish mainland as far as the Lüm Fiord. The war, however, was not to be terminated without an attempt on the part of the neutral Powers to arrive at a settlement by diplomacy. A Conference was opened at London on the 20th of April, and after three weeks of negotiation the belligerents were induced to accept an armistice. As the troops of the German Federation, though unconcerned in the military operations of the two Great Powers, were in possession of Holstein, the Federal Government was invited to take part in the Conference. It was represented by Count Beust, Prime Minister of Saxony, a politician who was soon to rise to much greater eminence; but in consequence of the diplomatic union of Prussia and Austria the views entertained by the Governments of the secondary German States had now no real bearing on the course of events, and Count Beust's earliest appearance on the great European stage was without result, except in its influence on his own career.  [516]

[Conference of London. April, 1864.]

The first proposition laid before the Conference was that submitted by Bernstorff, the Prussian envoy, to the effect that Schleswig-Holstein should receive complete independence, the question whether King Christian or some other prince should be sovereign of the new State being reserved for future settlement. To this the Danish envoys replied that even on the condition of personal union with Denmark through the Crown they could not assent to the grant of complete independence to the Duchies. Raising their demand in consequence of this refusal, and declaring that the war had made an end of the obligations subsisting under the London Treaty of 1852, the two German Powers then demanded that Schleswig-Holstein should be completely separated from Denmark and formed into a single State under Frederick of Augustenburg, who in the eyes of Germany possessed the best claim to the succession. Lord Russell, while denying that the acts or defaults of Denmark could liberate Austria and Prussia from their engagements made with other Powers in the Treaty of London, admitted that no satisfactory result was likely to arise from the continued union of the Duchies with Denmark, and suggested that King Christian should make an absolute cession of Holstein and of the southern part of Schleswig, retaining the remainder in full sovereignty. The frontier-line he proposed to draw at the River Schlei. To this principle of partition both Denmark and the German Powers assented, but it proved impossible to reach an agreement on the frontier-line. Bernstorff, who had at first required nearly all Schleswig, abated his demands, and would have accepted a line drawn westward from Flensburg, so leaving to Denmark at least half the province, including the important position of Düppel. The terms thus offered to Denmark were not unfavourable. Holstein it did not expect, and could scarcely desire, to retain; and the territory which would have been taken from it in Schleswig under this arrangement included few districts that were not really German. But the Government of Copenhagen, misled by the support given to it at the Conference by England and Russia-a support which was one of words only-refused to cede anything north of the town of Schleswig. Even when in the last resort Lord Russell proposed that the frontier-line should be settled by arbitration the Danish Government held fast to its refusal, and for the sake of a few miles of territory plunged once more into a struggle which, if it was not to kindle a European war of vast dimensions, could end only in the ruin of the Danes. The expected help failed them. Attacked and overthrown in the island of Alsen, the German flag carried to the northern extremity of their mainland, they were compelled to make peace on their enemies' terms. Hostilities were brought to a close by the signature of Preliminaries on the 1st of August; and by the Treaty of Vienna, concluded on the 30th of October, 1864, King Christian ceded his rights in the whole of Schleswig-Holstein to the sovereigns of Austria and Prussia jointly, and undertook to recognise whatever dispositions they might make of those provinces.

[Great Britain and Napoleon III.]

The British Government throughout this conflict had played a sorry part, at one moment threatening the Germans, at another using language towards the Danes which might well be taken to indicate an intention of lending them armed support. To some extent the errors of the Cabinet were due to the relation which existed between Great Britain and Napoleon III. It had up to this time been considered both at London and at Paris that the Allies of the Crimea had still certain common interests in Europe; and in the unsuccessful intervention at St. Petersburg on behalf of Poland in 1863 the British and French Governments had at first gone hand in hand. But behind every step openly taken by Napoleon III. there was some half-formed design for promoting the interests of his dynasty or extending the frontiers of France; and if England had consented to support the diplomatic concert at St. Petersburg by measures of force, it would have found itself engaged in a war in which other ends than those relating to Poland would have been the foremost. Towards the close of the year 1863 Napoleon had proposed that a European Congress should assemble, in order to regulate not only the affairs of Poland but all those European questions which remained unsettled. This proposal had been abruptly declined by the English Government; and when in the course of the Danish war Lord Palmerston showed an inclination to take up arms if France would do the same, Napoleon was probably not sorry to have the opportunity of repaying England for its rejection of his own overtures in the previous year. He had moreover hopes of obtaining from Prussia an extension of the French frontier either in Belgium or towards the Rhine.[517] In reply to overtures from London, Napoleon stated that the cause of Schleswig-Holstein to some extent represented the principle of nationality, to which France was friendly, and that of all wars in which France could engage a war with Germany would be the least desirable. England accordingly, if it took up arms for the Danes, would have been compelled to enter the war alone; and although at a later time, when the war was over and the victors were about to divide the spoil, the British and French fleets ostentatiously combined in manoeuvres at Cherbourg, this show of union deceived no one, least of all the resolute and well-informed director of affairs at Berlin. To force, and force alone, would Bismarck have yielded. Palmerston, now sinking into old age, permitted Lord Russell to parody his own fierce language of twenty years back; but all the world, except the Danes, knew that the fangs and the claws were drawn, and that British foreign policy had become for the time a thing of snarls and grimaces.

[Intentions of Bismarck as to Schleswig-Holstein.]

Bismarck had not at first determined actually to annex Schleswig-Holstein to Prussia. He would have been content to leave it under the nominal sovereignty of Frederick of Augustenburg if that prince would have placed the entire military and naval resources of Schleswig-Holstein under the control of the Government of Berlin, and have accepted on behalf of his Duchies conditions which Bismarck considered indispensable to German union under Prussian leadership. In the harbour of Kiel it was not difficult to recognise the natural headquarters of a future German fleet; the narrow strip of land projecting between the two seas naturally suggested the formation of a canal connecting the Baltic with the German Ocean, and such a work could only belong to Germany at large or to its leading Power. Moreover, as a frontier district, Schleswig-Holstein was peculiarly exposed to foreign attack; certain strategical positions necessary for its defence must therefore be handed over to its protector. That Prussia should have united its forces with Austria in order to win for the Schleswig-Holsteiners the power of governing themselves as they pleased, must have seemed to Bismarck a supposition in the highest degree preposterous. He had taken up the cause of the Duchies not in the interest of the inhabitants but in the interest of Germany; and by Germany he understood Germany centred at Berlin and ruled by the House of Hohenzollern. If therefore the Augustenburg prince was not prepared to accept his throne on these terms, there was no room for him, and the provinces must be incorporated with Prussia itself. That Austria would not without compensation permit the Duchies thus to fall directly or indirectly under Prussian sway was of course well known to Bismarck; but so far was this from causing him any hesitation in his policy, that from the first he had discerned in the Schleswig-Holstein question a favourable pretext for the war which was to drive Austria out of Germany.

[Relations of Prussia and Austria, Dec., 1854-Aug., 1865.]

[Convention of Gastein, Aug. 14, 1865.]

Peace with Denmark was scarcely concluded when, at the bidding of Prussia, reluctantly supported by Austria, the Saxon and Hanoverian troops which had entered Holstein as the mandatories of the Federal Diet were compelled to leave the country. A Provisional Government was established under the direction of an Austrian and a Prussian Commissioner. Bismarck had met the Prince of Augustenburg at Berlin some months before, and had formed an unfavourable opinion of the policy likely to be adopted by him towards Prussia. All Germany, however, was in favour of the Prince's claims, and at the Conference of London these claims had been supported by the Prussian envoy himself. In order to give some appearance of formal legality to his own action, Bismarck had to obtain from the Crown-jurists of Prussia a decision that King Christian IX. had, contrary to the general opinion of Germany, been the lawful inheritor of Schleswig-Holstein, and that the Prince of Augustenburg had therefore no rights whatever in the Duchies. As the claims of Christian had been transferred by the Treaty of Vienna to the sovereigns of Austria and Prussia jointly, it rested with them to decide who should be Duke of Schleswig-Holstein, and under what conditions. Bismarck announced at Vienna on the 22nd of February, 1865, the terms on which he was willing that Schleswig-Holstein should be conferred by the two sovereigns upon Frederick of Augustenburg. He required, in addition to community of finance, postal system, and railways, that Prussian law, including the obligation to military service, should be introduced into the Duchies; that their regiments should take the oath of fidelity to the King of Prussia, and that their principal military positions should be held by Prussian troops. These conditions would have made Schleswig-Holstein in all but name a part of the Prussian State: they were rejected both by the Court of Vienna and by Prince Frederick himself, and the population of Schleswig-Holstein almost unanimously declared against them. Both Austria and the Federal Diet now supported the Schleswig-Holsteiners in what appeared to be a struggle on behalf of their independence against Prussian domination; and when the Prussian Commissioner in Schleswig-Holstein expelled the most prominent of the adherents of Augustenburg, his Austrian colleague published a protest declaring the act to be one of lawless violence. It seemed that the outbreak of war between the two rival Powers could not long be delayed; but Bismarck had on this occasion moved too rapidly for his master, and considerations relating to the other European Powers made it advisable to postpone the rupture for some months. An agreement was patched up at Gastein by which, pending an ultimate settlement, the government of the two provinces was divided between their masters, Austria taking the administration of Holstein, Prussia that of Schleswig, while the little district of Lauenburg on the south was made over to King William in full sovereignty. An actual conflict between the representatives of the two rival governments at their joint headquarters in Schleswig-Holstein was thus averted; peace was made possible at least for some months longer; and the interval was granted to Bismarck which was still required for the education of his Sovereign in the policy of blood and iron, and for the completion of his own arrangements with the enemies of Austria outside Germany.  [518]

[Bismarck at Biarritz, Sept., 1865.]

The natural ally of Prussia was Italy; but without the sanction of Napoleon III. it would have been difficult to engage Italy in a new war. Bismarck had therefore to gain at least the passive concurrence of the French Emperor in the union of Italy and Prussia against Austria. He visited Napoleon at Biarritz in September, 1865, and returned with the object of his journey achieved. The negotiation of Biarritz, if truthfully recorded, would probably give the key to much of the European history of the next five years. As at Plombières, the French Emperor acted without his Ministers, and what he asked he asked without a witness. That Bismarck actually promised to Napoleon III. either Belgium or any part of the Rhenish Provinces in case of the aggrandisement of Prussia has been denied by him, and is not in itself probable. But there are understandings which prove to be understandings on one side only; politeness may be misinterpreted; and the world would have found Count Bismarck unendurable if at every friendly meeting he had been guilty of the frankness with which he informed the Austrian Government that its centre of action must be transferred from Vienna to Pesth. That Napoleon was now scheming for an extension of France on the north-east is certain; that Bismarck treated such rectification of the frontier as a matter for arrangement is hardly to be doubted; and if without a distinct and written agreement Napoleon was content to base his action on the belief that Bismarck would not withhold from him his reward, this only proved how great was the disparity between the aims which the French ruler allowed himself to cherish and his mastery of the arts by which alone such aims were to be realised. Napoleon desired to see Italy placed in possession of Venice; he probably believed at this time that Austria would be no unequal match for Prussia and Italy together, and that the natural result of a well-balanced struggle would be not only the completion of Italian union but the purchase of French neutrality or mediation by the cession of German territory west of the Rhine. It was no part of the duty of Count Bismarck to chill Napoleon's fancies or to teach him political wisdom. The Prussian statesman may have left Biarritz with the conviction that an attack on Germany would sooner or later follow the disappointment of those hopes which he had flattered and intended to mock; but for the present he had removed one dangerous obstacle from his path, and the way lay free before him to an Italian alliance if Italy itself should choose to combine with him in war.

[Italy, 1862-65.]

Since the death of Cavour the Italian Government had made no real progress towards the attainment of the national aims, the acquisition of Rome and Venice. Garibaldi, impatient of delay, had in 1862 landed again in Sicily and summoned his followers to march with him upon Rome. But the enterprise was resolutely condemned by Victor Emmanuel, and when Garibaldi crossed to the mainland he found the King's troops in front of him at Aspromonte. There was an exchange of shots, and Garibaldi fell wounded. He was treated with something of the distinction shown to a royal prisoner, and when his wound was healed he was released from captivity. His enterprise, however, and the indiscreet comments on it made by Rattazzi, who was now in power, strengthened the friends of the Papacy at the Tuileries, and resulted in the fall of the Italian Minister. His successor, Minghetti, deemed it necessary to arrive at some temporary understanding with Napoleon on the Roman question. The presence of French troops at Rome offended national feeling, and made any attempt at conciliation between the Papal Court and the Italian Government hopeless. In order to procure the removal of this foreign garrison Minghetti was willing to enter into engagements which seemed almost to imply the renunciation of the claim on Rome. By a Convention made in September, 1864, the Italian Government undertook not to attack the territory of the Pope, and to oppose by force every attack made upon it from without. Napoleon on his part engaged to withdraw his troops gradually from Rome as the Pope should organise his own army, and to complete the evacuation within two years. It was, however, stipulated in an Article which was intended to be kept secret, that the capital of Italy should be changed, the meaning of this stipulation being that Florence should receive the dignity which by the common consent of Italy ought to have been transferred from Turin to Rome and to Rome alone. The publication of this Article, which was followed by riots in Turin, caused the immediate fall of Minghetti's Cabinet. He was succeeded in office by General La Marmora, under whom the negotiations with Prussia were begun which, after long uncertainty, resulted in the alliance of 1866 and in the final expulsion of Austria from Italy.  [519]

[La Marmora.]

[Govone at Berlin, March, 1866.]

[Treaty of April 8, 1856.]

Bismarck from the beginning of his Ministry appears to have looked forward to the combination of Italy and Prussia against the common enemy; but his plans ripened slowly. In the spring of 1865, when affairs seemed to be reaching a crisis in Schleswig-Holstein, the first serious overtures were made by the Prussian ambassador at Florence. La Marmora answered that any definite proposition would receive the careful attention of the Italian Government, but that Italy would not permit itself to be made a mere instrument in Prussia's hands for the intimidation of Austria. Such caution was both natural and necessary on the part of the Italian Minister; and his reserve seemed to be more than justified when, a few months later, the Treaty of Gastein restored Austria and Prussia to relations of friendship. La Marmora might now well consider himself released from all obligations towards the Court of Berlin: and, entering on a new line of policy, he sent an envoy to Vienna to ascertain if the Emperor would amicably cede Venetia to Italy in return for the payment of a very large sum of money and the assumption by Italy of part of the Austrian national debt. Had this transaction been effected, it would probably have changed the course of European history; the Emperor, however, declined to bargain away any part of his dominions, and so threw Italy once more into the camp of his great enemy. In the meantime the disputes about Schleswig-Holstein broke out afresh. Bismarck renewed his efforts at Florence in the spring of 1866, with the result that General Govone was sent to Berlin in order to discuss with the Prussian Minister the political and military conditions of an alliance. But instead of proposing immediate action, Bismarck stated to Govone that the question of Schleswig-Holstein was insufficient to justify a great war in the eyes of Europe, and that a better cause must be put forward, namely, the reform of the Federal system of Germany. Once more the subtle Italians believed that Bismarck's anxiety for a war with Austria was feigned, and that he sought their friendship only as a means of extorting from the Court of Vienna its consent to Prussia's annexation of the Danish Duchies. There was an apparent effort on the part of the Prussian statesman to avoid entering into any engagement which involved immediate action; the truth being that Bismarck was still in conflict with the pacific influences which surrounded the King, and uncertain from day to day whether his master would really follow him in the policy of war. He sought therefore to make the joint resort to arms dependent on some future act, such as the summoning of a German Parliament, from which the King of Prussia could not recede if once he should go so far. But the Italians, apparently not penetrating the real secret of Bismarck's hesitation, would be satisfied with no such indeterminate engagement; they pressed for action within a limited time; and in the end, after Austria had taken steps which went far to overcome the last scruples of King William, Bismarck consented to fix three months as the limit beyond which the obligation of Italy to accompany Prussia into war should not extend. On the 8th of April a Treaty of offensive and defensive alliance was signed. It was agreed that if the King of Prussia should within three months take up arms for the reform of the Federal system of Germany, Italy would immediately after the outbreak of hostilities declare war upon Austria. Both Powers were to engage in the war with their whole force, and peace was not to be made but by common consent, such consent not to be withheld after Austria should have agreed to cede Venetia to Italy and territory with an equal population to Prussia.  [520]

[Bismarck and Austria, Aug., 1865-April, 1866.]

Eight months had now passed since the signature of the Convention of Gastem. The experiment of an understanding with Austria, which King William had deemed necessary, had been made, and it had failed; or rather, as Bismarck expressed himself in a candid moment, it had succeeded, inasmuch as it had cured the King of his scruples and raised him to the proper point of indignation against the Austrian Court. The agents in effecting this happy result had been the Prince of Augustenburg, the population of Holstein, and the Liberal party throughout Germany at large. In Schleswig, which the Convention of Gastein had handed over to Prussia, General Manteuffel, a son of the Minister of 1850, had summarily put a stop to every expression of public opinion, and had threatened to imprison the Prince if he came within his reach; in Holstein the Austrian Government had permitted, if it had not encouraged, the inhabitants to agitate in favour of the Pretender, and had allowed a mass-meeting to be held at Altona on the 23rd of January, where cheers were raised for Augustenburg, and the summoning of the Estates of Schleswig-Holstein was demanded. This was enough to enable Bismarck to denounce the conduct of Austria as an alliance with revolution. He demanded explanations from the Government of Vienna, and the Emperor declined to render an account of his actions. Warlike preparations now began, and on the 16th of March the Austrian Government announced that it should refer the affairs of Schleswig-Holstein to the Federal Diet. This was a clear departure from the terms of the Convention of Gastein, and from the agreement made between Austria and Prussia before entering into the Danish war in 1864 that the Schleswig-Holstein question should be settled by the two Powers independently of the German Federation. King William was deeply moved by such a breach of good faith; tears filled his eyes when he spoke of the conduct of the Austrian Emperor; and though pacific influences were still active around him he now began to fall in more cordially with the warlike policy of his Minister. The question at issue between Prussia and Austria expanded from the mere disposal of the Duchies to the reconstitution of the Federal system of Germany. In a note laid before the Governments of all the Minor States Bismarck declared that the time had come when Germany must receive a new and more effective organisation, and inquired how far Prussia could count on the support of allies if it should be attacked by Austria or forced into war. It was immediately after this re-opening of the whole problem of Federal reform in Germany that the draft of the Treaty with Italy was brought to its final shape by Bismarck and the Italian envoy, and sent to the Ministry at Florence for its approval.

[Austria offers Venice, May 5.]

Bismarck had now to make the best use of the three months' delay that was granted to him. On the day after the acceptance of the Treaty by the Italian Government, the Prussian representative at the Diet of Frankfort handed in a proposal for the summoning of a German Parliament, to be elected by universal suffrage. Coming from the Minister who had made Parliamentary government a mockery in Prussia, this proposal was scarcely considered as serious. Bavaria, as the chief of the secondary States, had already expressed its willingness to enter upon the discussion of Federal reform, but it asked that the two leading Powers should in the meantime undertake not to attack one another. Austria at once acceded to this request, and so forced Bismarck into giving a similar assurance. Promises of disarmament were then exchanged; but as Austria declined to stay the collection of its forces in Venetia against Italy, Bismarck was able to charge his adversary with insincerity in the negotiation, and preparations for war were resumed on both sides. Other difficulties, however, now came into view. The Treaty between Prussia and Italy had been made known to the Court of Vienna by Napoleon, whose advice La Marmora had sought before its conclusion, and the Austrian Emperor had thus become aware of his danger. He now determined to sacrifice Venetia if Italy's neutrality could be so secured. On the 5th of May the Italian ambassador at Paris, Count Nigra, was informed by Napoleon that Austria had offered to cede Venetia to him on behalf of Victor Emmanuel if France and Italy would not prevent Austria from indemnifying itself at Prussia's expense in Silesia. Without a war, at the price of mere inaction, Italy was offered all that it could gain by a struggle which was likely to be a desperate one, and which might end in disaster. La Marmora was in sore perplexity. Though he had formed a juster estimate of the capacity of the Prussian army than any other statesman or soldier in Europe, he was thoroughly suspicious of the intentions of the Prussian Government; and in sanctioning the alliance of the previous month he had done so half expecting that Bismarck would through the prestige of this alliance gain for Prussia its own objects without entering into war, and then leave Italy to reckon with Austria as best it might. He would gladly have abandoned the alliance and have accepted Austria's offer if Italy could have done this without disgrace. But the sense of honour was sufficiently strong to carry him past this temptation. He declined the offer made through Paris, and continued the armaments of Italy, though still with a secret hope that European diplomacy might find the means of realising the purpose of his country without war.  [521]

[Proposals for a Congress.]

The neutral Powers were now, with various objects, bestirring themselves in favour of a European Congress. Napoleon believed the time to be come when the Treaties of 1815 might be finally obliterated by the joint act of Europe. He was himself ready to join Prussia with three hundred thousand men if the King would transfer the Rhenish Provinces to France. Demands, direct and indirect, were made on Count Bismarck on behalf of the Tuileries for cessions of territory of greater or less extent. These demands were neither granted nor refused. Bismarck procrastinated; he spoke of the obstinacy of the King his master; he inquired whether parts of Belgium or Switzerland would not better assimilate with France than a German province; he put off the Emperor's representatives by the assurance that he could more conveniently arrange these matters with the Emperor when he should himself visit Paris. On the 28th of May invitations to a Congress were issued by France, England, and Russia jointly, the objects of the Congress being defined as the settlement of the affairs of Schleswig-Holstein, of the differences between Austria and Italy, and of the reform of the Federal Constitution of Germany, in so far as these affected Europe at large. The invitation was accepted by Prussia and by Italy; it was accepted by Austria only under the condition that no arrangement should be discussed which should give an increase of territory or power to one of the States invited to the Congress. This subtly-worded condition would not indeed have excluded the equal aggrandisement of all. It would not have rendered the cession of Venetia to Italy or the annexation of Schleswig-Holstein to Prussia impossible; but it would either have involved the surrender of the former Papal territory by Italy in order that Victor Emmanuel's dominions should receive no increase, or, in the alternative, it would have entitled Austria to claim Silesia as its own equivalent for the augmentation of the Italian Kingdom. Such reservations would have rendered any efforts of the Powers to preserve peace useless, and they were accepted as tantamount to a refusal on the part of Austria to attend the Congress. Simultaneously with its answer to the neutral Powers, Austria called upon the Federal Diet to take the affairs of Schleswig-Holstein into its own hands, and convoked the Holstein Estates. Bismarck thereupon declared the Convention of Gastein to be at an end, and ordered General Manteuffel to lead his troops into Holstein. The Austrian commander, protesting that he yielded only to superior force, withdrew through Altona into Hanover. Austria at once demanded and obtained from the Diet of Frankfort the mobilisation of the whole of the Federal armies. The representative of Prussia, declaring that this act of the Diet had made an end of the existing Federal union, handed in the plan of his Government for the reorganisation of Germany, and quitted Frankfort. Diplomatic relations between Austria and Prussia were broken off on the 12th of June, and on the 15th Count Bismarck demanded of the sovereigns of Hanover, Saxony, and Hesse-Cassel, that they should on that very day put a stop to their military preparations and accept the Prussian scheme of Federal reform. Negative answers being given, Prussian troops immediately marched into these territories, and war began. Weimar, Mecklenburg, and other petty States in the north took part with Prussia: all the rest of Germany joined Austria.  [522]

[German Opinion.]

The goal of Bismarck's desire, the end which he had steadily set before himself since entering upon his Ministry, was attained; and, if his calculations as to the strength of the Prussian army were not at fault, Austria was at length to be expelled from the German Federation by force of arms. But the process by which Bismarck had worked up to this result had ranged against him the almost unanimous opinion of Germany outside the military circles of Prussia itself. His final demand for the summoning of a German Parliament was taken as mere comedy. The guiding star of his policy had hitherto been the dynastic interest of the House of Hohenzollern; and now, when the Germans were to be plunged into war with one another, it seemed as if the real object of the struggle was no more than the annexation of the Danish Duchies and some other coveted territory to the Prussian Kingdom. The voice of protest and condemnation rose loud from every organ of public opinion. Even in Prussia itself the instances were few where any spontaneous support was tendered to the Government. The Parliament of Berlin, struggling up to the end against the all-powerful Minister, had seen its members prosecuted for speeches made within its own walls, and had at last been prorogued in order that its insubordination might not hamper the Crown in the moment of danger. But the mere disappearance of Parliament could not conceal the intensity of ill-will which the Minister and his policy had excited. The author of a fratricidal war of Germans against Germans was in the eyes of many the greatest of all criminals; and on the 7th of May an attempt was made by a young fanatic to take Bismarck's life in the streets of Berlin. The Minister owed the preservation of his life to the feebleness of his assailant's weapon and to his own vigorous arm. But the imminence of the danger affected King William far more than Bismarck himself. It spoke to his simple mind of supernatural protection and aid; it stilled his doubts; and confirmed him in the belief that Prussia was in this crisis the instrument for working out the Almighty's will.

[Napoleon III.]

A few days before the outbreak of hostilities the Emperor Napoleon gave publicity to his own view of the European situation. He attributed the coming war to three causes: to the faulty geographical limits of the Prussian State, to the desire for a better Federal system in Germany, and to the necessity felt by the Italian nation for securing its independence. These needs would, he conceived, be met by a territorial rearrangement in the north of Germany consolidating and augmenting the Prussian Kingdom; by the creation of a more effective Federal union between the secondary German States; and finally, by the incorporation of Venetia with Italy, Austria's position in Germany remaining unimpaired. Only in the event of the map of Europe being altered to the exclusive advantage of one Great Power would France require an extension of frontier. Its interests lay in the preservation of the equilibrium of Europe, and in the maintenance of the Italian Kingdom. These had already been secured by arrangements which would not require France to draw the sword; a watchful but unselfish neutrality was the policy which its Government had determined to pursue. Napoleon had in fact lost all control over events, and all chance of gaining the Rhenish Provinces, from the time when he permitted Italy to enter into the Prussian alliance without any stipulation that France should at its option be admitted as a third member of the coalition. He could not ally himself with Austria against his own creation, the Italian Kingdom; on the other hand, he had no means of extorting cessions from Prussia when once Prussia was sure of an ally who could bring two hundred thousand men into the field. His diplomacy had been successful in so far as it had assured Venetia to Italy whether Prussia should be victorious or overthrown, but as regarded France it had landed him in absolute powerlessness. He was unable to act on one side; he was not wanted on the other. Neutrality had become a matter not of choice but of necessity; and until the course of military events should have produced some new situation in Europe, France might well be watchful, but it could scarcely gain much credit for its disinterested part.  [523]

[Hanover and Hesse-Cassel conquered.]

[The Bohemian Campaign, June 26-July 3.]

[Battle of Königgrätz, July 3.]

Assured against an attack from the side of the Rhine, Bismarck was able to throw the mass of the Prussian forces southwards against Austria, leaving in the north only the modest contingent which was necessary to overcome the resistance of Hanover and Hesse-Cassel. Through the precipitancy of a Prussian general, who struck without waiting for his colleagues, the Hanoverians gained a victory at Langensalza on the 27th of June; but other Prussian regiments arrived on the field a few hours later, and the Hanoverian army was forced to capitulate on the next day. The King made his escape to Austria; the Elector of Hesse-Cassel, less fortunate, was made a prisoner of war. Northern Germany was thus speedily reduced to submission, and any danger of a diversion in favour of Austria in this quarter disappeared. In Saxony no attempt was made to bar the way to the advancing Prussians. Dresden was occupied without resistance, but the Saxon army marched southwards in good time, and joined the Austrians in Bohemia. The Prussian forces, about two hundred and fifty thousand strong, now gathered on the Saxon and Silesian frontier, covering the line from Pirna to Landshut. They were composed of three armies: the first, or central, army under Prince Frederick Charles, a nephew of the King; the second, or Silesian, army under the Crown Prince; the westernmost, known as the army of the Elbe, under General Herwarth von Bittenfeld. Against these were ranged about an equal number of Austrians, led by Benedek, a general who had gained great distinction in the Hungarian and the Italian campaigns. It had at first been thought probable that Benedek, whose forces lay about Olmütz, would invade Southern Silesia, and the Prussian line had therefore been extended far to the east. Soon, however, it appeared that the Austrians were unable to take up the offensive, and Benedek moved westwards into Bohemia. The Prussian line was now shortened, and orders were given to the three armies to cross the Bohemian frontier and converge in the direction of the town of Gitschin. General Moltke, the chief of the staff, directed their operations from Berlin by telegraph. The combined advance of the three armies was executed with extraordinary precision; and in a series of hard-fought combats extending from the 26th to the 29th of June the Austrians were driven back upon their centre, and effective communication was established between the three invading bodies. On the 30th the King of Prussia, with General Moltke and Count Bismarck, left Berlin; on the 2nd of July they were at headquarters at Gitschin. It had been Benedek's design to leave a small force to hold the Silesian army in check, and to throw the mass of his army westwards upon Prince Frederick Charles and overwhelm him before he could receive help from his colleagues. This design had been baffled by the energy of the Crown Prince's attack, and by the superiority of the Prussians in generalship, in the discipline of their troops, and in the weapon they carried; for though the Austrians had witnessed in the Danish campaign the effects of the Prussian breech-loading rifle, they had not thought it necessary to adopt a similar arm. Benedek, though no great battle had yet been fought, saw that the campaign was lost, and wrote to the Emperor on the 1st of July recommending him to make peace, for otherwise a catastrophe was inevitable. He then concentrated his army on high ground a few miles west of Königgrätz, and prepared for a defensive battle on the grandest scale. In spite of the losses of the past week he could still bring about two hundred thousand men into action. The three Prussian armies were now near enough to one another to combine in their attack, and on the night of July 2nd the King sent orders to the three commanders to move against Benedek before daybreak. Prince Frederick Charles, advancing through the village of Sadowa, was the first in the field. For hours his divisions sustained an unequal struggle against the assembled strength of the Austrians. Midday passed; the defenders now pressed down upon their assailants; and preparations for a retreat had been begun, when the long-expected message arrived that the Crown Prince was close at hand. The onslaught of the army of Silesia on Benedek's right, which was accompanied by the arrival of Herwarth at the other end of the field of battle, at once decided the day. It was with difficulty that the Austrian commander prevented the enemy from seizing the positions which would have cut off his retreat. He retired eastwards across the Elbe with a loss of eighteen thousand killed and wounded and twenty-four thousand prisoners. His army was ruined; and ten days after the Prussians had crossed the frontier the war was practically at an end.  [524]

[Battle of Custozza, June 24.]

[Napoleon's mediation, July 5.]

[Preliminaries of Nicolsburg, July 26.]

[Treaty of Prague, Aug. 23.]

The disaster of Königgrätz was too great to be neutralised by the success of the Austrian forces in Italy. La Marmora, who had given up his place at the head of the Government in order to take command of the army, crossed the Mincio at the head of a hundred and twenty thousand men, but was defeated by inferior numbers on the fatal ground of Custozza, and compelled to fall back on the Oglio. This gleam of success, which was followed by a naval victory at Lissa off the Istrian coast, made it easier for the Austrian Emperor to face the sacrifices that were now inevitable. Immediately after the battle of Königgrätz he invoked the mediation of Napoleon III., and ceded Venetia to him on behalf of Italy. Napoleon at once tendered his good offices to the belligerents, and proposed an armistice. His mediation was accepted in principle by the King or Prussia, who expressed his willingness also to grant an armistice as soon as preliminaries of peace were recognised by the Austrian Court. In the meantime, while negotiations passed between all four Governments, the Prussians pushed forward until their outposts came within sight of Vienna. If in pursuance of General Moltke's plan the Italian generals had thrown a corps north-eastwards from the head of the Adriatic, and so struck at the very heart of the Austrian monarchy, it is possible that the victors of Königgrätz might have imposed their own terms without regard to Napoleon's mediation, and, while adding the Italian Tyrol to Victor Emmanuel's dominions, have completed the union of Germany under the House of Hohenzollern at one stroke. But with Hungary still intact, and the Italian army paralysed by the dissensions of its commanders, prudence bade the great statesman of Berlin content himself with the advantages which he could reap without prolongation of the war, and without the risk of throwing Napoleon into the enemy's camp. He had at first required, as conditions of peace, that Prussia should be left free to annex Saxony, Hanover, Hesse-Cassel, and other North German territory; that Austria should wholly withdraw from German affairs; and that all Germany, less the Austrian Provinces, should be united in a Federation under Prussian leadership. To gain the assent of Napoleon to these terms, Bismarck hinted that France might by accord with Prussia annex Belgium. Napoleon, however, refused to agree to the extension of Prussia's ascendency over all Germany, and presented a counter-project which was in its turn rejected by Bismarck. It was finally settled that Prussia should not be prevented from annexing Hanover, Nassau, and Hesse-Cassel, as conquered territory that lay between its own Rhenish Provinces and the rest of the kingdom; that Austria should completely withdraw from German affairs; that Germany north of the Main, together with Saxony, should be included in a Federation under Prussian leadership; and that for the States south of the Main there should be reserved the right of entering into some kind of national bond with the Northern League. Austria escaped without loss of any of its non-Italian territory; it also succeeded in preserving the existence of Saxony, which, as in 1815, the Prussian Government had been most anxious to annex. Napoleon, in confining the Prussian Federation to the north of the Main, and in securing by a formal stipulation in the Treaty the independence of the Southern States, imagined himself to have broken Germany into halves, and to have laid the foundation of a South German League which should look to France as its protector. On the other hand, Bismarck by his annexation of Hanover and neighbouring districts had added a population of four millions to the Prussian Kingdom, and given it a continuous territory; he had forced Austria out of the German system; he had gained its sanction to the Federal union of all Germany north of the Main, and had at least kept the way open for the later extension of this union to the Southern States. Preliminaries of peace embodying these conditions and recognising Prussia's sovereignty in Schleswig-Holstein were signed at Nicolsburg on the 26th of July, and formed the basis of the definitive Treaty of Peace which was concluded at Prague on the 23rd of August. An illusory clause, added at the instance of Napoleon, provided that if the population of the northern districts of Schleswig should by a free vote express the wish to be united with Denmark, these districts should be ceded to the Danish Kingdom.  [525]

[The South German States.]

[Secret Treaties of the Southern States with Prussia.]

Bavaria and the south-western allies of Austria, though their military action was of an ineffective character, continued in arms for some weeks after the battle of Königgrätz and the suspension of hostilities arranged at Nicolsburg did not come into operation on their behalf till the 2nd of August. Before that date their forces were dispersed and their power of resistance broken by the Prussian generals Falckenstein and Manteuffel in a series of unimportant engagements and intricate manoeuvres. The City of Frankfort, against which Bismarck seems to have borne some personal hatred, was treated for a while by the conquerors with extraordinary and most impolitic harshness; in other respects the action of the Prussian Government towards these conquered States was not such as to render future union and friendship difficult. All the South German Governments, with the single exception of Baden, appealed to the Emperor Napoleon for assistance in the negotiations which they had opened at Berlin. But at the very moment when this request was made and granted Napoleon was himself demanding from Bismarck the cession of the Bavarian Palatinate and of the Hessian districts west of the Rhine. Bismarck had only to acquaint the King of Bavaria and the South German Ministers with the designs of their French protector in order to reconcile them to his own chastening, but not unfriendly, hand. The grandeur of a united Fatherland flashed upon minds hitherto impenetrable by any national ideal when it became known that Napoleon was bargaining for Oppenheim and Kaiserslautern. Not only were the insignificant questions as to the war-indemnities to be paid to Prussia and the frontier villages to be exchanged promptly settled, but by a series of secret Treaties all the South German States entered into an offensive and defensive alliance with the Prussian King, and engaged in case of war to place their entire forces at his disposal and under his command. The diplomacy of Napoleon III. had in the end effected for Bismarck almost more than his earlier intervention had frustrated, for it had made the South German Courts the allies of Prussia not through conquest or mere compulsion but out of regard for their own interests.  [526] It was said by the opponents of the Imperial Government in France, and scarcely with exaggeration, that every error which it was possible to commit had, in the course of the year 1866, been committed by Napoleon III. One crime, one act of madness, remained open to the Emperor's critics, to lash him and France into a conflict with the Power whose union he had not been able to prevent.

[Projects of compensation for France.]

Prior to the battle of Königgrätz, it would seem that all the suggestions of the French Emperor relating to the acquisition of Belgium were made to the Prussian Government through secret agents, and that they were actually unknown, or known by mere hearsay, to Benedetti, the French Ambassador at Berlin. According to Prince Bismarck, these overtures had begun as early as 1862, when he was himself Ambassador at Paris, and were then made verbally and in private notes to himself; they were the secret of Napoleon's neutrality during the Danish war; and were renewed through relatives and confidential agents of the Emperor when the struggle with Austria was seen to be approaching. The ignorance in which Count Benedetti was kept of his master's private diplomacy may to some extent explain the extraordinary contradictions between the accounts given by this Minister and by Prince Bismarck of the negotiations that passed between them in the period following the campaign of 1866, after Benedetti had himself been charged to present the demands of the French Government. In June, while the Ambassador was still, as it would seem, in ignorance of what was passing behind his back, he had informed the French Ministry that Bismarck, anxious for the preservation of French neutrality, had hinted at the compensations that might be made to France if Prussia should meet with great success in the coming war. According to the report of the Ambassador, made at the time, Count Bismarck stated that he would rather withdraw from public life than cede the Rhenish Provinces with Cologne and Bonn, but that he believed it would be possible to gain the King's ultimate consent to the cession of the Prussian district of Trèves on the Upper Moselle, which district, together with Luxemburg or parts of Belgium and Switzerland, would give France an adequate improvement of its frontier. The Ambassador added in his report, by way of comment, that Count Bismarck was the only man in the kingdom who was disposed to make any cession of Prussian territory whatever, and that a unanimous and violent revulsion against France would be excited by the slightest indication of any intention on the part of the French Government to extend its frontiers towards the Rhine. He concluded his report with the statement that, after hearing Count Bismarck's suggestions, he had brought the discussion to a summary close, not wishing to leave the Prussian Minister under the impression that any scheme involving the seizure of Belgian or Swiss territory had the slightest chance of being seriously considered at Paris. (June 4-8.)

[Demand for Rhenish territory, July 25-Aug. 7, 1866.]

[The Belgian project, Aug. 16-30.]

Benedetti probably wrote these last words in full sincerity. Seven weeks later, after the settlement of the Preliminaries at Nicolsburg, he was ordered to demand the cession of the Bavarian Palatinate, of the portion of Hesse-Darmstadt west of the Rhine, including Mainz, and of the strip of Prussian territory on the Saar which had been left to France in 1814 but taken from it in 1815. According to the statement of Prince Bismarck, which would seem to be exaggerated, this demand was made by Benedetti as an ultimatum and with direct threats of war, which were answered by Bismarck in language of equal violence. In any case the demand was unconditionally refused, and Benedetti travelled to Paris in order to describe what had passed at the Prussian headquarters. His report made such an impression on the Emperor that the demand for cessions on the Rhine was at once abandoned, and the Foreign Minister, Drouyn de Lhuys, who had been disposed to enforce this by arms, was compelled to quit office. Benedetti returned to Berlin, and now there took place that negotiation relating to Belgium on which not only the narratives of the persons immediately concerned, but the documents written at the time, leave so much that is strange and unexplained. According to Benedetti, Count Bismarck was keenly anxious to extend the German Federation to the South of the Main, and desired with this object an intimate union with at least one Great Power. He sought in the first instance the support of France, and offered in return to facilitate the seizure of Belgium. The negotiation, according to Benedetti, failed because the Emperor Napoleon required that the fortresses in Southern Germany should be held by the troops of the respective States to which they belonged, while at the same time General Manteuffel, who had been sent from Berlin on a special mission to St. Petersburg, succeeded in effecting so intimate a union with Russia that alliance with France became unnecessary. According to the counter-statement of Prince Bismarck, the plan now proposed originated entirely with the French Ambassador, and was merely a repetition of proposals which had been made by Napoleon during the preceding four years, and which were subsequently renewed at intervals by secret agents almost down to the outbreak of the war of 1870. Prince Bismarck has stated that he dallied with these proposals only because a direct refusal might at any moment have caused the outbreak of war between France and Prussia, a catastrophe which up to the end he sought to avert. In any case the negotiation with Benedetti led to no conclusion, and was broken off by the departure of both statesmen from Berlin in the beginning of autumn.  [527]

[Prussia and North Germany after the war.]

The war of 1866 had been brought to an end with extraordinary rapidity; its results were solid and imposing. Venice, perplexed no longer by its Republican traditions or by doubts of the patriotism of the House of Savoy, prepared to welcome King Victor Emmanuel; Bismarck, returning from the battle-field of Königgrätz, found his earlier unpopularity forgotten in the flood of national enthusiasm which his achievements and those of the army had evoked. A new epoch had begun; the antagonisms of the past were out of date; nobler work now stood before the Prussian people and its rulers than the perpetuation of a barren struggle between Crown and Parliament. By none was the severance from the past more openly expressed than by Bismarck himself; by none was it more bitterly felt than by the old Conservative party in Prussia, who had hitherto regarded the Minister as their own representative. In drawing up the Constitution of the North German Federation, Bismarck remained true to the principle which he had laid down at Frankfort before the war, that the German people must be represented by a Parliament elected directly by the people themselves. In the incorporation of Hanover, Hesse-Cassel and the Danish Duchies with Prussia, he saw that it would be impossible to win the new populations to a loyal union with Prussia if the King's Government continued to recognise no friends but the landed aristocracy and the army. He frankly declared that the action of the Cabinet in raising taxes without the consent of Parliament had been illegal, and asked for an Act of Indemnity. The Parliament of Berlin understood and welcomed the message of reconciliation. It heartily forgave the past, and on its own initiative added the name of Bismarck to those for whose services to the State the King asked a recompense. The Progressist party, which had constituted the majority in the last Parliament, gave place to a new combination known as the National Liberal party, which, while adhering to the Progressist creed in domestic affairs, gave its allegiance to the Foreign and the German policy of the Minister. Within this party many able men who in Hanover and the other annexed territories had been the leaders of opposition to their own Governments now found a larger scope and a greater political career. More than one of the colleagues of Bismarck who had been appointed to their offices in the years of conflict were allowed to pass into retirement, and their places were filled by men in sympathy with the National Liberals. With the expansion of Prussia and the establishment of its leadership in a German Federal union, the ruler of Prussia seemed himself to expand from the instrument of a military monarchy to the representative of a great nation.

[Hungary and Austria, 1865.]

To Austria the battle of Königgrätz brought a settlement of the conflict between the Crown and Hungary. The Constitution of February, 1861, hopefully as it had worked during its first years, had in the end fallen before the steady refusal of the Magyars to recognise the authority of a single Parliament for the whole Monarchy. Within the Reichsrath itself the example of Hungary told as a disintegrating force; the Poles, the Czechs seceded from the Assembly; the Minister, Schmerling, lost his authority, and was forced to resign in the summer of 1865. Soon afterwards an edict of the Emperor suspended the Constitution. Count Belcredi, who took office in Schmerling's place, attempted to arrive at an understanding with the Magyar leaders. The Hungarian Diet was convoked, and was opened by the King in person before the end of the year. Francis Joseph announced his abandonment of the principle that Hungary had forfeited its ancient rights by rebellion, and asked in return that the Diet should not insist upon regarding the laws of 1848 as still in force. Whatever might be the formal validity of those laws, it was, he urged, impossible that they should be brought into operation unaltered. For the common affairs of the two halves of the Monarchy there must be some common authority. It rested with the Diet to arrive at the necessary understanding with the Sovereign on this point, and to place on a satisfactory footing the relations of Hungary to Transylvania and Croatia. As soon as an accord should have been reached on these subjects, Francis Joseph stated that he would complete his reconciliation with the Magyars by being crowned King of Hungary.

[Deák.]

In the Assembly to which these words were addressed the majority was composed of men of moderate opinions, under the leadership of Francis Deák. Deák had drawn up the programme of the Hungarian Liberals in the election of 1847. He had at that time appeared to be marked out by his rare political capacity and the simple manliness of his character for a great, if not the greatest, part in the work that then lay before his country. But the violence of revolutionary methods was alien to his temperament. After serving in Batthyány's Ministry, he withdrew from public life on the outbreak of war with Austria, and remained in retirement during the dictatorship of Kossuth and the struggle of 1849. As a loyal friend to the Hapsburg dynasty, and a clear-sighted judge of the possibilities of the time, he stood apart while Kossuth dethroned the Sovereign and proclaimed Hungarian independence. Of the patriotism and the disinterestedness of Deák there was never the shadow of a doubt; a distinct political faith severed him from the leaders whose enterprise ended in the catastrophe which he had foreseen, and preserved for Hungary one statesman who could, without renouncing his own past and without inflicting humiliation on the Sovereign, stand as the mediator between Hungary and Austria when the time for reconciliation should arrive. Deák was little disposed to abate anything of what he considered the just demands of his country. It was under his leadership that the Diet had in 1861 refused to accept the Constitution which established a single Parliament for the whole Monarchy. The legislative independence of Hungary he was determined at all costs to preserve intact; rather than surrender this he had been willing in 1861 to see negotiations broken off and military rule restored. But when Francis Joseph, wearied of the sixteen years' struggle, appealed once more to Hungary for union and friendship, there was no man more earnestly desirous to reconcile the Sovereign with the nation, and to smooth down the opposition to the King's proposals which arose within the Diet itself, than Deák.

[Scheme of Hungarian Committee, June 25, 1866.]

Under his influence a committee was appointed to frame the necessary basis of negotiation. On the 25th of June, 1866, the Committee gave in its report. It declared against any Parliamentary union with the Cis-Leithan half of the Monarchy, but consented to the establishment of common Ministries for War, Finance, and Foreign Affairs, and recommended that the Budget necessary for these joint Ministries should be settled by Delegations from the Hungarian Diet and from the western Reichsrath.  [528] The Delegations, it was proposed, should meet separately, and communicate their views to one another by writing. Only when agreement should not have been thus attained were the Delegations to unite in a single body, in which case the decision was to rest with an absolute majority of votes.

[Negotiations with Hungary after Königgrätz.]

[Federalism or Dualism.]

[Settlement by Beust.]

[Francis Joseph's Coronation, June 8, 1867.]

The debates of the Diet on the proposals of King Francis Joseph had been long and anxious; it was not until the moment when the war with Prussia was breaking out that the Committee presented its report. The Diet was now prorogued, but immediately after the battle of Königgrätz the Hungarian leaders were called to Vienna, and negotiations were pushed forward on the lines laid down by the Committee. It was a matter of no small moment to the Court of Vienna that while bodies of Hungarian exiles had been preparing to attack the Empire both from the side of Silesia and of Venice, Deák and his friends had loyally abstained from any communication with the foreign enemies of the House of Hapsburg. That Hungary would now gain almost complete independence was certain; the question was not so much whether there should be an independent Parliament and Ministry at Pesth as whether there should not be a similarly independent Parliament and Ministry in each of the territories of the Crown, the Austrian Sovereign becoming the head of a Federation instead of the chief of a single or a dual State. Count Belcredi, the Minister at Vienna, was disposed towards such a Federal system; he was, however, now confronted within the Cabinet by a rival who represented a different policy. After making peace with Prussia, the Emperor called to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs Count Beust, who had hitherto been at the head of the Saxon Government, and who had been the representative of the German Federation at the London Conference of 1864. Beust, while ready to grant the Hungarians their independence, advocated the retention of the existing Reichsrath and of a single Ministry for all the Cis-Leithan parts of the Monarchy. His plan, which pointed to the maintenance of German ascendency in the western provinces, and which deeply offended the Czechs and the Slavic populations, was accepted by the Emperor: Belcredi withdrew from office, and Beust was charged, as President of the Cabinet, with the completion of the settlement with Hungary (Feb. 7, 1867). Deák had hitherto left the chief ostensible part in the negotiations to Count Andrássy, one of the younger patriots of 1848, who had been condemned to be hanged, and had lived a refugee during the next ten years. He now came to Vienna himself, and in the course of a few days removed the last remaining difficulties. The King gratefully charged him with the formation of the Hungarian Ministry under the restored Constitution, but Deák declined alike all office, honours, and rewards, and Andrássy, who had actually been hanged in effigy, was placed at the head of the Government. The Diet, which had reassembled shortly before the end of 1866, greeted the national Ministry with enthusiasm. Alterations in the laws of 1848 proposed in accordance with the agreement made at Vienna, and establishing the three common Ministries with the system of Delegations for common affairs, were carried by large majorities.  [529] The abdication of Ferdinand, which throughout the struggle of 1849 Hungary had declined to recognise, was now acknowledged as valid, and on the 8th of June, 1867, Francis Joseph was crowned King of Hungary amid the acclamations of Pesth. The gift of money which is made to each Hungarian monarch on his coronation Francis Joseph by a happy impulse distributed among the families of those who had fallen in fighting against him in 1849. A universal amnesty was proclaimed, no condition being imposed on the return of the exiles but that they should acknowledge the existing Constitution. Kossuth alone refused to return to his country so long as a Hapsburg should be its King, and proudly clung to ideas which were already those of the past.

[Hungary since 1867.]

The victory of the Magyars was indeed but too complete. Not only were Beust and the representatives of the western half of the Monarchy so overmatched by the Hungarian negotiators that in the distribution of the financial burdens of the Empire Hungary escaped with far too small a share, but in the more important problem of the relation of the Slavic and Roumanian populations of the Hungarian Kingdom to the dominant race no adequate steps were taken for the protection of these subject nationalities. That Croatia and Transylvania should be reunited with Hungary if the Emperor and the Magyars were ever to be reconciled was inevitable; and in the case of Croatia certain conditions were no doubt imposed, and certain local rights guaranteed. But on the whole the non-Magyar peoples in Hungary were handed over to the discretion of the ruling race. The demand of Bismarck that the centre of gravity of the Austrian States should be transferred from Vienna to Pesth had indeed been brought to pass. While in the western half of the Monarchy the central authority, still represented by a single Parliament, seemed in the succeeding years to be altogether losing its cohesive power, and the political life of Austria became a series of distracting complications, in Hungary the Magyar Government resolutely set itself to the task of moulding into one the nationalities over which it ruled. Uniting the characteristic faults with the great qualities of a race marked out by Nature and ancient habit for domination over more numerous but less aggressive neighbours, the Magyars have steadily sought to the best of their power to obliterate the distinctions which make Hungary in reality not one but several nations. They have held the Slavic and the Roumanian population within their borders with an iron grasp, but they have not gained their affection. The memory of the Russian intervention in 1849 and of the part then played by Serbs, by Croats and Roumanians in crushing Magyar independence has blinded the victors to the just claims of these races both within and without the Hungarian kingdom, and attached their sympathy to the hateful and outworn empire of the Turk. But the individuality of peoples is not to be blotted out in a day; nor, with all its striking advance in wealth, in civilisation, and in military power, has the Magyar State been able to free itself from the insecurity arising from the presence of independent communities on its immediate frontiers belonging to the same race as those whose language and nationality it seeks to repress.

CHAPTER XXIV.

Napoleon III.-The Mexican Expedition-Withdrawal of the French and death of Maximilian-The Luxemburg Question-Exasperation in France against Prussia-Austria-Italy-Mentana-Germany after 1866-The Spanish candidature of Leopold of Hohenzollern-French declaration-Benedetti and King William-Withdrawal of Leopold and demand for guarantees-The telegram from Ems-War-Expected Alliances of France-Austria-Italy- Prussian plans-The French army-Causes of French inferiority- Weissenburg-Wörth-Spicheren-Borny-Mars-la-Tour-Gravelotte-Sedan- The Republic proclaimed at Paris-Favre and Bismarck-Siege of Paris-Gambetta at Tours-The Army of the Loire-Fall of Metz-Fighting at Orleans-Sortie of Champigny-The Armies of the North, of the Loire, of the East-Bourbaki's ruin-Capitulation of Paris and Armistice- Preliminaries of Peace-Germany-Establishment of the German Empire-The Commune of Paris-Second siege-Effects of the war as to Russia and Italy-Rome.

[Napoleon III.]

The reputation of Napoleon III. was perhaps at its height at the end of the first ten years of his reign. His victories over Russia and Austria had flattered the military pride of France; the flowing tide of commercial prosperity bore witness, as it seemed, to the blessings of a government at once firm and enlightened; the reconstruction of Paris dazzled a generation accustomed to the mean and dingy aspect of London and other capitals before 1850, and scarcely conscious of the presence or absence of real beauty and dignity where it saw spaciousness and brilliance. The political faults of Napoleon, the shiftiness and incoherence of his designs, his want of grasp on reality, his absolute personal nullity as an administrator, were known to some few, but they had not been displayed to the world at large. He had done some great things, he had conspicuously failed in nothing. Had his reign ended before 1863, he would probably have left behind him in popular memory the name of a great ruler. But from this time his fortune paled. The repulse of his intervention on behalf of Poland in 1863 by the Russian Court, his petulant or miscalculating inaction during the Danish War of the following year, showed those to be mistaken who had imagined that the Emperor must always exercise a controlling power in Europe. During the events which formed the first stage in the consolidation of Germany his policy was a succession of errors. Simultaneously with the miscarriage of his European schemes, an enterprise which he had undertaken beyond the Atlantic, and which seriously weakened his resources at a time when concentrated strength alone could tell on European affairs, ended in tragedy and disgrace.

[The Mexican Project.]

There were in Napoleon III., as a man of State, two personalities, two mental existences, which blended but ill with one another. There was the contemplator of great human forces, the intelligent, if not deeply penetrative, reader of the signs of the times, the brooder through long years of imprisonment and exile, the child of Europe, to whom Germany, Italy, and England had all in turn been nearer than his own country; and there was the crowned adventurer, bound by his name and position to gain for France something that it did not possess, and to regard the greatness of every other nation as an impediment to the ascendency of his own. Napoleon correctly judged the principle of nationality to be the dominant force in the immediate future of Europe. He saw in Italy and in Germany races whose internal divisions alone had prevented them from being the formidable rivals of France, and yet he assisted the one nation to effect its union, and was not indisposed, within certain limits, to promote the consolidation of the other. That the acquisition of Nice and Savoy, and even of the Rhenish Provinces, could not in itself make up to France for the establishment of two great nations on its immediate frontiers Napoleon must have well understood: he sought to carry the principle of agglomeration a stage farther in the interests of France itself, and to form some moral, if not political, union of the Latin nations, which should embrace under his own ascendency communities beyond the Atlantic as well as those of the Old World. It was with this design that in the year 1862 he made the financial misdemeanours of Mexico the pretext for an expedition to that country, the object of which was to subvert the native Republican Government, and to place the Hapsburg Maximilian, as a vassal prince, on its throne. England and Spain had at first agreed to unite with France in enforcing the claims of the European creditors of Mexico; but as soon as Napoleon had made public his real intentions these Powers withdrew their forces, and the Emperor was left free to carry out his plans alone.

[The Mexican Expedition, 1862-1865.]

[Napoleon compelled to withdraw, 1866-7.]

[Fall and Death of Maximilian.]

The design of Napoleon to establish French influence in Mexico was connected with his attempt to break up the United States by establishing the independence of the Southern Confederacy, then in rebellion, through the mediation of the Great Powers of Europe. So long as the Civil War in the United States lasted, it seemed likely that Napoleon's enterprise in Mexico would be successful. Maximilian was placed upon the throne, and the Republican leader, Juarez, was driven into the extreme north of the country. But with the overthrow of the Southern Confederacy and the restoration of peace in the United States in 1865 the prospect totally changed. The Government of Washington refused to acknowledge any authority in Mexico but that of Juarez, and informed Napoleon in courteous terms that his troops must be withdrawn. Napoleon had bound himself by Treaty to keep twenty-five thousand men in Mexico for the protection of Maximilian. He was, however, unable to defy the order of the United States. Early in 1866 he acquainted Maximilian with the necessities of the situation, and with the approaching removal of the force which alone had placed him and could sustain him on the throne. The unfortunate prince sent his consort, the daughter of the King of the Belgians, to Europe to plead against this act of desertion; but her efforts were vain, and her reason sank under the just presentiment of her husband's ruin. The utmost on which Napoleon could venture was the postponement of the recall of his troops till the spring of 1867. He urged Maximilian to abdicate before it was too late; but the prince refused to dissociate himself from his counsellors who still implored him to remain. Meanwhile the Juarists pressed back towards the capital from north and south. As the French detachments were withdrawn towards the coast the entire country fell into their hands. The last French soldiers quitted Mexico at the beginning of March, 1867, and on the 15th of May, Maximilian, still lingering at Queretaro, was made prisoner by the Republicans. He had himself while in power ordered that the partisans of Juarez should be treated not as soldiers but as brigands, and that when captured they should be tried by court-martial and executed within twenty-four hours. The same severity was applied to himself. He was sentenced to death and shot at Queretaro on the 19th of June.

[Decline of Napoleon's reputation.]

Thus ended the attempt of Napoleon III. to establish the influence of France and of his dynasty beyond the seas. The doom of Maximilian excited the compassion of Europe; a deep, irreparable wound was inflicted on the reputation of the man who had tempted him to his treacherous throne, who had guaranteed him protection, and at the bidding of a superior power had abandoned him to his ruin. From this time, though the outward splendour of the Empire was undiminished, there remained scarcely anything of the personal prestige which Napoleon had once enjoyed in so rich a measure. He was no longer in the eyes of Europe or of his own country the profound, self-contained statesman in whose brain lay the secret of coming events; he was rather the gambler whom fortune was preparing to desert, the usurper trembling for the future of his dynasty and his crown. Premature old age and a harassing bodily ailment began to incapacitate him for personal exertion. He sought to loosen the reins in which his despotism held France, and to make a compromise with public opinion which was now declaring against him. And although his own cooler judgment set little store by any addition of frontier strips of alien territory to France, and he would probably have been best pleased to pass the remainder of his reign in undisturbed inaction, he deemed it necessary, after failure in Mexico had become inevitable, to seek some satisfaction in Europe for the injured pride of his country. He entered into negotiations with the King of Holland for the cession of Luxemburg, and had gained his assent, when rumours of the transaction reached the North German Press, and the project passed from out the control of diplomatists and became an affair of rival nations.

[The Luxemburg question, Feb.-May, 1867.]

Luxemburg, which was an independent Duchy ruled by the King of Holland, had until 1866 formed a part of the German Federation; and although Bismarck had not attempted to include it in his own North German Union, Prussia retained by the Treaties of 1815 a right to garrison the fortress of Luxemburg, and its troops were actually there in possession. The proposed transfer of the Duchy to France excited an outburst of patriotic resentment in the Federal Parliament at Berlin. The population of Luxemburg was indeed not wholly German, and it had shown the strongest disinclination to enter the North German league; but the connection of the Duchy with Germany in the past was close enough to explain the indignation roused by Napoleon's project among politicians who little suspected that during the previous year Bismarck himself had cordially recommended this annexation, and that up to the last moment he had been privy to the Emperor's plan. The Prussian Minister, though he did not affect to share the emotion of his countrymen, stated that his policy in regard to Luxemburg must be influenced by the opinion of the Federal Parliament, and he shortly afterwards caused it to be understood at Paris that the annexation of the Duchy to France was impossible. As a warning to France he had already published the Treaties of alliance between Prussia and the South German States, which had been made at the close of the war of 1866, but had hitherto been kept secret.  [530] Other powers now began to tender their good offices. Count Beust, on behalf of Austria, suggested that Luxemburg should be united to Belgium, which in its turn should cede a small district to France. This arrangement, which would have been accepted at Berlin, and which, by soothing the irritation produced in France by Prussia's successes, would possibly have averted the war of 1870, was frustrated by the refusal of the King of Belgium to part with any of his territory-Napoleon, disclaiming all desire for territorial extension, now asked only for the withdrawal of the Prussian garrison from Luxemburg; but it was known that he was determined to enforce this demand by arms. The Russian Government proposed that the question should be settled by a Conference of the Powers at London. This proposal was accepted under certain conditions by France and Prussia, and the Conference assembled on the 7th of May. Its deliberations were completed in four days, and the results were summed up in the Treaty of London signed on the 11th. By this Treaty the Duchy of Luxemburg was declared neutral territory under the collective guarantee of the Powers. Prussia withdrew its garrison, and the King of Holland, who continued to be sovereign of the Duchy, undertook to demolish the fortifications of Luxemburg, and to maintain it in the future as an open town.  [531]

[Exasperation in France against Prussia.]

Of the politicians of France, those who even affected to regard the aggrandisement of Prussia and the union of Northern Germany with indifference or satisfaction were a small minority. Among these was the Emperor, who, after his attempts to gain a Rhenish Province had been baffled, sought to prove in an elaborate State-paper that France had won more than it had lost by the extinction of the German Federation as established in 1815, and by the dissolution of the tie that had bound Austria and Prussia together as members of this body. The events of 1866 had, he contended, broken up a system devised in evil days for the purpose of uniting Central Europe against France, and had restored to the Continent the freedom of alliances; in other words, they had made it possible for the South German States to connect themselves with France. If this illusion was really entertained by the Emperor, it was rudely dispelled by the discovery of the Treaties between Prussia and the Southern States and by their publication in the spring of 1867. But this revelation was not necessary to determine the attitude of the great majority of those who passed for the representatives of independent political opinion in France. The Ministers indeed were still compelled to imitate the Emperor's optimism, and a few enlightened men among the Opposition understood that France must be content to see the Germans effect their national unity; but the great body of unofficial politicians, to whatever party they belonged, joined in the bitter outcry raised at once against the aggressive Government of Prussia and the feeble administration at Paris, which had not found the means to prevent, or had actually facilitated, Prussia's successes. Thiers, who more than any one man had by his writings popularised the Napoleonic legend and accustomed the French to consider themselves entitled to a monopoly of national greatness on the Rhine, was the severest critic of the Emperor, the most zealous denouncer of the work which Bismarck had effected. It was only with too much reason that the Prussian Government looked forward to an attack by France at some earlier or later time as almost certain, and pressed forward the military organisation which was to give to Germany an army of unheard-of efficiency and strength.

[France and Prussia after 1867.]

There appears to be no evidence that Napoleon III. himself desired to attack Prussia so long as that Power should strictly observe the stipulations of the Treaty of Prague which provided for the independence of the South German States. But the current of events irresistibly impelled Germany to unity. The very Treaty which made the river Main the limit of the North German Confederacy reserved for the Southern States the right of attaching themselves to those of the North by some kind of national tie. Unless the French Emperor was resolved to acquiesce in the gradual development of this federal unity until, as regarded the foreigner, the North and the South of Germany should be a single body, he could have no confident hope of lasting peace. To have thus anticipated and accepted the future, to have removed once and for all the sleepless fears of Prussia by the frank recognition of its right to give all Germany effective Union, would have been an act too great and too wise in reality, too weak and self-renouncing in appearance, for any chief of a rival nation. Napoleon did not take this course; on the other hand, not desiring to attack Prussia while it remained within the limits of the Treaty of Prague, he refrained from seeking alliances with the object of immediate and aggressive action. The diplomacy of the Emperor during the period from 1866 to 1870 is indeed still but imperfectly known; but it would appear that his efforts were directed only to the formation of alliances with the view of eventual action when Prussia should have passed the limits which the Emperor himself or public opinion in Paris should, as interpreter of the Treaty of Prague, impose upon this Power in its dealings with the South German States.

[Negotiations with Austria, 1868-69.]

The Governments to which Napoleon could look for some degree of support were those of Austria and Italy. Count Beust, now Chancellor of the Austrian Monarchy, was a bitter enemy to Prussia, and a rash and adventurous politician, to whom the very circumstance of his sudden elevation from the petty sphere of Saxon politics gave a certain levity and unconstraint in the handling of great affairs. He cherished the idea of recovering Austria's ascendency in Germany, and was disposed to repel the extension of Russian influence westwards by boldly encouraging the Poles to seek for the satisfaction of their national hopes in Galicia under the Hapsburg Crown. To Count Beust France was the most natural of all allies. On the other hand, the very system which Beust had helped to establish in Hungary raised serious obstacles against the adoption of his own policy. Andrássy, the Hungarian Minister, while sharing Beust's hostility to Russia, declared that his countrymen had no interest in restoring Austria's German connection, and were in fact better without it. In these circumstances the negotiations of the French and the Austrian Emperor were conducted by a private correspondence. The interchange of letters continued during the years 1868 and 1869, and resulted in a promise made by Napoleon to support Austria if it should be attacked by Prussia, while the Emperor Francis Joseph promised to assist France if it should be attacked by Prussia and Russia together. No Treaty was made, but a general assurance was exchanged between the two Emperors that they would pursue a common policy and treat one another's interests as their own. With the view of forming a closer understanding the Archduke Albrecht visited Paris in February, 1870, and a French general was sent to Vienna to arrange the plan of campaign in case of war with Prussia. In such a war, if undertaken by the two Powers, it was hoped that Italy would join.  [532]

[Italy after 1866.]

[Mentana, Nov. 3, 1867.]

The alliance of 1866 between Prussia and Italy had left behind it in each of these States more of rancour than of good-will. La Marmora had from the beginning to the end been unfortunate in his relations with Berlin. He had entered into the alliance with suspicion; he would gladly have seen Venetia given to Italy by a European Congress without war; and when hostilities broke out, he had disregarded and resented what he considered an attempt of the Prussian Government to dictate to him the military measures to be pursued. On the other hand, the Prussians charged the Italian Government with having deliberately held back its troops after the battle of Custozza in pursuance of arrangements made between Napoleon and the Austrian Emperor on the voluntary cession of Venice, and with having endangered or minimised Prussia's success by enabling the Austrians to throw a great part of their Italian forces northwards. There was nothing of that comradeship between the Italian and the Prussian armies which is acquired on the field of battle. The personal sympathies of Victor Emmanuel were strongly on the side of the French Emperor; and when, at the close of the year 1866, the French garrison was withdrawn from Rome in pursuance of the convention made in September, 1864, it seemed probable that France and Italy might soon unite in a close alliance. But in the following year the attempts of the Garibaldians to overthrow the Papal Government, now left without its foreign defenders, embroiled Napoleon and the Italian people. Napoleon was unable to defy the clerical party in France; he adopted the language of menace in his communications with the Italian Cabinet; and when, in the autumn of 1867, the Garibaldians actually invaded the Roman States, he despatched a body of French troops under General Failly to act in support of those of the Pope. An encounter took place at Mentana on November 3rd, in which the Garibaldians, after defeating the Papal forces, were put to the rout by General Failly. The occupation of Civita Vecchia was renewed, and in the course of the debates raised at Paris on the Italian policy of the Government, the Prime Minister, M. Rouher, stated, with the most passionate emphasis that, come what might, Italy should never possess itself of Rome. "Never," he cried, "will France tolerate such an outrage on its honour and its dignity."  [533]

[Napoleon and Italy after Mentana.]

[Italy and Austria.]

The affair of Mentana, the insolent and heartless language in which General Failly announced his success, the reoccupation of Roman territory by French troops, and the declaration made by M. Rouher in the French Assembly, created wide and deep anger in Italy, and made an end for the time of all possibility of a French alliance. Napoleon was indeed, as regarded Italy, in an evil case. By abandoning Rome he would have turned against himself and his dynasty the whole clerical interest in France, whose confidence he had already to some extent forfeited by his policy in 1860; on the other hand, it was vain for him to hope for the friendship of Italy whilst he continued to bar the way to the fulfilment of the universal national desire. With the view of arriving at some compromise he proposed a European Conference on the Roman question; but this was resisted above all by Count Bismarck, whose interest it was to keep the sore open; and neither England nor Russia showed any anxiety to help the Pope's protector out of his difficulties. Napoleon sought by a correspondence with Victor Emmanuel during 1868 and 1869 to pave the way for a defensive alliance; but Victor Emmanuel was in reality as well as in name a constitutional king, and probably could not, even if he had desired, have committed Italy to engagements disapproved by the Ministry and Parliament. It was made clear to Napoleon that the evacuation of the Papal States must precede any treaty of alliance between France and Italy. Whether the Italian Government would have been content with a return to the conditions of the September Convention, or whether it made the actual possession of Rome the price of a treaty-engagement, is uncertain; but inasmuch as Napoleon was not at present prepared to evacuate Civita Vecchia, he could aim at nothing more than some eventual concert when the existing difficulties should have been removed. The Court of Vienna now became the intermediary between the two Powers who had united against it in 1859. Count Beust was free from the associations which had made any approach to friendship with the kingdom of Victor Emmanuel impossible for his predecessors. He entered into negotiations at Florence, which resulted in the conclusion of an agreement between the Austrian and the Italian Governments that they would act together and guarantee one another's territories in the event of a war between France and Prussia. This agreement was made with the assent of the Emperor Napoleon, and was understood to be preparatory to an accord with France itself; but it was limited to a defensive character, and it implied that any eventual concert with France must be arranged by the two Powers in combination with one another.  [534]

[Isolation of France.]

At the beginning of 1870 the Emperor Napoleon was therefore without any more definite assurance of support in a war with Prussia than the promise of the Austrian Sovereign that he would assist France if attacked by Prussia and Russia together, and that he would treat the interests of France as his own. By withdrawing his protection from Rome Napoleon had undoubtedly a fair chance of building up this shadowy and remote engagement into a defensive alliance with both Austria and Italy. But perfect clearness and resolution of purpose, as well as the steady avoidance of all quarrels on mere incidents, were absolutely indispensable to the creation and the employment of such a league against the Power which alone it could have in view; and Prussia had now little reason to fear any such exercise of statesmanship on the part of Napoleon. The solution of the Roman question, in other words the withdrawal of the French garrison from Roman territory, could proceed only from some stronger stimulus than the declining force of Napoleon's own intelligence and will could now supply. This fatal problem baffled his attempts to gain alliances; and yet the isolation of France was but half acknowledged, but half understood; and a host of rash, vainglorious spirits impatiently awaited the hour that should call them to their revenge on Prussia for the triumphs in which it had not permitted France to share.

[Germany, 1867-1870.]

Meanwhile on the other side Count Bismarck advanced with what was most essential in his relations with the States of Southern Germany-the completion of the Treaties of Alliance by conventions assimilating the military systems of these States to that of Prussia. A Customs-Parliament was established for the whole of Germany, which, it was hoped, would be the precursor of a National Assembly uniting the North and the South of the Main. But in spite of this military and commercial approximation, the progress towards union was neither so rapid nor so smooth as the patriots of the North could desire. There was much in the harshness and self-assertion of the Prussian character that repelled the less disciplined communities of the South. Ultramontanism was strong in Bavaria; and throughout the minor States the most advanced of the Liberals were opposed to a closer union with Berlin, from dislike of its absolutist traditions and the heavy hand of its Government. Thus the tendency known as Particularism was supported in Bavaria and Würtemberg by classes of the population who in most respects were in antagonism to one another; nor could the memories of the campaign of 1866 and the old regard for Austria be obliterated in a day. Bismarck did not unduly press on the work of consolidation. He marked and estimated the force of the obstacles which too rapid a development of his national policy would encounter. It is possible that he may even have seen indications that religious and other influences might imperil the military union which he had already established, and that he may not have been unwilling to call to his aid, as the surest of all preparatives for national union, the event which he had long believed to be inevitable at some time or other in the future, a war with France.

[The Spanish candidature of Leopold of Hohenzollern.]

[Leopold accepts the Spanish Crown, July 3, 1870.]

Since the autumn of 1868 the throne of Spain had been vacant in consequence of a revolution in which General Prim had been the leading actor. It was not easy to discover a successor for the Bourbon Isabella; and after other candidatures had been vainly projected it occurred to Prim and his friends early in 1869 that a suitable candidate might be found in Prince Leopold of Hohenzollern-Sigmaringen, whose elder brother had been made Prince of Roumania, and whose father, Prince Antony, had been Prime Minister of Prussia in 1859. The House of Hohenzollern-Sigmaringen was so distantly related to the reigning family of Prussia that the name alone preserved the memory of the connection; and in actual blood-relationship Prince Leopold was much more nearly allied to the French Houses of Murat and Beauharnais. But the Sigmaringen family was distinctly Prussian by interest and association, and its chief, Antony, had not only been at the head of the Prussian Administration himself, but had, it is said, been the first to suggest the appointment of Bismarck to the same office. The candidature of a Hohenzollern might reasonably be viewed in France as an attempt to connect Prussia politically with Spain; and with so much reserve was this candidature at the first handled at Berlin that, in answer to inquiries made by Benedetti in the spring of 1869, the Secretary of State who represented Count Bismarck stated on his word of honour that the candidature had never been suggested. The affair was from first to last ostensibly treated at Berlin as one with which the Prussian Government was wholly unconcerned, and in which King William was interested only as head of the family to which Prince Leopold belonged. For twelve months after Benedetti's inquiries it appeared as if the project had been entirely abandoned; it was, however, revived in the spring of 1870, and on the 3rd of July the announcement was made at Paris that Prince Leopold had consented to accept the Crown of Spain if the Cortes should confirm his election.

[French Declaration, July 6.]

At once there broke out in the French Press a storm of indignation against Prussia. The organs of the Government took the lead in exciting public opinion. On the 6th of July the Duke of Gramont, Foreign Minister, declared to the Legislative Body that the attempt of a Foreign Power to place one of its Princes on the throne of Charles V. imperilled the interests and the honour of France, and that, if such a contingency were realised, the Government would fulfil its duty without hesitation and without weakness. The violent and unsparing language of this declaration, which had been drawn up at a Council of Ministers under the Emperor's presidency, proved that the Cabinet had determined either to humiliate Prussia or to take vengeance by arms. It was at once seen by foreign diplomatists, who during the preceding days had been disposed to assist in removing a reasonable subject of complaint, how little was the chance of any peaceable settlement after such a public challenge had been issued to Prussia in the Emperor's name. One means of averting war alone seemed possible, the voluntary renunciation by Prince Leopold of the offered Crown. To obtain this renunciation became the task of those who, unlike the French Minister of Foreign Affairs, were anxious to preserve peace.

[Ollivier's Ministry.]

The parts that were played at this crisis by the individuals who most influenced the Emperor Napoleon are still but imperfectly known; but there is no doubt that from the beginning to the end the Duke of Gramont, with short intermissions, pressed with insane ardour for war. The Ministry now in office had been called to their places in January, 1870, after the Emperor had made certain changes in the constitution in a Liberal direction, and had professed to transfer the responsibility of power from himself to a body of advisers possessing the confidence of the Chamber. Ollivier, formerly one of the leaders of the Opposition, had accepted the Presidency of the Cabinet. His colleagues were for the most part men new to official life, and little able to hold their own against such representatives of unreformed Imperialism as the Duke of Gramont and the War-Minister Leboeuf who sat beside them. Ollivier himself was one of the few politicians in France who understood that his countrymen must be content to see German unity established whether they liked it or not. He was entirely averse from war with Prussia on the question which had now arisen; but the fear that public opinion would sweep away a Liberal Ministry which hesitated to go all lengths in patriotic extravagance led him to sacrifice his own better judgment, and to accept the responsibility for a policy which in his heart he disapproved. Gramont's rash hand was given free play. Instructions were sent to Benedetti to seek the King of Prussia at Ems, where he was taking the waters, and to demand from him, as the only means of averting war, that he should order the Hohenzollern Prince to revoke his acceptance of the Crown. "We are in great haste," Gramont added, "for we must gain the start in case of an unsatisfactory reply, and commence the movement of troops by Saturday in order to enter upon the campaign in a fortnight. Be on your guard against an answer merely leaving the Prince of Hohenzollern to his fate, and disclaiming on the part of the King any interest in his future."  [535]

[Benedetti and King William at Ems, July 9-14.]

Benedetti's first interview with the King was on the 9th of July. He informed the King of the emotion that had been caused in France by the candidature of the Hohenzollern Prince; he dwelt on the value to both countries of the friendly relation between France and Prussia; and, while studiously avoiding language that might wound or irritate the King, he explained to him the requirements of the Government at Paris. The King had learnt beforehand what would be the substance of Benedetti's communication. He had probably been surprised and grieved at the serious consequences which Prince Leopold's action had produced in France; and although he had determined not to submit to dictation from Paris or to order Leopold to abandon his candidature, he had already, as it seems, taken steps likely to render the preservation of peace more probable. At the end of a conversation with the Ambassador, in which he asserted his complete independence as head of the family of Hohenzollern, he informed Benedetti that he had entered into communication with Leopold and his father, and that he expected shortly to receive a despatch from Sigmaringen. Benedetti rightly judged that the King, while positively refusing to meet Gramont's demands, was yet desirous of finding some peaceable way out of the difficulty; and the report of this interview which he sent to Paris was really a plea in favour of good sense and moderation. But Gramont was little disposed to accept such counsels. "I tell you plainly," he wrote to Benedetti on the next day, "public opinion is on fire, and will leave us behind it. We must begin; we wait only for your despatch to call up the three hundred thousand men who are waiting the summons. Write, telegraph, something definite. If the King will not counsel the Prince of Hohenzollern to resign, well, it is immediate war, and in a few days we are on the Rhine."

[Leopold withdraws, July 12.]

[Guarantee against renewal demanded.]

[Benedetti and the King, July 13.]

Nevertheless Benedetti's advice was not without its influence on the Emperor and his Ministers. Napoleon, himself wavering from hour to hour, now inclined to the peace-party, and during the 11th there was a pause in the military preparations that had been begun. On the 12th the efforts of disinterested Governments, probably also the suggestions of the King of Prussia himself, produced their effects. A telegram was received at Madrid from Prince Antony stating that his son's candidature was withdrawn. A few hours later Ollivier announced the news in the Legislative Chamber at Paris, and exchanged congratulations with the friends of peace, who considered that the matter was now at an end. But this pacific conclusion little suited either the war-party or the Bonapartists of the old type, who grudged to a Constitutional Ministry so substantial a diplomatic success. They at once declared that the retirement of Prince Leopold was a secondary matter, and that the real question was what guarantees had been received from Prussia against a renewal of the candidature. Gramont himself, in an interview with the Prussian Ambassador, Baron Werther, sketched a letter which he proposed that King William should send to the Emperor, stating that in sanctioning the candidature of Prince Leopold he had not intended to offend the French, and that in associating himself with the Prince's withdrawal he desired that all misunderstandings should be at an end between the two Governments. The despatch of Baron Werther conveying this proposition appears to have deeply offended King William, whom it reached about midday on the 13th. Benedetti had that morning met the King on the promenade at Ems, and had received from him the promise that as soon as the letter which was still on its way from Sigmaringen should arrive he would send for the Ambassador in order that he might communicate its contents at Paris. The letter arrived; but Baron Werther's despatch from Paris had arrived before it; and instead of summoning Benedetti as he had promised, the King sent one of his aides-de-camp to him with a message that a written communication had been received from Prince Leopold confirming his withdrawal, and that the matter was now at an end. Benedetti desired the aide-de-camp to inform the King that he was compelled by his instructions to ask for a guarantee against a renewal of the candidature. The aide-de-camp did as he was requested, and brought back a message that the King gave his entire approbation to the withdrawal of the Prince of Hohenzollern, but that he could do no more. Benedetti begged for an audience with His Majesty. The King replied that he was compelled to decline entering into further negotiation, and that he had said his last word. Though the King thus refused any further discussion, perfect courtesy was observed on both sides; and on the following morning the King and the Ambassador, who were both leaving Ems, took leave of one another at the railway station with the usual marks of respect.

[Publication of the telegram from Ems, July 13.]

[War decided at Paris, July 14.]

That the guarantee which the French Government had resolved to demand would not be given was now perfectly certain; yet, with the candidature of Prince Leopold fairly extinguished, it was still possible that the cooler heads at Paris might carry the day, and that the Government would stop short of declaring war on a point on which the unanimous judgment of the other Powers declared it to be in the wrong. But Count Bismarck was determined not to let the French escape lightly from the quarrel. He had to do with an enemy who by his own folly had come to the brink of an aggressive war, and, far from facilitating his retreat, it was Bismarck's policy to lure him over the precipice. Not many hours after the last message had passed between King William and Benedetti, a telegram was officially published at Berlin, stating, in terms so brief as to convey the impression of an actual insult, that the King had refused to see the French Ambassador, and had informed him by an aide-de-camp that he had nothing more to communicate to him. This telegram was sent to the representatives of Prussia at most of the European Courts, and to its agents in every German capital. Narratives instantly gained currency, and were not contradicted by the Prussian Government, that Benedetti had forced himself upon the King on the promenade at Ems, and that in the presence of a large company the King had turned his back upon the Ambassador. The publication of the alleged telegram from Ems became known in Paris on the 14th. On that day the Council of Ministers met three times. At the first meeting the advocates of peace were still in the majority; in the afternoon, as the news from Berlin and the fictions describing the insult offered to the French Ambassador spread abroad, the agitation in Paris deepened, and the Council decided upon calling up the Reserves; yet the Emperor himself seemed still disposed for peace. It was in the interval between the second and the third meeting of the Council, between the hours of six and ten in the evening, that Napoleon finally gave way before the threats and importunities of the war-party. The Empress, fanatically anxious for the overthrow of a great Protestant Power, passionately eager for the military glory which alone could insure the Crown to her son, won the triumph which she was so bitterly to rue. At the third meeting of the Council, held shortly before midnight, the vote was given for war.

In Germany this decision had been expected; yet it made a deep impression not only on the German people but on Europe at large that, when the declaration of war was submitted to the French Legislative Body in the form of a demand for supplies, no single voice was raised to condemn the war for its criminality and injustice: the arguments which were urged against it by M. Thiers and others were that the Government had fixed upon a bad cause, and that the occasion was inopportune. Whether the majority of the Assembly really desired war is even now matter of doubt. But the clamour of a hundred madmen within its walls, the ravings of journalists and incendiaries, who at such a time are to the true expression of public opinion what the Spanish Inquisition was to the Christian religion, paralysed the will and the understanding of less infatuated men. Ten votes alone were given in the Assembly against the grant demanded for war; to Europe at large it went out that the crime and the madness was that of France as a nation. Yet Ollivier and many of his colleagues up to the last moment disapproved of the war, and consented to it only because they believed that the nation would otherwise rush into hostilities under a reactionary Ministry who would serve France worse than themselves. They found when it was too late that the supposed national impulse, which they had thought irresistible, was but the outcry of a noisy minority. The reports of their own officers informed them that in sixteen alone out of the eighty-seven Departments of France was the war popular. In the other seventy-one it was accepted either with hesitation or regret.  [536]

[Initial forces of either side.]

[Expected Alliances of France.]

[Austria preparing.]

How vast were the forces which the North German Confederation could bring into the field was well known to Napoleon's Government. Benedetti had kept his employers thoroughly informed of the progress of the North German military organisation; he had warned them that the South German States would most certainly act with the North against a foreign assailant; he had described with great accuracy and great penetration the nature of the tie that existed between Berlin and St. Petersburg, a tie which was close enough to secure for Prussia the goodwill, and in certain contingencies the armed support, of Russia, while it was loose enough not to involve Prussia in any Muscovite enterprise that would bring upon it the hostility of England and Austria. The utmost force which the French military administration reckoned on placing in the field at the beginning of the campaign was two hundred and fifty thousand men, to be raised at the end of three weeks by about fifty thousand more. The Prussians, even without reckoning on any assistance from Southern Germany, and after allowing for three army-corps that might be needed to watch Austria and Denmark, could begin the campaign with three hundred and thirty thousand. Army to army, the French thus stood according to the reckoning of their own War Office outnumbered at the outset; but Leboeuf, the War-Minister, imagined that the Foreign Office had made sure of alliances, and that a great part of the Prussian Army would not be free to act on the western frontier. Napoleon had in fact pushed forward his negotiations with Austria and Italy from the time that war became imminent. Count Beust, while clearly laying it down that Austria was not bound to follow France into a war made at its own pleasure, nevertheless felt some anxiety lest France and Prussia should settle their differences at Austria's expense; moreover from the victory of Napoleon, assisted in any degree by himself, he could fairly hope for the restoration of Austria's ascendency in Germany and the undoing of the work of 1866. It was determined at a Council held at Vienna on the 18th of July that Austria should for the present be neutral if Russia should not enter the war on the side of Prussia; but this neutrality was nothing more than a stage towards alliance with France if at the end of a certain brief period the army of Napoleon should have penetrated into Southern Germany. In a private despatch to the Austrian Ambassador at Paris Count Beust pointed out that the immediate participation of Austria in the war would bring Russia into the field on King William's side. "To keep Russia neutral," he wrote, "till the season is sufficiently advanced to prevent the concentration of its troops must be at present our object; but this neutrality is nothing more than a means for arriving at the real end of our policy, the only means for completing our preparations without exposing ourselves to premature attack by Prussia or Russia." He added that Austria had already entered into a negotiation with Italy with a view to the armed mediation of the two Powers, and strongly recommended the Emperor to place the Italians in possession of Rome.  [537]

[France, Austria, and Italy.]

Negotiations were now pressed forward between Paris, Florence, and Vienna, for the conclusion of a triple alliance. Of the course taken by these negotiations contradictory accounts are given by the persons concerned in them. According to Prince Napoleon, Victor Emmanuel demanded possession of Rome and this was refused to him by the French Emperor, in consequence of which the project of alliance failed. According to the Duke of Gramont, no more was demanded by Italy than the return to the conditions of the September Convention; this was agreed to by the Emperor, and it was in pursuance of this agreement that the Papal States were evacuated by their French garrison on the 2nd of August. Throughout the last fortnight of July, after war had actually been declared, there was, if the statement of Gramont is to be trusted, a continuous interchange of notes, projects, and telegrams between the three Governments. The difficulties raised by Italy and Austria were speedily removed, and though some weeks were needed by these Powers for their military preparations, Napoleon was definitely assured of their armed support in case of his preliminary success. It was agreed that Austria and Italy, assuming at the first the position of armed neutrality, should jointly present an ultimatum to Prussia in September demanding the exact performance of the Treaty of Prague, and, failing its compliance with this summons in the sense understood by its enemies, that the two Powers would immediately declare war, their armies taking the field at latest on the 15th of September. That Russia would in that case assist Prussia was well known; but it would seem that Count Beust feared little from his northern enemy in an autumn campaign. The draft of the Treaty between Italy and Austria had actually, according to Gramont's statement, been accepted by the two latter Powers, and received its last amendments in a negotiation between the Emperor Napoleon and an Italian envoy, Count Vimercati, at Metz. Vimercati reached Florence with the amended draft on the 4th of August, and it was expected that the Treaty would be signed on the following day. When that day came it saw the forces of the French Empire dashed to pieces.[538]

[Prussian Plans.]

Preparations for a war with France had long occupied the general staff at Berlin. Before the winter of 1868 a memoir had been drawn up by General Moltke, containing plans for the concentration of the whole of the German forces, for the formation of each of the armies to be employed, and the positions to be occupied at the outset by each corps. On the basis of this memoir the arrangements for the transport of each corps from its depôt to the frontier had subsequently been worked out in such minute detail that when, on the 16th of July, King William gave the order for mobilisation, nothing remained but to insert in the railway time-tables and marching-orders the day on which the movement was to commence. This minuteness of detail extended, however, only to that part of Moltke's plan which related to the assembling and first placing of the troops. The events of the campaign could not thus be arranged and tabulated beforehand; only the general object and design could be laid down. That the French would throw themselves with great rapidity upon Southern Germany was considered probable. The armies of Baden, Würtemberg, and Bavaria were too weak, the military centres of the North were too far distant, for effective resistance to be made in this quarter to the first blows of the invader. Moltke therefore recommended that the Southern troops should withdraw from their own States and move northwards to join those of Prussia in the Palatinate or on the Middle Rhine, so that the entire forces of Germany should be thrown upon the flank or rear of the invader; while, in the event of the French not thus taking the offensive, France itself was to be invaded by the collective strength of Germany along the line from Saarbrücken to Landau, and its armies were to be cut off from their communications with Paris by vigorous movements of the invader in a northerly direction.  [539]

[German mobilisation.]

The military organisation of Germany is based on the division of the country into districts, each of which furnishes at its own depôt a small but complete army. The nucleus of each such corps exists in time of peace, with its own independent artillery, stores, and material of war. On the order for mobilisation being given, every man liable to military service, but not actually serving, joins the regiment to which he locally belongs, and in a given number of days each corps is ready to take the field in full strength. The completion of each corps at its own depôt is the first stage in the preparation for a campaign. Not till this is effected does the movement of troops towards the frontier begin. The time necessary for the first act of preparation was, like that to be occupied in transport, accurately determined by the Prussian War Office. It resulted from General Moltke's calculations that, the order of mobilisation having been given on the 16th of July, the entire army with which it was intended to begin the campaign would be collected and in position ready to cross the frontier on the 4th of August, if the French should not have taken up the offensive before that day. But as it was apprehended that part at least of the French army would be thrown into Germany before that date, the westward movement of the German troops stopped short at a considerable distance from the border, in order that the troops first arriving might not be exposed to the attack of a superior force before their supports should be at hand. On the actual frontier there was placed only the handful of men required for reconnoitring, and for checking the enemy during the few hours that would be necessary to guard against the effect of a surprise.

[The French Army.]

The French Emperor was aware of the numerical inferiority of his army to that of Prussia; he hoped, however, by extreme rapidity of movement to penetrate Southern Germany before the Prussian army could assemble, and so, while forcing the Southern Governments to neutrality, to meet on the Upper Danube the assisting forces of Italy and Austria. It was his design to concentrate a hundred and fifty thousand men at Metz, a hundred thousand at Strasburg, and with these armies united to cross the Rhine into Baden; while a third army, which was to assemble at Châlons, protected the north-eastern frontier against an advance of the Prussians. A few days after the declaration of war, while the German corps were still at their depôts in the interior, considerable forces were massed round Metz and Strasburg. All Europe listened for the rush of the invader and the first swift notes of triumph from a French army beyond the Rhine; but week after week passed, and the silence was still unbroken. Stories, incredible to those who first heard them, yet perfectly true, reached the German frontier-stations of actual famine at the advanced posts of the enemy, and of French soldiers made prisoners while digging in potato-fields to keep themselves alive. That Napoleon was less ready than had been anticipated became clear to all the world; but none yet imagined the revelations which each successive day was bringing at the headquarters of the French armies. Absence of whole regiments that figured in the official order of battle, defective transport, stores missing or congested, made it impossible even to attempt the inroad into Southern Germany within the date up to which it had any prospect of success. The design was abandoned, yet not in time to prevent the troops that were hurrying from the interior from being sent backwards and forwards according as the authorities had, or had not, heard of the change of plan. Napoleon saw that a Prussian force was gathering on the Middle Rhine which it would be madness to leave on his flank; he ordered his own commanders to operate on the corresponding line of the Lauter and the Saar, and despatched isolated divisions to the very frontier, still uncertain whether even in this direction he would be able to act on the offensive, or whether nothing now remained to him but to resist the invasion of France by a superior enemy. Ollivier had stated in the Assembly that he and his colleagues entered upon the war with a light heart; he might have added that they entered upon it with bandaged eyes. The Ministers seem actually not to have taken the trouble to exchange explanations with one another. Leboeuf, the War-Minister, had taken it for granted that Gramont had made arrangements with Austria which would compel the Prussians to keep a large part of their forces in the interior. Gramont, in forcing on the quarrel with Prussia, and in his negotiations with Austria, had taken it for granted that Leboeuf could win a series of victories at the outset in Southern Germany. The Emperor, to whom alone the entire data of the military and the diplomatic services of France were open, was incapable of exertion or scrutiny, purposeless, distracted with pain, half-imbecile.

[Causes of French military inferiority.]

That the Imperial military administration was rotten to the core the terrible events of the next few weeks sufficiently showed. Men were in high place whose antecedents would have shamed the better kind of brigand. The deficiencies of the army were made worse by the diversion of public funds to private necessities; the looseness, the vulgar splendour, the base standards of judgment of the Imperial Court infected each branch of the public services of France, and worked perhaps not least on those who were in military command. But the catastrophe of 1870 seemed to those who witnessed it to tell of more than the vileness of an administration; in England, not less than in Germany, voices of influence spoke of the doom that had overtaken the depravity of a sunken nation; of the triumph of simple manliness, of Godfearing virtue itself, in the victories of the German army. There may have been truth in this; yet it would require a nice moral discernment to appraise the exact degeneracy of the French of 1870 from the French of 1854 who humbled Russia, or from the French of 1859 who triumphed at Solferino; and it would need a very comprehensive acquaintance with the lower forms of human pleasure to judge in what degree the sinfulness of Paris exceeds the sinfulness of Berlin. Had the French been as strict a race as the Spartans who fell at Thermopylae, as devout as the Tyrolese who perished at Königgrätz, it is quite certain that, with the numbers which took the field against Germany in 1870, with Napoleon III. at the head of affairs, and the actual generals of 1870 in command, the armies of France could not have escaped destruction.

[Cause of German Success.]

The main cause of the disparity of France and Germany in 1870 was in truth that Prussia had had from 1862 to 1866 a Government so strong as to be able to force upon its subjects its own gigantic scheme of military organisation in defiance of the votes of Parliament and of the national will. In 1866 Prussia, with a population of nineteen millions, brought actually into the field three hundred and fifty thousand men, or one in fifty-four of its inhabitants. There was no other government in Europe, with the possible exception of Russia, which could have imposed upon its subjects, without risking its own existence, so vast a burden of military service as that implied in this strength of the fighting army. Napoleon III. at the height of his power could not have done so; and when after Königgrätz he endeavoured to raise the forces of France to an equality with those of the rival Power by a system which would have brought about one in seventy of the population into the field, his own nominees in the Legislative Body, under pressure of public opinion, so weakened the scheme that the effective numbers of the army remained little more than they were before. The true parallel to the German victories of 1870 is to be found in the victories of the French Committee of Public Safety in 1794 and in those of the first Napoleon. A government so powerful as to bend the entire resources of the State to military ends will, whether it is one of democracy run mad, or of a crowned soldier of fortune, or of an ancient monarchy throwing new vigour into its traditional system and policy, crush in the moment of impact communities of equal or greater resources in which a variety of rival influences limit and control the central power and subordinate military to other interests. It was so in the triumphs of the Reign of Terror over the First Coalition; it was so in the triumphs of King William over Austria and France. But the parallel between the founders of German unity and the organisers of victory after 1793 extends no farther than to the sources of their success. Aggression and adventure have not been the sequels of the war of 1870. The vast armaments of Prussia were created in order to establish German union under the House of Hohenzollern, and they have been employed for no other object. It is the triumph of statesmanship, and it has been the glory of Prince Bismarck, after thus reaping the fruit of a well-timed homage to the God of Battles, to know how to quit his shrine.

[The frontier, Aug. 2.]

[Saarbrücken, Aug 2.]

[Weissenburg, Aug 4.]

[Battle of Wörth, Aug. 6.]

At the end of July, twelve days after the formal declaration of war, the gathering forces of the Germans, over three hundred and eighty thousand strong, were still some distance behind the Lauter and the Saar. Napoleon, apparently without any clear design, had placed certain bodies of troops actually on the frontier at Forbach, Weissenburg, and elsewhere, while other troops, raising the whole number to about two hundred and fifty thousand, lay round Metz and Strasburg, and at points between these and the most advanced positions. The reconnoitring of the small German detachments on the frontier was conducted with extreme energy: the French appear to have made no reconnaissances at all, for when they determined at last to discover what was facing them at Saarbrücken, they advanced with twenty-five thousand men against one-tenth of that number. On the 2nd of August Frossard's corps from Forbach moved upon Saarbrücken with the Emperor in person. The garrison was driven out, and the town bombarded, but even now the reconnaissance was not continued beyond the bridge across the Saar which divides the two parts of the town. Forty-eight hours later the alignment of the German forces in their invading order was completed, and all was ready for an offensive campaign. The central army, commanded by Prince Frederick Charles, spreading east and west behind Saarbrücken, touched on its right the northern army commanded by General Steinmetz, on its left the southern army commanded by the Crown Prince, which covered the frontier of the Palatinate, and included the troops of Bavaria and Würtemberg. The general direction of the three armies was thus from north-west to south-east. As the line of invasion was to be nearly due west, it was necessary that the first step forwards should be made by the army of the Crown Prince in order to bring it more nearly to a level with the northern corps in the march into France. On the 4th of August the Crown Prince crossed the Alsatian frontier and moved against Weissenburg. The French General Douay, who was posted here with about twelve thousand men, was neither reinforced nor bidden to retire. His troops met the attack of an enemy many times more numerous with great courage; but the struggle was a hopeless one, and after several hours of severe fighting the Germans were masters of the field. Douay fell in the battle; his troops frustrated an attempt made to cut off their retreat, and fell back southwards towards the corps of McMahon, which lay about ten miles behind them. The Crown Prince marched on in search of his enemy, McMahon, who could collect only forty-five thousand men, desired to retreat until he could gain some support; but the Emperor, tormented by fears of the political consequences of the invasion, insisted upon his giving battle. He drew up on the hills about Wörth, almost on the spot where in 1793 Hoche had overthrown the armies of the First Coalition. On the 6th of August the leading divisions of the Crown Prince, about a hundred thousand strong, were within striking distance. The superiority of the Germans in numbers was so great that McMahon's army might apparently have been captured or destroyed with far less loss than actually took place if time had been given for the movements which the Crown Prince's staff had in view, and for the employment of his full strength. But the impetuosity of divisional leaders on the morning of the 6th brought on a general engagement. The resistance of the French was of the most determined character. With one more army-corps-and the corps of General Failly was expected to arrive on the field-it seemed as if the Germans might yet be beaten back. But each hour brought additional forces into action in the attack, while the French commander looked in vain for the reinforcements that could save him from ruin. At length, when the last desperate charges of the Cuirassiers had shattered against the fire of cannon and needle-guns, and the village of Froschwiller, the centre of the French position, had been stormed house by house, the entire army broke and fled in disorder. Nine thousand prisoners, thirty-three cannon, fell into the hands of the conquerors. The Germans had lost ten thousand men, but they had utterly destroyed McMahon's army as an organised force. Its remnant disappeared from the scene of warfare, escaping by the western roads in the direction of Châlons, where first it was restored to some degree of order. The Crown Prince, leaving troops behind him to beleaguer the smaller Alsatian fortresses, marched on untroubled through the northern Vosges, and descended into the open country about Lunéville and Nancy, unfortified towns which could offer no resistance to the passage of an enemy.

[Spicheren, Aug. 6.]

On the same day that the battle of Wörth was fought, the leading columns of the armies of Steinmetz and Prince Frederick Charles crossed the frontier at Saarbrücken. Frossard's corps, on the news of the defeat at Weissenburg, had withdrawn to its earlier positions between Forbach and the frontier: it held the steep hills of Spicheren that look down upon Saarbrücken, and the woods that flank the high road where this passes from Germany into France. As at Wörth, it was not intended that any general attack should be made on the 6th; a delay of twenty-four hours would have enabled the Germans to envelop or crush Frossard's corps with an overwhelming force. But the leaders of the foremost regiments threw themselves impatiently upon the French whom they found before them: other brigades hurried up to the sound of the cannon, until the struggle took the proportion of a battle, and after hours of fluctuating success the heights of Spicheren were carried by successive rushes of the infantry full in the enemy's fire. Why Frossard was not reinforced has never been explained, for several French divisions lay at no great distance westward, and the position was so strong that, if a pitched battle was to be fought anywhere east of Metz, few better points could have been chosen. But, like Douay at Weissenburg, Frossard was left to struggle alone against whatever forces the Germans might throw upon him. Napoleon, who directed the operations of the French armies from Metz, appears to have been now incapable of appreciating the simplest military necessities, of guarding against the most obvious dangers. Helplessness, infatuation ruled the miserable hours.

[Paris after Aug. 6.]

The impression made upon Europe by the battles of the 6th of August corresponded to the greatness of their actual military effects. There was an end to all thoughts of the alliance of Austria and Italy with France. Germany, though unaware of the full magnitude of the perils from which it had escaped, breathed freely after weeks of painful suspense; the very circumstance that the disproportion of numbers on the battle-field of Wörth was still unknown heightened the joy and confidence produced by the Crown Prince's victory, a victory in which the South German troops, fighting by the side of those who had been their foes in 1866, had borne their full part. In Paris the consternation with which the news of McMahon's overthrow was received was all the greater that on the previous day reports had been circulated of a victory won at Landau and of the capture of the Crown Prince with his army. The bulletin of the Emperor, briefly narrating McMahon's defeat and the repulse of Frossard, showed in its concluding words-"All may yet be retrieved"-how profound was the change made in the prospects of the war by that fatal day. The truth was at once apprehended. A storm of indignation broke out against the Imperial Government at Paris. The Chambers were summoned. Ollivier, attacked alike by the extreme Bonapartists and by the Opposition, laid down his office. A reactionary Ministry, headed by the Count of Palikao, was placed in power by the Empress, a Ministry of the last hour as it was justly styled by all outside it. Levies were ordered, arms and stores accumulated for the reserve-forces, preparations made for a siege of Paris itself. On the 12th the Emperor gave up the command which he had exercised with such miserable results, and appointed Marshal Bazaine, one of the heroes of the Mexican Expedition, General-in-Chief of the Army of the Rhine.

[Napoleon at Metz. Aug. 7-11.]

[Borny, Aug 14.]

After the overthrow of McMahon and the victory of the Germans at Spicheren, there seems to have been a period of utter paralysis in the French headquarters at Metz. The divisions of Prince Frederick Charles and Steinmetz did not immediately press forward; it was necessary to allow some days for the advance of the Crown Prince through the Vosges; and during these days the French army about Metz, which, when concentrated, numbered nearly two hundred thousand men, might well have taken the positions necessary for the defence of Moselle, or in the alternative might have gained several marches in the retreat towards Verdun and Châlons. Only a small part of this body had as yet been exposed to defeat. It included in it the very flower of the French forces, tens of thousands of troops probably equal to any in Europe, and capable of forming a most formidable army if united to the reserves which would shortly be collected at Châlons or nearer Paris. But from the 7th to the 12th of August Napoleon, too cowed to take the necessary steps for battle in defence of the line of Moselle, lingered purposeless a id irresolute at Metz, unwilling to fall back from this fortress. It was not till the 14th that the retreat was begun. By this time the Germans were close at hand, and their leaders were little disposed to let the hesitating enemy escape them. While the leading divisions of the French were crossing the Moselle, Steinmetz hurried forward his troops and fell upon the French detachments still lying on the south-east of Metz about Borny and Courcelles. Bazaine suspended his movement of retreat in order to beat back an assailant who for once seemed to be inferior in strength. At the close of the day the French commander believed that he had gained a victory and driven the Germans off their line of advance; in reality he had allowed himself to be diverted from the passage of the Moselle at the last hour, while the Germans left under Prince Frederick Charles gained the river farther south, and actually began to cross it in order to bar his retreat.

[Mars-la-Tour, Aug. 15.]

From Metz westwards there is as far as the village of Gravelotte, which is seven miles distant, but one direct road; at Gravelotte the road forks, the southern arm leading towards Verdun by Vionville and Mars-la-Tour, the northern by Conflans. During the 15th of August the first of Bazaine's divisions moved as far as Vionville along the southern road; others came into the neighbourhood of Gravelotte, but two corps which should have advanced past Gravelotte on to the northern road still lay close to Metz. The Prussian vanguard was meanwhile crossing the Moselle southwards from Noveant to Pont-a-Mousson, and hurrying forwards by lines converging on the road taken by Bazaine. Down to the evening of the 15th it was not supposed at the Prussian headquarters that Bazaine could be overtaken and brought to battle nearer than the line of the Meuse; but on the morning of the 16th the cavalry-detachments which had pushed farthest to the north-west discovered that the heads of the French columns had still not passed Mars-la-Tour. An effort was instantly made to seize the road and block the way before the enemy. The struggle, begun by a handful of combatants on each side, drew to it regiment after regiment as the French battalions close at hand came into action, and the Prussians hurried up in wild haste to support their comrades who were exposed to the attack of an entire army. The rapidity with which the Prussian generals grasped the situation before them, the vigour with which they brought up their cavalry over a distance which no infantry could traverse in the necessary time, and without a moment's hesitation hurled this cavalry in charge after charge against a superior foe, mark the battle of Mars-la-Tour as that in which the military superiority of the Germans was most truly shown. Numbers in this battle had little to do with the result, for by better generalship Bazaine could certainly at any one point have overpowered his enemy. But while the Germans rushed like a torrent upon the true point of attack-that is the westernmost-Bazaine by some delusion considered it his primary object to prevent the Germans from thrusting themselves between the retreating army and Metz, and so kept a great part of his troops inactive about the fortress. The result was that the Germans, with a loss of sixteen thousand men, remained at the close of the day masters of the road at Vionville, and that the French army could not, without winning a victory and breaking through the enemy's line, resume its retreat along this line.

[Gravelotte, Aug. 18.]

It was expected during the 17th that Bazaine would make some attempt to escape by the northern road, but instead of doing so he fell back on Gravelotte and the heights between this and Metz, in order to fight a pitched battle. The position was a well-chosen one; but by midday on the 18th the armies of Steinmetz and Prince Frederick Charles were ranged in front of Bazaine with a strength of two hundred and fifty thousand men, and in the judgment of the King these forces were equal to the attack. Again, as at Wörth, the precipitancy of divisional commanders caused the sacrifice of whole brigades before the battle was won. While the Saxon corps with which Moltke intended to deliver his slow but fatal blow upon the enemy's right flank was engaged in its long northward détour, Steinmetz pushed his Rhinelanders past the ravine of Gravelotte into a fire where no human being could survive, and the Guards, pressing forward in column over the smooth unsheltered slope from St. Marie to St. Privat, sank by thousands without reaching midway in their course. Until the final blow was dealt by the Saxon corps from the north flank, the ground which was won by the Prussians was won principally by their destructive artillery fire: their infantry attacks had on the whole been repelled, and at Gravelotte itself it had seemed for a moment as if the French were about to break the assailant's line. But Bazaine, as on the 16th, steadily kept his reserves at a distance from the points where their presence was most required, and, according to his own account, succeeded in bringing into action no more than a hundred thousand men, or less than two-thirds of the forces under his command.  [540] At the close of the awful day, when the capture of St. Privat by the Saxons turned the defender's line, the French abandoned all their positions and drew back within the defences of Metz.

[McMahon is compelled to attempt Bazaine's relief.]

The Germans at once proceeded to block all the roads round the fortress, and Bazaine made no effort to prevent them. At the end of a few days the line was drawn around him in sufficient strength to resist any sudden attack. Steinmetz, who was responsible for a great part of the loss sustained at Gravelotte, was now removed from his command; his army was united with that under Prince Frederick Charles as the besieging force, while sixty thousand men, detached from this great mass, were formed into a separate army under Prince Albert of Saxony, and sent by way of Verdun to co-operate with the Crown Prince against McMahon. The Government at Paris knew but imperfectly what was passing around Metz from day to day; it knew, however, that if Metz should be given up for lost the hour of its own fall could not be averted. One forlorn hope remained, to throw the army which McMahon was gathering at Châlons north-eastward to Bazaine's relief, though the Crown Prince stood between Châlons and Metz, and could reach every point in the line of march more rapidly than McMahon himself. Napoleon had quitted Metz on the evening of the 15th; on the 17th a council of war was held at Châlons, at which it was determined to fall back upon Paris and to await the attack of the Crown Prince under the forts of the capital. No sooner was this decision announced to the Government at Paris than the Empress telegraphed to her husband warning him to consider what would be the effects of his return, and insisting that an attempt should be made to relieve Bazaine.  [541] McMahon, against his own better judgment, consented to the northern march. He moved in the first instance to Rheims in order to conceal his intention from the enemy, but by doing this he lost some days. On the 23rd, in pursuance of arrangements made with Bazaine, whose messengers were still able to escape the Prussian watch, he set out north-eastwards in the direction of Montmédy.

[German movement northwards, Aug 26.]

[Battle of Sedan, Sept. 1.]

[Capitulation of Sedan, Sept. 2.]

The movement was discovered by the Prussian cavalry and reported at the headquarters at Bar-le-Duc on the 25th. Instantly the westward march of the Crown Prince was arrested, and his army, with that of the Prince of Saxony, was thrown northwards in forced marches towards Sedan. On reaching Le Chesne, west of the Meuse, on the 27th, McMahon became aware of the enemy's presence. He saw that his plan was discovered, and resolved to retreat westwards before it was too late. The Emperor, who had attached himself to the army, consented, but again the Government at Paris interfered with fatal effect. More anxious for the safety of the dynasty than for the existence of the army, the Empress and her advisers insisted that McMahon should continue his advance. Napoleon seems now to have abdicated all authority and thrown to the winds all responsibility. He allowed the march to be resumed in the direction of Mouzon and Stenay. Failly's corps, which formed the right wing, was attacked on the 29th before it could reach the passage of the Meuse at the latter place, and was driven northwards to Beaumont. Here the commander strangely imagined himself to be in security. He was surprised in his camp on the following day, defeated, and driven northwards towards Mouzon. Meanwhile the left of McMahon's army had crossed the Meuse and moved eastwards to Carignan, so that his troops were severed by the river and at some distance from one another. Part of Failly's men were made prisoners in the struggle on the south, or dispersed on the west of the Meuse; the remainder, with their commander, made a hurried and disorderly escape beyond the river, and neglected to break down the bridges by which they had passed. McMahon saw that if the advance was continued his divisions would one after another fall into the enemy's hands. He recalled the troops which had reached Carignan, and concentrated his army about Sedan to fight a pitched battle. The passages of the Meuse above and below Sedan were seized by the Germans. Two hundred and forty thousand men were at Moltke's disposal; McMahon had about half that number. The task of the Germans was not so much to defeat the enemy as to prevent them from escaping to the Belgian frontier. On the morning of September 1st, while on the east of Sedan the Bavarians after a desperate resistance stormed the village of Bazeilles, Hessian and Prussian regiments crossed the Meuse at Donchéry several miles to the west. From either end of this line corps after corps now pushed northwards round the French positions, driving in the enemy wherever they found them, and, converging under the eyes of the Prussian King, his general, and his Minister, each into its place in the arc of fire before which the French Empire was to perish. The movement was as admirably executed as designed. The French fought furiously but in vain: the mere mass of the enemy, the mere narrowing of the once completed circle, crushed down resistance without the clumsy havoc of Gravelotte. From point after point the defenders were forced back within Sedan itself. The streets were choked with hordes of beaten infantry and cavalry; the Germans had but to take one more step forward and the whole of their batteries would command the town. Towards evening there was a pause in the firing, in order that the French might offer negotiations for surrender; but no sign of surrender was made, and the Bavarian cannon resumed their fire, throwing shells into the town itself. Napoleon now caused a white flag to be displayed on the fortress, and sent a letter to the King of Prussia, stating that as he had not been able to die in the midst of his troops, nothing remained for him but to surrender his sword into the hands of his Majesty. The surrender was accepted by King William, who added that General Moltke would act on his behalf in arranging terms of capitulation. General Wimpffen, who had succeeded to the command of the French army on the disablement of McMahon by a wound, acted on behalf of Napoleon. The negotiations continued till late in the night, the French general pressing for permission for his troops to be disarmed in Belgium, while Moltke insisted on the surrender of the entire army as prisoners of war. Fearing the effect of an appeal by Napoleon himself to the King's kindly nature, Bismarck had taken steps to remove his sovereign to a distance until the terms of surrender should be signed. At daybreak on September 2nd Napoleon sought the Prussian headquarters. He was met on the road by Bismarck, who remained in conversation with him till the capitulation was completed on the terms required by the Germans. He then conducted Napoleon to the neighbouring château of Bellevue, where King William, the Crown Prince, and the Prince of Saxony visited him. One pang had still to be borne by the unhappy man. Down to his interview with the King, Napoleon had imagined that all the German armies together had operated against him at Sedan, and he must consequently have still had some hope that his own ruin might have purchased the deliverance of Bazaine. He learnt accidentally from the King that Prince Frederick Charles had never stirred from before Metz. A convulsion of anguish passed over his face: his eyes filled with tears. There was no motive for a prolonged interview between the conqueror and the conquered, for, as a prisoner, Napoleon could not discuss conditions of peace. After some minutes of conversation the King departed for the Prussian headquarters. Napoleon remained in the château until the morning of the next day, and then began his journey towards the place chosen for his captivity, the palace of Wilhelmshöhe at Cassel.  [542]

[The Republic Proclaimed, Sept. 4.]

[Circular of Jules Favre, Sept. 6.]

Rumours of disaster had reached Paris in the last days of August, but to each successive report of evil the Government replied with lying boasts of success, until on the 3rd of September it was forced to announce a catastrophe far surpassing the worst anticipations of the previous days. With the Emperor and his entire army in the enemy's hands, no one supposed that the dynasty could any longer remain on the throne: the only question was by what form of government the Empire should be succeeded. The Legislative Chamber assembled in the dead of night; Jules Favre proposed the deposition of the Emperor, and was heard in silence. The Assembly adjourned for some hours. On the morning of the 4th, Thiers, who sought to keep the way open for an Orleanist restoration, moved that a Committee of Government should be appointed by the Chamber itself, and that elections to a new Assembly should be held as soon as circumstances should permit. Before this and other propositions of the same nature could be put to the vote, the Chamber was invaded by the mob. Gambetta, with most of the Deputies for Paris, proceeded to the Hôtel de Ville, and there proclaimed the Republic. The Empress fled; a Government of National Defence came into existence, with General Trochu at its head, Jules Favre assuming the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Gambetta that of the Interior. No hand was raised in defence of the Napoleonic dynasty or of the institutions of the Empire. The Legislative Chamber and the Senate disappeared without even making an attempt to prolong their own existence. Thiers, without approving of the Republic or the mode in which it had come into being, recommended his friends to accept the new Government, and gave it his own support. On the 6th of September a circular of Jules Favre, addressed to the representatives of France at all the European Courts, justified the overthrow of the Napoleonic Empire, and claimed for the Government by which it was succeeded the goodwill of the neutral Powers. Napoleon III. was charged with the responsibility for the war: with the fall of his dynasty, it was urged, the reasons for a continuance of the struggle had ceased to exist. France only asked for a lasting peace. Such peace, however, must leave the territory of France inviolate, for peace with dishonour would be but the prelude to a new war of extermination. "Not an inch of our soil will we cede"-so ran the formula-"not a stone of our fortresses."  [543]

[Favre and Bismarck, Sept. 29.]

The German Chancellor had nothing ready in the way of rhetoric equal to his antagonist's phrases; but as soon as the battle of Sedan was won it was settled at the Prussian headquarters that peace would not be made without the annexation of Alsace and Lorraine. Prince Bismarck has stated that his own policy would have stopped at the acquisition of Strasburg: Moltke, however, and the chiefs of the army pronounced that Germany could not be secure against invasion while Metz remained in the hands of France, and this opinion was accepted by the King. For a moment it was imagined that the victory of Sedan had given the conqueror peace on his own terms. This hope, however, speedily disappeared, and the march upon Paris was resumed by the army of the Crown Prince without waste of time. In the third week of September the invaders approached the capital. Favre, in spite of his declaration of the 6th, was not indisposed to enter upon negotiations; and, trusting to his own arts of persuasion, he sought an interview with the German Chancellor, which was granted to him at Ferrières on the 19th, and continued on the following day. Bismarck hesitated to treat the holders of office in Paris as an established Government; he was willing to grant an armistice in order that elections might be held for a National Assembly with which Germany could treat for peace; but he required, as a condition of the armistice, that Strasburg and Toul should be surrendered. Toul was already at the last extremity; Strasburg was not capable of holding out ten days longer; but of this the Government at Paris was not aware. The conditions demanded by Bismarck were rejected as insulting to France, and the war was left to take its course. Already, while Favre was negotiating at Ferrières, the German vanguard was pressing round to the west of Paris. A body of French troops which attacked them on the 19th at Châtillon was put to the rout and fled in panic. Versailles was occupied on the same day, and the line of investment was shortly afterwards completed around the capital.

[Siege of Paris, Sept. 19.]

[Tours.]

[Gambetta at Tours.]

The second act in the war now began. Paris had been fortified by Thiers about 1840, at the time when it seemed likely that France might be engaged in war with a coalition on the affairs of Mehemet Ali. The forts were not distant enough from the city to protect it altogether from artillery with the lengthened range of 1870; they were sufficient, however, to render an assault out of the question, and to compel the besieger to rely mainly on the slow operation of famine. It had been reckoned by the engineers of 1840 that food enough might be collected to enable the city to stand a two-months' siege; so vast, however, were the supplies collected in 1870 that, with double the population, Paris had provisions for above four months. In spite therefore of the capture and destruction of its armies the cause of France was not hopeless, if, while Paris and Metz occupied four hundred thousand of the invaders, the population of the provinces should take up the struggle with enthusiasm, and furnish after some months of military exercise troops more numerous than those which France had lost, to attack the besiegers from all points at once and to fall upon their communications. To organise such a national resistance was, however, impossible for any Government within the besieged capital itself. It was therefore determined to establish a second seat of Government on the Loire; and before the lines were drawn round Paris three members of the Ministry, with M. Crémieux at their head, set out for Tours. Crémieux, however, who was an aged lawyer, proved quite unequal to his task. His authority was disputed in the west and the south. Revolutionary movements threatened to break up the unity of the national defence. A stronger hand, a more commanding will, was needed. Such a hand, such a will belonged to Gambetta, who on the 7th of October left Paris in order to undertake the government of the provinces and the organisation of the national armies. The circle of the besiegers was now too closely drawn for the ordinary means of travel to be possible. Gambetta passed over the German lines in a balloon, and reached Tours in safety, where he immediately threw his feeble colleagues into the background and concentrated all power in his own vigorous grasp. The effect of his presence was at once felt throughout France. There was an end of the disorders in the great cities, and of all attempts at rivalry with the central power. Gambetta had the faults of rashness, of excessive self-confidence, of defective regard for scientific authority in matters where he himself was ignorant: but he possessed in an extraordinary degree the qualities necessary for a Dictator at such a national crisis: boundless, indomitable courage; a simple, elemental passion of love for his country that left absolutely no place for hesitations or reserve in the prosecution of the one object for which France then existed, the war. He carried the nation with him like a whirlwind. Whatever share the military errors of Gambetta and his rash personal interference with commanders may have had in the ultimate defeat of France, without him it would never have been known of what efforts France was capable. The proof of his capacity was seen in the hatred and the fear with which down to the time of his death he inspired the German people. Had there been at the head of the army of Metz a man of one-tenth of Gambetta's effective force, it is possible that France might have closed the war, if not with success, at least with undiminished territory.

[Fall of Strasburg, Sept. 28.]

[The army of the Loire.]

[Tann takes Orleans, Oct. 12.]

Before Gambetta left Paris the fall of Strasburg set free the army under General Werder by which it had been besieged, and enabled the Germans to establish a civil Government in Alsace, the western frontier of the new Province having been already so accurately studied that, when peace was made in 1871, the frontier-line was drawn not upon one of the earlier French maps but on the map now published by the German staff. It was Gambetta's first task to divide France into districts, each with its own military centre, its own army, and its own commander. Four such districts were made: the centres were Lille, Le Mans, Bourges, and Besançon. At Bourges and in the neighbourhood considerable progress had already been made in organisation. Early in October German cavalry-detachments, exploring southwards, found that French troops were gathering on the Loire. The Bavarian General Von der Tann was detached by Moltke from the besieging army at Paris, and ordered to make himself master of Orleans. Von der Tann hastened southwards, defeated the French outside Orleans on the 11th of October, and occupied this city, the French retiring towards Bourges. Gambetta removed the defeated commander, and set in his place General Aurelle de Paladines. Von der Tann was directed to cross the Loire and destroy the arsenals at Bourges; he reported, however, that this task was beyond his power, in consequence of which Moltke ordered General Werder with the army of Strasburg to move westwards against Bourges, after dispersing the weak forces that were gathering about Besançon. Werder set out on his dangerous march, but he had not proceeded far when an army of very different power was thrown into the scale against the French levies on the Loire.

[Bazaine at Metz.]

[Capitulation of Metz, Oct. 27.]

In the battle of Gravelotte, fought on the 18th of August, the French troops had been so handled by Bazaine as to render it doubtful whether he really intended to break through the enemy's line and escape from Metz. At what period political designs inconsistent with his military duty first took possession of Bazaine's thoughts is uncertain. He had played a political part in Mexico; it is probable that as soon as he found himself at the head of the one effective army of France, and saw Napoleon hopelessly discredited, he began to aim at personal power. Before the downfall of the Empire he had evidently adopted a scheme of inaction with the object of preserving his army entire: even the sortie by which it had been arranged that he should assist McMahon on the day before Sedan was feebly and irresolutely conducted. After the proclamation of the Republic Bazaine's inaction became still more marked. The intrigues of an adventurer named Regnier, who endeavoured to open a negotiation between the Prussians and the exiled Empress Eugénie, encouraged him in his determination to keep his soldiers from fulfilling their duty to France. Week after week passed by; a fifth of the besieging army was struck down with sickness; yet Bazaine made no effort to break through, or even to diminish the number of men who were consuming the supplies of Metz by giving to separate detachments the opportunity of escape. On the 12th of October, after the pretence of a sortie on the north, he entered into communication with the German headquarters at Versailles. Bismarck offered to grant a free departure to the army of Metz on condition that the fortress should be placed in his hands, that the army should undertake to act on behalf of the Empress, and that the Empress should pledge herself to accept the Prussian conditions of peace, whatever these might be. General Boyer was sent to England to acquaint the Empress with these propositions. They were declined by her, and after a fortnight had been spent in manoeuvres for a Bonapartist restoration. Bazaine found himself at the end of his resources. On the 27th the capitulation of Metz was signed. The fortress itself, with incalculable cannon and material of war, and an army of a hundred and seventy thousand men, including twenty-six thousand sick and wounded in the hospitals, passed into the hands of the Germans.  [544]

[Bazaine.]

Bazaine was at a later time tried by a court-martial, found guilty of the neglect of duty, and sentenced to death. That sentence was not executed; but if there is an infamy that is worse than death, such infamy will to all time cling to his name. In the circumstances in which France was placed no effort, no sacrifice of life could have been too great for the commander of the army at Metz. To retain the besiegers in full strength before the fortress would not have required the half of Bazaine's actual force. If half his army had fallen on the field of battle in successive attempts to cut their way through the enemy, brave men would no doubt have perished; but even had their efforts failed their deaths would have purchased for Metz the power to hold out for weeks or for months longer. The civil population of Metz was but sixty thousand, its army was three times as numerous; unlike Paris, it saw its stores consumed not by helpless millions of women and children, but by soldiers whose duty it was to aid the defence of their country at whatever cost. Their duty, if they could not cut their way through, was to die fighting; and had they shown hesitation, which was not the case, Bazaine should have died at their head. That Bazaine would have fulfilled his duty even if Napoleon III. had remained on the throne is more than doubtful, for his inaction had begun before the catastrophe of Sedan. His pretext after that time was that the government of France had fallen into the hands of men of disorder, and that it was more important for his army to save France from the Government than from the invader. He was the only man in France who thought so. The Government of September 4th, whatever its faults, was good enough for tens of thousands of brave men, Legitimists, Orleanists, Bonapartists, who flocked without distinction of party to its banners: it might have been good enough for Marshal Bazaine. But France had to pay the penalty for the political, the moral indifference which could acquiesce in the Coup d'État of 1851, in the servility of the Empire, in many a vile and boasted deed in Mexico, in China, in Algiers. Such indifference found its Nemesis in a Bazaine.

[Tann driven from Orleans, Nov. 9.]

[Battles of Orleans, Nov. 28-Dec. 2.]

[Sortie of Champigny, Nov. 29-Dec. 4.]

[Battle of Amiens, Nov. 27.]

The surrender of Metz and the release of the great army of Prince Frederick Charles by which it was besieged fatally changed the conditions of the French war of national defence. Two hundred thousand of the victorious troops of Germany under some of their ablest generals were set free to attack the still untrained levies on the Loire and in the north of France, which, with more time for organisation, might well have forced the Germans to raise the siege of Paris. The army once commanded by Steinmetz was now reconstituted, and despatched under General Manteuffel towards Amiens; Prince Frederick Charles moved with the remainder of his troops towards the Loire. Aware that his approach could not long be delayed, Gambetta insisted that Aurelle de Paladines should begin the march on Paris. The general attacked Tann at Coulmiers on the 9th of November, defeated him, and re-occupied Orleans, the first real success that the French had gained in the war. There was great alarm at the German headquarters at Versailles; the possibility of a failure of the siege was discussed; and forty thousand troops were sent southwards in haste to the support of the Bavarian general. Aurelle, however, did not move upon the capital: his troops were still unfit for the enterprise; and he remained stationary on the north of Orleans, in order to improve his organisation, to await reinforcements, and to meet the attack of Frederick Charles in a strong position. In the third week of November the leading divisions of the army of Metz approached, and took post between Orleans and Paris. Gambetta now insisted that the effort should be made to relieve the capital. Aurelle resisted, but was forced to obey. The garrison of Paris had already made several unsuccessful attacks upon the lines of their besiegers, the most vigorous being that of Le Bourget on the 30th of October, in which bayonets were crossed. It was arranged that in the last days of November General Trochu should endeavour to break out on the southern side, and that simultaneously the army of the Loire should fall upon the enemy in front of it and endeavour to force its way to the capital. On the 28th the attack upon the Germans on the north of Orleans began. For several days the struggle was renewed by one division after another of the armies of Aurelle and Prince Frederick Charles. Victory remained at last with the Germans; the centre of the French position was carried; the right and left wings of the army were severed from one another and forced to retreat, the one up the Loire, the other towards the west. Orleans on the 5th of December passed back into the hands of the Germans. The sortie from Paris, which began with a successful attack by General Ducrot upon Champigny beyond the Marne, ended after some days of combat in the recovery by the Germans of the positions which they had lost, and in the retreat of Ducrot into Paris. In the same week Manteuffel, moving against the relieving army of the north, encountered it near Amiens, defeated it after a hard struggle, and gained possession of Amiens itself.

[Rouen occupied, Dec. 6.]

[Bapaume, Jan. 3.]

[St. Quentin, Jan 19.]

After the fall of Amiens, Manteuffel moved upon Rouen. This city fell into his hands without resistance; the conquerors pressed on westwards, and at Dieppe troops which had come from the confines of Russia gazed for the first time upon the sea. But the Republican armies, unlike those which the Germans had first encountered, were not to be crushed at a single blow. Under the energetic command of Faidherbe the army of the North advanced again upon Amiens. Goeben, who was left to defend the line of the Somme, went out to meet him, defeated him on the 23rd of December, and drove him back to Arras. But again, after a week's interval, Faidherbe pushed forward. On the 3rd of January he fell upon Goeben's weak division at Bapaume, and handled it so severely that the Germans would on the following day have abandoned their position, if the French had not themselves been the first to retire. Faidherbe, however, had only fallen back to receive reinforcements. After some days' rest he once more sought to gain the road to Paris, advancing this time by the eastward line through St. Quentin. In front of this town Goeben attacked him. The last battle of the army of the North was fought on the 19th of January. The French general endeavoured to disguise his defeat, but the German commander had won all that he desired. Faidherbe's army was compelled to retreat northwards in disorder; its part in the war was at an end.

[The Armies of the Loire and of the East.]

[Le Mans, Jan. 12.]

[Bourbaki.]

[Montbéliard, Jan. 15-17.]

[The Eastern army crosses the Swiss Frontier, Feb. 1.]

During the last three weeks of December there was a pause in the operations of the Germans on the Loire. It was expected that Bourbaki and the east wing of The Armies of the French army would soon re-appear at Orleans and endeavour to combine with Chanzy's troops. Gambetta, however, had formed another plan. He considered that Chanzy, with the assistance of divisions formed in Brittany, would be strong enough to encounter Prince Frederick Charles, and he determined to throw the army of Bourbaki, strengthened by reinforcements from the south, upon Germany itself. The design was a daring one, and had the two French armies been capable of performing the work which Gambetta required of them, an inroad into Baden, or even the re-conquest of Alsace, would most seriously have affected the position of the Germans before Paris. But Gambetta miscalculated the power of young, untrained troops, imperfectly armed, badly fed, against a veteran enemy. In a series of hard-fought struggles the army of the Loire under General Chanzy was driven back at the beginning of January from Vendôme to Le Mans. On the 12th, Chanzy took post before this city and fought his last battle. While he was making a vigorous resistance in the centre of the line, the Breton regiments stationed on his right gave way; the Germans pressed round him, and gained possession of the town. Chanzy retreated towards Laval, leaving thousands of prisoners in the hands of the enemy, and saving only the debris of an army. Bourbaki in the meantime, with a numerous but miserably equipped force, had almost reached Belfort. The report of his eastward movement was not at first believed at the German headquarters before Paris, and the troops of General Werder, which had been engaged about Dijon with a body of auxiliaries commanded by Garibaldi, were left to bear the brunt of the attack without support. When the real state of affairs became known Manteuffel was sent eastwards in hot haste towards the threatened point. Werder had evacuated Dijon and fallen back upon Vesoul; part of his army was still occupied in the siege of Belfort. As Bourbaki approached he fell back with the greater part of his troops in order to cover the besieging force, leaving one of his lieutenants to make a flank attack upon Bourbaki at Villersexel. This attack, one of the fiercest in the war, delayed the French for two days, and gave Werder time to occupy the strong positions that he had chosen about Montbéliard. Here, on the 15th of January, began a struggle which lasted for three days. The French, starving and perishing with cold, though far superior in number to their enemy, were led with little effect against the German entrenchments. On the 18th Bourbaki began his retreat. Werder was unable to follow him; Manteuffel with a weak force was still at some distance, and for a moment it seemed possible that Bourbaki, by a rapid movement westwards, might crush this isolated foe. Gambetta ordered Bourbaki to make the attempt: the commander refused to court further disaster with troops who were not fit to face an enemy, and retreated towards Pontarlier in the hope of making his way to Lyons. But Manteuffel now descended in front of him; divisions of Werder's army pressed down from the north; the retreat was cut off; and the unfortunate French general, whom a telegram from Gambetta removed from his command, attempted to take his own life. On the 1st of February, the wreck of his army, still numbering eighty-five thousand men, but reduced to the extremity of weakness and misery, sought refuge beyond the Swiss frontier.

[Capitulation of Paris and Armistice, Jan. 28.]

The war was now over. Two days after Bourbaki's repulse at Montbéliard the last unsuccessful sortie was made from Paris. There now remained provisions only for another fortnight; above forty thousand of the inhabitants had succumbed to the privations of the siege; all hope of assistance from the relieving armies before actual famine should begin disappeared. On the 23rd of January Favre sought the German Chancellor at Versailles in order to discuss the conditions of a general armistice and of the capitulation of Paris. The negotiations lasted for several days; on the 28th an armistice was signed with the declared object that elections might at once be freely held for a National Assembly, which should decide whether the war should be continued, or on what conditions peace should be made. The conditions of the armistice were that the forts of Paris and all their material of war should be handed over to the German army; that the artillery of the enceinte should be dismounted; and that the regular troops in Paris should, as prisoners of war, surrender their arms. The National Guard were permitted to retain their weapons and their artillery. Immediately upon the fulfilment of the first two conditions all facilities were to be given for the entry of supplies of food into Paris.  [545]

[National Assembly at Bordeaux, Feb. 12.]

[Preliminaries of Peace, Feb. 26.]

The articles of the armistice were duly executed, and on the 30th of January the Prussian flag waved over the forts of the French capital. Orders were sent into the provinces by the Government that elections should at once be held. It had at one time been feared by Count Bismarck that Gambetta would acknowledge no armistice that might be made by his colleagues at Paris. But this apprehension was not realised, for, while protesting against a measure adopted without consultation with himself and his companions at Bordeaux, Gambetta did not actually reject the armistice. He called upon the nation, however, to use the interval for the collection of new forces; and in the hope of gaining from the election an Assembly in favour of a continuation of the war, he published a decree incapacitating for election all persons who had been connected with the Government of Napoleon III. Against this decree Bismarck at once protested, and at his instance it was cancelled by the Government of Paris. Gambetta thereupon resigned. The elections were held on the 8th of February, and on the 12th the National Assembly was opened at Bordeaux. The Government of Defence now laid down its powers. Thiers-who had been the author of those fortifications which had kept the Germans at bay for four months after the overthrow of the Imperial armies; who, in the midst of the delirium of July, 1870, had done all that man could do to dissuade the Imperial Government and its Parliament from war; who, in spite of his seventy years, had, after the fall of Napoleon, hurried to London, to St. Petersburg, to Florence, to Vienna, in the hope of winning some support for France,-was the man called by common assent to the helm of State. He appointed a Ministry, called upon the Assembly to postpone all discussions as to the future Government of France, and himself proceeded to Versailles in order to negotiate conditions of peace. For several days the old man struggled with Count Bismarck on point after point in the Prussian demands. Bismarck required the cession of Alsace and Eastern Lorraine, the payment of six milliards of francs, and the occupation of part of Paris by the German army until the conditions of peace should be ratified by the Assembly. Thiers strove hard to save Metz, but on this point the German staff was inexorable; he succeeded at last in reducing the indemnity to five milliards, and was given the option between retaining Belfort and sparing Paris the entry of the German troops. On the last point his patriotism decided without a moment's hesitation. He bade the Germans enter Paris, and saved Belfort for France. On the 26th of February preliminaries of peace were signed. Thirty thousand German soldiers marched into the Champs Elysées on the 1st of March; but on that same day the treaty was ratified by the Assembly at Bordeaux, and after forty-eight hours Paris was freed from the sight of its conquerors. The Articles of Peace provided for the gradual evacuation of France by the German army as the instalments of the indemnity, which were allowed to extend over a period of three years, should be paid. There remained for settlement only certain matters of detail, chiefly connected with finance; these, however, proved the object of long and bitter controversy, and it was not until the 10th of May that the definitive Treaty of Peace was signed at Frankfort.

[German Unity.]

France had made war in order to undo the work of partial union effected by Prussia in 1866: it achieved the opposite result, and Germany emerged from the war with the Empire established. Immediately after the victory of Wörth the Crown Prince had seen that the time had come for abolishing the line of division which severed Southern Germany from the Federation of the North. His own conception of the best form of national union was a German Empire with its chief at Berlin. That Count Bismarck was without plans for uniting North and South Germany it is impossible to believe; but the Minister and the Crown Prince had always been at enmity; and when, after the battle of Sedan, they spoke together of the future, it seemed to the Prince as if Bismarck had scarcely thought of the federation of the Empire or of the re-establishment of the Imperial dignity, and as if he was inclined to it only under certain reserves. It was, however, part of Bismarck's system to exclude the Crown Prince as far as possible from political affairs, under the strange pretext that his relationship to Queen Victoria would be abused by the French proclivities of the English Court; and it is possible that had the Chancellor after the battle of Sedan chosen to admit the Prince to his confidence instead of resenting his interference, the difference between their views as to the future of Germany would have been seen to be one rather of forms and means than of intention. But whatever the share of these two dissimilar spirits in the initiation of the last steps towards German union, the work, as ultimately achieved, was both in form and in substance that which the Crown Prince had conceived. In the course of September negotiations were opened with each of the Southern States for its entry into the Northern Confederation. Bavaria alone raised serious difficulties, and demanded terms to which the Prussian Government could not consent. Bismarck refrained from exercising pressure at Munich, but invited the several Governments to send representatives to Versailles for the purpose of arriving at a settlement. For a moment the Court of Munich drew the sovereign of Würtemberg to its side, and orders were sent to the envoys of Würtemberg at Versailles to act with the Bavarians in refusing to sign the treaty projected by Bismarck. The Würtemberg Ministers hereupon tendered their resignation; Baden and Hesse-Darmstadt signed the treaty, and the two dissentient kings saw themselves on the point of being excluded from United Germany. They withdrew their opposition, and at the end of November the treaties uniting all the Southern States with the existing Confederation were executed, Bavaria retaining larger separate rights than were accorded to any other member of the Union.

[Proclamation of the Empire, Jan. 18.]

In the acts which thus gave to Germany political cohesion there was nothing that altered the title of its chief. Bismarck, however, had in the meantime informed the recalcitrant sovereigns that if they did not themselves offer the Imperial dignity to King William, the North German Parliament would do so. At the end of November a letter was accordingly sent by the King of Bavaria to all his fellow-sovereigns, proposing that the King of Prussia, as President of the newly-formed Federation, should assume the title of German Emperor. Shortly afterwards the same request was made by the same sovereign to King William himself, in a letter dictated by Bismarck. A deputation from the North German Reichstag, headed by its President, Dr. Simson, who, as President of the Frankfort National Assembly, had in 1849 offered the Imperial Crown to King Frederick William, expressed the concurrence of the nation in the act of the Princes. It was expected that before the end of the year the new political arrangements would have been sanctioned by the Parliaments of all the States concerned, and the 1st of January had been fixed for the assumption of the Imperial title. So vigorous, however, was the opposition made in the Bavarian Chamber, that the ceremony was postponed till the 18th. Even then the final approving vote had not been taken at Munich; but a second adjournment would have been fatal to the dignity of the occasion; and on the 18th of January, in the midst of the Princes of Germany and the representatives of its army assembled in the Hall of Mirrors at Versailles, King William assumed the title of German Emperor. The first Parliament of the Empire was opened at Berlin two months later.

[The Commune of Paris.]

[Troops withdrawn to Versailles, March 18.]

[The Commune.]

The misfortunes of France did not end with the fall of its capital and the loss of its border provinces; the terrible drama of 1870 closed with civil war. It is part of the normal order of French history that when an established Government is overthrown, and another is set in its place, this second Government is in its turn attacked by insurrection in Paris, and an effort is made to establish the rule of the democracy of the capital itself, or of those who for the moment pass for its leaders. It was so in 1793, in 1831, in 1848, and it was so again in 1870. Favre, Trochu, and the other members of the Government of Defence had assumed power on the downfall of Napoleon III. because they considered themselves the individuals best able to serve the State. There were hundreds of other persons in Paris who had exactly the same opinion of themselves; and when, with the progress of the siege, the Government of Defence lost its popularity and credit, it was natural that ambitious and impatient men of a lower political rank should consider it time to try whether Paris could not make a better defence under their own auspices. Attempts were made before the end of October to overthrow the Government. They were repeated at intervals, but without success. The agitation, however, continued within the ranks of the National Guard, which, unlike the National Guard in the time of Louis Philippe, now included the mass of the working class, and was the most dangerous enemy, instead of the support, of Government. The capitulation brought things to a crisis. Favre had declared that it would be impossible to disarm the National Guard without a battle in the streets; at his instance Bismarck allowed the National Guard to retain their weapons, and the fears of the Government itself thus prepared the way for successful insurrection. When the Germans were about to occupy western Paris, the National Guard drew off its artillery to Montmartre and there erected entrenchments. During the next fortnight, while the Germans were withdrawing from the western forts in accordance with the conditions of peace, the Government and the National Guard stood facing one another in inaction; on the 18th of March General Lecomte was ordered to seize the artillery parked at Montmartre. His troops, surrounded and solicited by the National Guard, abandoned their commander. Lecomte was seized, and, with General Clément Thomas, was put to death. A revolutionary Central Committee took possession of the Hôtel de Ville; the troops still remaining faithful to the Government were withdrawn to Versailles, where Thiers had assembled the Chamber. Not only Paris itself, but the western forts with the exception of Mont Valérien, fell into the hands of the insurgents. On the 26th of March elections were held for the Commune. The majority of peaceful citizens abstained from voting. A council was elected, which by the side of certain harmless and well-meaning men contained a troop of revolutionists by profession; and after the failure of all attempts at conciliation, hostilities began between Paris and Versailles.

[Second Siege-April 2, May 21.]

There were in the ranks of those who fought for the Commune some who fought in the sincere belief that their cause was that of municipal freedom; there were others who believed, and with good reason, that the existence of the Republic was threatened by a reactionary Assembly at Versailles; but the movement was on the whole the work of fanatics who sought to subvert every authority but their own; and the unfortunate mob who followed them, in so far as they fought for anything beyond the daily pay which had been their only means of sustenance since the siege began, fought for they knew not what. As the conflict was prolonged, it took on both sides a character of atrocious violence and cruelty. The murder of Generals Lecomte and Thomas at the outset was avenged by the execution of some of the first prisoners taken by the troops of Versailles. Then hostages were seized by the Commune. The slaughter in cold blood of three hundred National Guards surprised at Clamart by the besiegers gave to the Parisians the example of massacre. When, after a siege of six weeks, in which Paris suffered far more severely than it had suffered from the cannonade of the Germans, the troops of Versailles at length made their way into the capital, humanity, civilisation, seemed to have vanished in the orgies of devils. The defenders, as they fell back, murdered their hostages, and left behind them palaces, museums, the entire public inheritance of the nation in its capital, in flames. The conquerors during several days shot down all whom they took fighting, and in many cases put to death whole bands of prisoners without distinction. The temper of the army was such that the Government, even if it had desired, could probably not have mitigated the terrors of this vengeance. But there was little sign anywhere of an inclination to mercy. Courts-martial and executions continued long after the heat of combat was over. A year passed, and the tribunals were still busy with their work. Above ten thousand persons were sentenced to transportation or imprisonment before public justice was satisfied.

[Entry of Italian Troops into Rome, Sept. 20, 1870.]

[The Papacy.]

The material losses which France sustained at the hands of the invader and in civil war were soon repaired; but from the battle of Wörth down to the overthrow of the Commune France had been effaced as a European Power, and its effacement was turned to good account by two nations who were not its enemies. Russia, with the sanction of Europe, threw off the trammels which had been imposed upon it in the Black Sea by the Treaty of 1856. Italy gained possession of Rome. Soon after the declaration of war the troops of France, after an occupation of twenty-one years broken only by an interval of some months in 1867, were withdrawn from the Papal territory. Whatever may have been the understanding with Victor Emmanuel on which Napoleon recalled his troops from Civita Vecchia, the battle of Sedan set Italy free; and on the 20th of September the National Army, after overcoming a brief show of resistance, entered Rome. The unity of Italy was at last completed; Florence ceased to be the national capital. A body of laws passed by the Italian Parliament, and known as the Guarantees, assured to the Pope the honours and immunities of a sovereign, the possession of the Vatican and the Lateran palaces, and a princely income; in the appointment of Bishops and generally in the government of the Church a fulness of authority was freely left to him such as he possessed in no other European land. But Pius would accept no compromise for the loss of his temporal power. He spurned the reconciliation with the Italian people, which had now for the first time since 1849 become possible. He declared Rome to be in the possession of brigands; and, with a fine affectation of disdain for Victor Emmanuel and the Italian Government, he invented, and sustained down to the end of his life, before a world too busy to pay much heed to his performance, the reproachful part of the Prisoner of the Vatican.

CHAPTER XXV.

France after 1871-Alliance of the Three Emperors-Revolt of Herzegovina-The Andrássy Note-Murder of the Consuls at Salonika-The Berlin Memorandum-Rejected by England-Abdul Aziz deposed-Massacres in Bulgaria-Servia and Montenegro declare War-Opinion in England- Disraeli-Meeting of Emperors at Reichstadt-Servian Campaign-Declaration of the Czar-Conference at Constantinople-Its Failure-The London Protocol-Russia declares War-Advance on the Balkans-Osman at Plevna-Second Attack on Plevna-The Shipka Pass-Roumania-Third attack on Plevna-Todleben-Fall of Plevna-Passage of the Balkans-Armistice- England-The Fleet passes the Dardanelles-Treaty of San Stefano-England and Russia-Secret Agreement-Convention with Turkey-Congress of Berlin-Treaty of Berlin-Bulgaria.

[France after 1871.]

The storm of 1870 was followed by some years of European calm. France, recovering with wonderful rapidity from the wounds inflicted by the war, paid with ease the instalments of its debt to Germany, and saw its soil liberated from the foreigner before the period fixed by the Treaty of Frankfort. The efforts of a reactionary Assembly were kept in check by M. Thiers; the Republic, as the form of government which divided Frenchmen the least, was preferred by him to the monarchical restoration which might have won France allies at some of the European Courts. For two years Thiers baffled or controlled the royalist majority at Versailles which sought to place the Comté de Chambord or the chief of the House of Orleans on the throne, and thus saved his country from the greatest of all perils, the renewal of civil war. In 1873 he fell before a combination of his opponents, and McMahon succeeded to the Presidency, only to find that the royalist cause was made hopeless by the refusal of the Comté de Chambord to adopt the Tricolour flag, and that France, after several years of trial, definitely preferred the Republic. Meanwhile, Prince Bismarck had known how to frustrate all plans for raising a coalition against victorious Germany among the Powers which had been injured by its successes, or whose interests were threatened by its greatness. He saw that a Bourbon or a Napoleon on the throne of France would find far more sympathy and confidence at Vienna and St. Petersburg than the shifting chief of a Republic, and ordered Count Arnim, the German Ambassador at Paris, who wished to promote a Napoleonic restoration, to desist from all attempts to weaken the Republican Government. At St. Petersburg, where after the misfortunes of 1815 France had found its best friends, the German statesman had as yet little to fear. Bismarck had supported Russia in undoing the Treaty of Paris; in announcing the conclusion of peace with France, the German Emperor had assured the Czar in the most solemn language that his services in preventing the war of 1870 from becoming general should never be forgotten; and, whatever might be the feeling of his subjects, Alexander II. continued to believe that Russia could find no steadier friend than the Government of Berlin.

[Alliance of the three Emperors.]

With Austria Prince Bismarck had a more difficult part to play. He could hope for no real understanding so long as Beust remained at the head of affairs. But the events of 1870, utterly frustrating Beust's plans for a coalition against Prussia, and definitely closing for Austria all hope of recovering its position within Germany, had shaken the Minister's position. Bismarck was able to offer to the Emperor Francis Joseph the sincere and cordial friendship of the powerful German Empire, on the condition that Austria should frankly accept the work of 1866 and 1870. He had dissuaded his master after the victory of Königgrätz from annexing any Austrian territory; he had imposed no condition of peace that left behind it a lasting exasperation; and he now reaped the reward of his foresight. Francis Joseph accepted the friendship offered him from Berlin, and dismissed Count Beust from office, calling to his place the Hungarian Minister Andrássy, who, by conviction as well as profession, welcomed the establishment of a German Empire, and the definite abandonment by Austria of its interference in German affairs. In the summer of 1872 the three Emperors, accompanied by their Ministers, met in Berlin. No formal alliance was made, but a relation was established of sufficient intimacy to insure Prince Bismarck against any efforts that might be made by France to gain an ally. For five years this so-called League of the three Emperors continued in more or less effective existence, and condemned France to isolation. In the apprehension of the French people, Germany, gorged with the five milliards but still lean and ravenous, sought only for some new occasion for war. This was not the case. The German nation had entered unwillingly into the war of 1870; that its ruler, when once his great aim had been achieved, sought peace not only in word but in deed the history of subsequent years has proved. The alarms which at intervals were raised at Paris and elsewhere had little real foundation; and when next the peace of Europe was broken, it was not by a renewal of the struggle on the Vosges, but by a conflict in the East, which, terrible as it was in the sufferings and the destruction of life which it involved, was yet no senseless duel between two jealous nations, but one of the most fruitful in results of all modern wars, rescuing whole provinces from Ottoman dominion, and leaving behind it in place of a chaos of outworn barbarism at least the elements for a future of national independence among the Balkan population.

[Revolt of Herzegovina, Aug., 1875.]

[Andrássy Note, Jan. 31, 1876.]

In the summer of 1875 Herzegovina rose against its Turkish masters, and in Bosnia conflicts broke out between Christians and Mohammedans. The insurrection was vigorously, though privately, supported by Servia and Montenegro, and for some months baffled all the efforts made by the Porte for its suppression. Many thousands of the Christians, flying from a devastated land and a merciless enemy, sought refuge beyond the Austrian frontier, and became a burden upon the Austrian Government. The agitation among the Slavic neighbours and kinsmen of the insurgents threatened the peace of Austria itself, where Slav and Magyar were almost as ready to fall upon one another as Christian and Turk. Andrássy entered into communications with the Governments of St. Petersburg and Berlin as to the adoption of a common line of policy by the three Empires towards the Porte; and a scheme of reforms, intended to effect the pacification of the insurgent provinces, was drawn up by the three Ministers in concert with one another. This project, which was known as the Andrássy Note, and which received the approval of England and France, demanded from the Porte the establishment of full and entire religious liberty, the abolition of the farming of taxes, the application of the revenue produced by direct taxation in Bosnia and Herzegovina to the needs of those provinces themselves, the institution of a Commission composed equally of Christians and Mohammedans to control the execution of these reforms and of those promised by the Porte, and finally the improvement of the agrarian condition of the population by the sale to them of waste lands belonging to the State. The Note demanding these reforms was presented in Constantinople on the 31st of January, 1876. The Porte, which had already been lavish of promises to the insurgents, raised certain objections in detail, but ultimately declared itself willing to grant in substance the concessions which were specified by the Powers.  [546]

[Murder of the Consuls at Salonika, May 6.]

Armed with this assurance, the representatives of Austria now endeavoured to persuade the insurgents to lay down their arms and the refugees to return to their homes. But the answer was made that promises enough had already been given by the Sultan, and that the question was, not what more was to be written on a piece of paper, but how the execution of these promises was to be enforced. Without some guarantee from the Great Powers of Europe the refugees refused to place themselves again at the mercy of the Turk, and the leaders in Herzegovina refused to disband their troops. The conflict broke out afresh with greater energy; the intervention of the Powers, far from having produced peace, roused the fanatical passions of the Mohammedans both against the Christian rayahs and against the foreigner to whom they had appealed. A wave of religious, of patriotic agitation, of political disquiet, of barbaric fury, passed over the Turkish Empire. On the 6th of May the Prussian and the French Consuls at Salonika were attacked and murdered by the mob. In Smyrna and Constantinople there were threatening movements against the European inhabitants; in Bulgaria, the Circassian settlers and the hordes of irregular troops whom the Government had recently sent into that province waited only for the first sign of an expected insurrection to fall upon their prey and deluge the land with blood.

[The Berlin Memorandum, May 13.]

As soon as it became evident that peace was not to be produced by Count Andrássy's Note, the Ministers of the three Empires determined to meet one another with the view of arranging further diplomatic steps to be taken in common. Berlin, which the Czar was about to visit, was chosen as the meeting-place; the date of the meeting was fixed for the second week in May. It was in the interval between the despatch of Prince Bismarck's invitation and the arrival of the Czar, with Prince Gortschakoff and Count Andrássy, that intelligence came of the murder of the Prussian and French Consuls at Salonika. This event gave a deeper seriousness to the deliberations now held. The Ministers declared that if the representatives of two foreign Powers could be thus murdered in broad daylight in a peaceful town under the eyes of the powerless authorities, the Christians of the insurgent provinces might well decline to entrust themselves to an exasperated enemy. An effective guarantee for the execution of the promises made by the Porte had become absolutely necessary. The conclusions of the Ministers were embodied in a Memorandum, which declared that an armistice of two months must be imposed on the combatants; that the mixed Commission mentioned in the Andrássy Note must be at once called into being, with a Christian native of Herzegovina at its head; and that the reforms promised by the Porte must be carried out under the superintendence of the representatives of the European Powers. If before the end of the armistice the Porte should not have given its assent to these terms, the Imperial Courts declared that they must support these diplomatic efforts by measures of a more effective character.  [547]

[England alone rejects the Berlin Memorandum.]

On the same day that this Memorandum was signed, Prince Bismarck invited the British, the French, and Italian Ambassadors to meet the Russian and the Austrian Chancellors at his residence. They did so. The Memorandum was read, and an urgent request was made that Great Britain France, and Italy would combine with the Imperial Courts in support of the Berlin Memorandum as they had in support of the Andrássy Note. As Prince Gortschakoff and Andrássy were staying in Berlin only for two days longer, it was hoped that answers might be received by telegraph within forty-eight hours. Within that time answers arrived from the French and Italian Governments accepting the Berlin Memorandum; the reply from London did not arrive till five days later; it announced the refusal of the Government to join in the course proposed. Pending further negotiations on this subject, French, German, Austrian, Italian, and Russian ships of war were sent to Salonika to enforce satisfaction for the murder of the Consuls. The Cabinet of London, declining to associate itself with the concert of the Powers, and stating that Great Britain, while intending nothing in the nature of a menace, could not permit territorial changes to be made in the East without its own consent, despatched the fleet to Besika Bay.

[Abdul Aziz deposed, May 29.]

[Massacres in Bulgaria.]

[Servia and Montenegro declare war, July 2.]

Up to this time little attention had been paid in England to the revolt of the Christian subjects of the Porte or its effect on European politics. Now, however, a series of events began which excited the interest and even the passion of the English people in an extraordinary degree. The ferment in Constantinople was deepening. On the 29th of May the Sultan Abdul Aziz was deposed by Midhat Pasha and Hussein Avni, the former the chief of the party of reform, the latter the representative of the older Turkish military and patriotic spirit which Abdul Aziz had incensed by his subserviency to Russia. A few days later the deposed Sultan was murdered. Hussein Avni and another rival of Midhat were assassinated by a desperado as they sat at the council; Murad V., who had been raised to the throne, proved imbecile; and Midhat, the destined regenerator of the Ottoman Empire as many outside Turkey believed, grasped all but the highest power in the State. Towards the end of June reports reached western Europe of the repression of an insurrection in Bulgaria with measures of atrocious violence. Servia and Montenegro, long active in support of their kinsmen who were in arms, declared war. The reports from Bulgaria, at first vague, took more definite form; and at length the correspondents of German as well as English newspapers, making their way to the district south of the Balkans, found in villages still strewed with skeletons and human remains the terrible evidence of what had passed. The British Ministry, relying upon the statements of Sir H. Elliot, Ambassador at Constantinople, at first denied the seriousness of the massacres: they directed, however, that investigations should be made on the spot by a member of the Embassy; and Mr. Baring, Secretary of Legation, was sent to Bulgaria with this duty. Baring's report confirmed the accounts which his chief had refused to believe, and placed the number of the victims, rightly or wrongly, at not less than twelve thousand.  [548]

[Opinion in England.]

The Bulgarian massacres acted on Europe in 1876 as the massacre of Chios had acted on Europe in 1822. In England especially they excited the deepest horror, and completely changed the tone of public opinion towards the Turk. Hitherto the public mind had scarcely been conscious of the questions that were at issue in the East. Herzegovina, Bosnia, Bulgaria, were not familiar names like Greece; the English people hardly knew where these countries were, or that they were not inhabited by Turks. The Crimean War had left behind it the tradition of friendship with the Sultan; it needed some lightning-flash, some shock penetrating all ranks of society, to dispel once and for all the conventional idea of Turkey as a community resembling a European State, and to bring home to the English people the true condition of the Christian races of the Balkan under their Ottoman masters. But this the Bulgarian massacres effectively did; and from this time the great mass of the English people, who had sympathised so strongly with the Italians and the Hungarians in their struggle for national independence, were not disposed to allow the influence of Great Britain to be used for the perpetuation of Turkish ascendency over the Slavic races. There is little doubt that if in the autumn of 1876 the nation had had the opportunity of expressing its views by a Parliamentary election, it would have insisted on the adoption of active measures in concert with the Powers which were prepared to force reform upon the Porte. But the Parliament of 1876 was but two years old; the majority which supported the Government was still unbroken; and at the head of the Cabinet there was a man gifted with extraordinary tenacity of purpose, with great powers of command over others, and with a clear, cold, untroubled apprehension of the line of conduct which he intended to pursue. It was one of the strangest features of this epoch that a Minister who in a long career had never yet exercised the slightest influence upon foreign affairs, and who was not himself English by birth, should have impressed in such an extreme degree the stamp of his own individuality upon the conduct of our foreign policy; that he should have forced England to the very front in the crisis through which Europe was passing; and that, for good or for evil, he should have reversed the tendency which since the Italian war of 1859 had seemed ever to be drawing England further and further away from Continental affairs.

[Disraeli.]

Disraeli's conception of Parliamentary politics was an ironical one. It had pleased the British nation that the leadership of one of its great political parties should be won by a man of genius only on the condition of accommodating himself to certain singular fancies of his contemporaries; and for twenty years, from the time of his attacks upon Sir Robert Peel for the abolition of the corn-laws down to the time when he educated his party into the democratic Reform Bill of 1867, Disraeli with an excellent grace suited himself to the somewhat strange parts which he was required to play. But after 1874, when he was placed in office at the head of a powerful majority in both Houses of Parliament and of a submissive Cabinet, the antics ended; the epoch of statesmanship, and of statesmanship based on the leader's own individual thought not on the commonplace of public creeds, began. At a time when Cavour was rice-growing and Bismarck unknown outside his own county, Disraeli had given to the world in Tancred his visions of Eastern Empire. Mysterious chieftains planned the regeneration of Asia by a new crusade of Arab and Syrian votaries of the one living faith, and lightly touched on the transfer of Queen Victoria's Court from London to Delhi. Nothing indeed is perfect; and Disraeli's eye was favoured with such extraordinary perceptions of the remote that it proved a little uncertain in its view of matters not quite without importance nearer home. He thought the attempt to establish Italian independence a misdemeanour; he listened to Bismarck's ideas on the future of Germany, and described them as the vapourings of a German baron. For a quarter of a century Disraeli had dazzled and amused the House of Commons without, as it seemed, drawing inspiration from any one great cause or discerning any one of the political goals towards which the nations of Europe were tending. At length, however, the time came for the realisation of his own imperial policy; and before the Eastern question had risen conspicuously above the horizon in Europe, Disraeli, as Prime Minister of England, had begun to act in Asia and Africa. He sent the Prince of Wales to hold Durbars and to hunt tigers amongst the Hindoos; he proclaimed the Queen Empress of India; he purchased the Khedive's shares in the Suez Canal. Thus far it had been uncertain whether there was much in the Minister's policy beyond what was theatrical and picturesque; but when a great part of the nation began to ask for intervention on behalf of the Eastern Christians against the Turks, they found out that Disraeli's purpose was solid enough. Animated by a deep distrust and fear of Russia, he returned to what had been the policy of Tory Governments in the days before Canning, the identification of British interests with the maintenance of Ottoman power. If a generation of sentimentalists were willing to sacrifice the grandeur of an Empire to their sympathies with an oppressed people, it was not Disraeli who would be their instrument. When the massacre of Batak was mentioned in the House of Commons, he dwelt on the honourable qualities of the Circassians; when instances of torture were alleged, he remarked that an oriental people generally terminated its connection with culprits in a more expeditious manner.  [549] There were indeed Englishmen enough who loved their country as well as Disraeli, and who had proved their love by sacrifices which Disraeli had not had occasion to make, who thought it humiliating that the greatness of England should be purchased by the servitude and oppression of other races, and that the security of their Empire should be deemed to rest on so miserable a thing as Turkish rule. These were considerations to which Disraeli did not attach much importance. He believed the one thing needful to be the curbing of Russia; and, unlike Canning, who held that Russia would best be kept in check by England's own armed co-operation with it in establishing the independence of Greece, he declined from the first to entertain any project of imposing reform on the Sultan by force, doubting only to what extent it would be possible for him to support the Sultan in resistance to other Powers. According to his own later statement he would himself, had he been left unfettered, have definitely informed the Czar that if he should make war upon the Porte England would act as its ally. Public opinion in England, however, rendered this course impossible. The knife of Circassian and Bashi-Bazouk had severed the bond with Great Britain which had saved Turkey in 1854. Disraeli-henceforward Earl of Beaconsfield-could only utter grim anathemas against Servia for presuming to draw the sword upon its rightful lord and master, and chide those impatient English who, like the greater man whose name is associated with Beaconsfield, considered that the world need not be too critical as to the means of getting rid of such an evil as Ottoman rule.  [550]

[Meeting and Treaty of Reichstadt, July 8.]

[The Servian Campaign, July-Oct.]

[Russian enforces an armistice, Oct. 30.]

The rejection by England of the Berlin Memorandum and the proclamation of war by Servia and Montenegro were followed by the closer union of the three Imperial Courts. The Czar and the Emperor Francis Joseph, with their Ministers, met at Reichstadt in Bohemia on the 8th of July. According to official statements the result of the meeting was that the two sovereigns determined upon non-intervention for the present, and proposed only to renew the attempt to unite all the Christian Powers in a common policy when some definite occasion should arise. Rumours, however, which proved to be correct, went abroad that something of the nature of an eventual partition of European Turkey had been the object of negotiation. A Treaty had in fact been signed providing that if Russia should liberate Bulgaria by arms, Austria should enter into possession of Bosnia and Herzegovina. The neutrality of Austria had virtually been purchased at this price, and Russia had thus secured freedom of action in the event of the necessary reforms not being forced upon Turkey by the concert of Europe. Sooner perhaps than Prince Gortschakoff had expected, the religious enthusiasm of the Russian people and their sympathy for their kinsmen and fellow-believers beyond the Danube forced the Czar into vigorous action. In spite of the assistance of several thousands of Russian volunteers and of the leadership of the Russian General Tchernaieff, the Servians were defeated in their struggle with the Turks. The mediation of England was in vain tendered to the Porte on the only terms on which even at London peace was seen to be possible, the maintenance of the existing rights of Servia and the establishment of provincial autonomy in Bosnia, Herzegovina, and Bulgaria. After a brief suspension of hostilities in September war was renewed. The Servians were driven from their positions; Alexinatz was captured, the road to Belgrade lay open, and the doom of Bulgaria seemed likely to descend upon the conquered Principality. The Turks offered indeed a five months' armistice, which would have saved them the risks of a winter campaign and enabled them to crush their enemy with accumulated forces in the following spring. This, by the advice of Russia, the Servians refused to accept. On the 30th of October a Russian ultimatum was handed in at Constantinople by the Ambassador Ignatieff, requiring within forty-eight hours the grant to Servia of an armistice for two months and the cessation of hostilities. The Porte submitted; and wherever Slav and Ottoman stood facing one another in arms, in Herzegovina and Bosnia as well as Servia and Montenegro, there was a pause in the struggle.

[Declaration of the Czar, Nov. 2.]

[England proposes a Conference.]

The imminence of a war between Russia and Turkey in the last days of October and the close connection between Russia and the Servian cause justified the anxiety of the British Government. This anxiety the Czar sought to dispel by a frank declaration of his own views. On the 2nd of November he entered into conversation with the British Ambassador, Lord A. Loftus, and assured him on his word of honour that he had no intention of acquiring Constantinople; that if it should be necessary for him to occupy part of Bulgaria his army would remain there only until peace was restored and the security of the Christian population established; and, generally, that he desired nothing more earnestly than a complete accord between England and Russia in the maintenance of European peace and the improvement of the condition of the Christian population in Turkey. He stated, however, with perfect clearness that if the Porte should continue to refuse the reforms demanded by Europe, and the Powers should put up with its continued refusal, Russia would act alone. Disclaiming in words of great earnestness all desire for territorial aggrandisement, he protested against the suspicion with which his policy was regarded in England, and desired that his words might be made public in England as a message of peace.  [551] Lord Derby, then Foreign Secretary, immediately expressed the satisfaction with which the Government had received these assurances; and on the following day an invitation was sent from London to all the European Powers proposing a Conference at Constantinople, on the basis of a common recognition of the integrity of the Ottoman Empire, accompanied by a disavowal on the part of each of the Powers of all aims at aggrandisement or separate advantage. In proposing this Conference the Government acted in conformity with the expressed desire of the Czar. But there were two voices within the Cabinet. Lord Beaconsfield, had it been in his power, would have informed Russia categorically that England would support the Sultan if attacked. This the country and the Cabinet forbade: but the Premier had his own opportunities of utterance, and at the Guildhall Banquet on the 9th of November, six days after the Foreign Secretary had acknowledged the Czar's message of friendship, and before this message had been made known to the English people, Lord Beaconsfield uttered words which, if they were not idle bluster, could have been intended only as a menace to the Czar or as an appeal to the war-party at home:-"Though the policy of England is peace, there is no country so well prepared for war as our own. If England enters into conflict in a righteous cause, her resources are inexhaustible. She is not a country that when she enters into a campaign has to ask herself whether she can support a second or a third campaign. She enters into a campaign which she will not terminate till right is done."

[Project of Ottoman Constitution.]

The proposal made by the Earl of Derby for a Conference at Constantinople was accepted by all the Powers, and accepted on the bases specified. Lord Salisbury, then Secretary of State for India, was appointed to represent Great Britain in conjunction with Sir H. Elliot, its Ambassador. The Minister made his journey to Constantinople by way of the European capitals, and learnt at Berlin that the good understanding between the German Emperor and the Czar extended to Eastern affairs. Whether the British Government had as yet gained any trustworthy information on the Treaty of Reichstadt is doubtful; but so far as the public eye could judge, there was now, in spite of the tone assumed by Lord Beaconsfield, a fairer prospect of the solution of the Eastern question by the establishment of some form of autonomy in the Christian provinces than there had been at any previous time. The Porte itself recognised the serious intention of the Powers, and, in order to forestall the work of the Conference, prepared a scheme of constitutional reform that far surpassed the wildest claims of Herzegovinian or of Serb. Nothing less than a complete system of Parliamentary Government, with the very latest ingenuities from France and Belgium, was to be granted to the entire Ottoman Empire. That Midhat Pasha, who was the author of this scheme, may have had some serious end in view is not impossible; but with the mass of Palace-functionaries at Constantinople it was simply a device for embarrassing the West with its own inventions; and the action of men in power, both great and small, continued after the constitution had come into nominal existence to be exactly what it had been before. The very terms of the constitution must have been unintelligible to all but those who had been employed at foreign courts. The Government might as well have announced its intention of clothing the Balkans with the flora of the deep sea.

[Demands settled at the Preliminary Conference, Dec. 11-21.]

In the second week of December the representatives of the six Great Powers assembled at Constantinople. In order that the demands of Europe should be presented to the Porte with unanimity, they determined to hold a series of preliminary meetings with one another before the formal opening of the Conference and before communicating with the Turks. At these meetings, after Ignatieff had withdrawn his proposal for a Russian occupation of Bulgaria, complete accord was attained. It was resolved to demand the cession of certain small districts by the Porte to Servia and Montenegro; the grant of administrative autonomy to Bosnia, Herzegovina, and Bulgaria; the appointment in each of these provinces of Christian governors, whose terms of office should be for five years, and whose nomination should be subject to the approval of the Powers; the confinement of Turkish troops to the fortresses; the removal of the bands of Circassians to Asia; and finally the execution of these reforms under the superintendence of an International Commission, which should have at its disposal a corps of six thousand gendarmes to be enlisted in Switzerland or Belgium. By these arrangements, while the Sultan retained his sovereignty and the integrity of the Ottoman Empire remained unimpaired, it was conceived that the Christian population would be effectively secured against Turkish violence and caprice.

[The Turks refuse the demands of the Conference, Jan. 20, 1877.]

All differences between the representatives of the European Powers having been removed, the formal Conference was opened on the 23rd of December under the presidency of the Turkish Foreign Minister, Savfet Pasha. The proceedings had not gone far when they were interrupted by the roar of cannon. Savfet explained that the new Ottoman constitution was being promulgated, and that the salvo which the members of the Conference heard announced the birth of an era of universal happiness and prosperity in the Sultan's dominions. It soon appeared that in the presence of this great panacea there was no place for the reforming efforts of the Christian Powers. Savfet declared from the first that, whatever concessions might be made on other points, the Sultan's Government would never consent to the establishment of a Foreign Commission to superintend the execution of its reforms, nor to the joint action of the Powers in the appointment of the governors of its provinces. It was in vain argued that without such foreign control Europe possessed no guarantee that the promises and the good intentions of the Porte, however gratifying these might be, would be carried into effect. Savfet replied that by the Treaty of 1856 the Powers had declared the Ottoman Empire to stand on exactly the same footing as any other great State in Europe, and had expressly debarred themselves from interfering, under whatever circumstances, with its internal administration. The position of the Turkish representative at the Conference was in fact the only logical one. In the Treaty of Paris the Powers had elaborately pledged themselves to an absurdity; and this Treaty the Turk was never weary of throwing in their faces. But the situation was not one for lawyers and for the interpretation of documents. The Conference, after hearing the arguments and the counter-projects of the Turkish Ministers, after reconsidering its own demands and modifying these in many important points in deference to Ottoman wishes, adhered to the demand for a Foreign Commission and for a European control over the appointment of governors. Midhat, who was now Grand Vizier, summoned the Great Council of the Empire, and presented to it the demands of the Conference. These demands the Great Council unanimously rejected. Lord Salisbury had already warned the Sultan what would be the results of continued obstinacy; and after receiving Midhat's final reply the ambassadors of all the Powers, together with the envoys who had been specially appointed for the Conference, quitted Constantinople.

[The London Protocol, Mar. 31.]

[The Porte rejects the Protocol.]

[Russia declares war, April 24.]

Russia, since the beginning of November, had been actively preparing for war. The Czar had left the world in no doubt as to his own intentions in case of the failure of the European Concert; it only remained for him to ascertain whether, after the settlement of a definite scheme of reform by the Conference and the rejection of this scheme by the Porte, the Powers would or would not take steps to enforce their conclusion. England suggested that the Sultan should be allowed a year to carry out his good intentions: Gortschakoff inquired whether England would pledge itself to action if, at the end of the year, reform was not effected; but no such pledge was forthcoming. With the object either of discovering some arrangement in which the Powers would combine, or of delaying the outbreak of war until the Russian preparations were more advanced and the season more favourable, Ignatieff was sent round to all the European Courts. He visited England, and subsequently drew up, with the assistance of Count Schouvaloff, Russian Ambassador at London, a document which gained the approval of the British as well as the Continental Governments. This document, known as the London Protocol, was signed on the 31st of March. After a reference to the promises of reform made by the Porte, it stated that the Powers intended to watch carefully by their representatives over the manner in which these promises were carried into effect; that if their hopes should be once more disappointed they should regard the condition of affairs as incompatible with the interests of Europe; and that in such case they would decide in common upon the means best fitted to secure the well-being of the Christian population and the interests of general peace. Declarations relative to the disarmament of Russia, which it was now the principal object of the British Government to effect, were added. There was indeed so little of a substantial engagement in this Protocol that it would have been surprising had Russia disarmed without obtaining some further guarantee for the execution of reform. But weak as the Protocol was, it was rejected by the Porte. Once more the appeal was made to the Treaty of Paris, once more the Sultan protested against the encroachment of the Powers on his own inviolable rights. Lord Beaconsfield's Cabinet even now denied that the last word had been spoken, and professed to entertain some hope in the effect of subsequent diplomatic steps; but the rest of Europe asked and expected no further forbearance on the part of Russia. The army of operations already lay on the Pruth: the Grand Duke Nicholas, brother of the Czar, was appointed to its command; and on the 24th of April the Russian Government issued its declaration of war.

[Passage of the Danube, June 27.]

[Advance on the Balkans, July.]

[Gourko south of the Balkans, July 15.]

Between the Russian frontier and the Danube lay the Principality of Roumania. A convention signed before the outbreak of hostilities gave to the Russian army a free passage through this territory, and Roumania subsequently entered the war as Russia's ally. It was not, however, until the fourth week of June that the invaders were able to cross the Danube. Seven army-corps were assembled in Roumania; of these one crossed the Lower Danube into the Dobrudscha, two were retained in Roumania as a reserve, and four crossed the river in the neighbourhood of Sistowa, in order to enter upon the Bulgarian campaign. It was the desire of the Russians to throw forward the central part of their army by the line of the river Jantra upon the Balkans; with their left to move against Rustchuk and the Turkish armies in the eastern fortresses of Bulgaria; with their right to capture Nicopolis, and guard the central column against any flank attack from the west. But both in Europe and in Asia the Russians had underrated the power of their adversary, and entered upon the war with insufficient forces. Advantages won by their generals on the Armenian frontier while the European army was still marching through Roumania were lost in the course of the next few weeks. Bayazid and other places that fell into the hands of the Russians at the first onset were recovered by the Turks under Mukhtar Pasha; and within a few days after the opening of the European campaign the Russian divisions in Asia were everywhere retreating upon their own frontier. The Bulgarian campaign was marked by the same rapid successes of the invader at the outset, to be followed, owing to the same insufficiency of force, by similar disasters. Encountering no effective opposition on the Danube, the Russians pushed forward rapidly towards the Balkans by the line of the Jantra. The Turkish army lay scattered in the Bulgarian fortresses, from Widdin in the extreme west to Shumla at the foot of the Eastern Balkans. It was considered by the Russian commanders that two army-corps would be required to operate against the Turks in Eastern Bulgaria, while one corps would be enough to cover the central line of invasion from the west. There remained, excluding the two corps in reserve in Roumania and the corps holding the Dobrudscha, but one corps for the march on the Balkans and Adrianople. The command of the vanguard of this body was given to General Gourko, who pressed on into the Balkans, seized the Shipka Pass, and descended into Southern Bulgaria (July 15). The Turks were driven from Kesanlik and Eski Sagra, and Gourko's cavalry, a few hundreds in number, advanced to within two days' march of Adrianople.

[Osman occupies Plevna, July 19.]

[First engagement at Plevna, July 20.]

[Second battle at Plevna, July 30.]

[The Shipka Pass, Aug. 20-23.]

The headquarters of the whole Russian army were now at Tirnova, the ancient Bulgarian capital, about half-way between the Danube and the Balkans. Two army-corps, commanded by the Czarewitch, moved eastwards against Rustchuk and the so-called Turkish army of the Danube, which was gathering behind the lines of the Kara Lom; another division, under General Krudener, turned westward and captured Nicopolis with its garrison. Lovatz and other points lying westward of the Jantra were occupied by weak detachments; but so badly were the reconnaissances of the Russians performed in this direction that they were unaware of the approach of a Turkish army from Widdin, thirty-five thousand strong, till this was close on their flank. Before the Russians could prevent him, Osman Pasha, with the vanguard of this army, had occupied the town and heights of Plevna, between Nicopolis and Lovatz. On the 20th of July, still unaware of their enemy's strength, the Russians attacked him at Plevna: they were defeated with considerable loss, and after a few days one of Osman's divisions, pushing forward upon the invader's central line, drove them out of Lovatz. The Grand Duke now sent reinforcements to Krudener, and ordered him to take Plevna at all costs. Krudener's strength was raised to thirty-five thousand; but in the meantime new Turkish regiments had joined Osman, and his troops, now numbering about fifty thousand, had been working day and night entrenching themselves in the heights round Plevna which the Russians had to attack. The assault was made on the 30th of July; it was beaten back with terrible slaughter, the Russians leaving a fifth of their number on the field. Had Osman taken up the offensive and the Turkish commander on the Lom pressed vigorously upon the invader's line, it would probably have gone ill with the Russian army in Bulgaria. Gourko was at once compelled to abandon the country south of the Balkans. His troops, falling back upon the Shipka Pass, were there attacked from the south by far superior forces under Suleiman Pasha. The Ottoman commander, prodigal of the lives of his men and trusting to mere blindfold violence, hurled his army day after day against the Russian positions (Aug. 20-23). There was a moment when all seemed lost, and the Russian soldiers sent to their Czar the last message of devotion from men who were about to die at their post. But in the extremity of peril there arrived a reinforcement, weak, but sufficient to turn the scale against the ill-commanded Turks. Suleiman's army withdrew to the village of Shipka at the southern end of the pass. The pass itself, with the entrance from northern Bulgaria, remained in the hands of the Russians.

[Roumania.]

[Third battle of Plevna, Sept 11-12.]

After the second battle of Plevna it became clear that the Russians could not carry on the campaign with their existing forces. Two army-corps were called up which were guarding the coast of the Black Sea; several others were mobilised in the interior of Russia, and began their journey towards the Danube. So urgent, however, was the immediate need, that the Czar was compelled to ask help from Roumania. This help was given. Roumanian troops, excellent in quality, filled up the gap caused by Krudener's defeats, and the whole army before Plevna was placed under the command of the Roumanian Prince Charles. At the beginning of September the Russians were again ready for action. Lovatz was wrested from the Turks, and the division which had captured it moved on to Plevna to take part in a great combined attack. This attack was made on the 11th of September under the eyes of the Czar. On the north the Russians and Roumanians together, after a desperate struggle, stormed the Grivitza redoubt. On the south Skobeleff carried the first Turkish position, but could make no impression on their second line of defence. Twelve thousand men fell on the Russian side before the day was over, and the main defences of the Turks were still unbroken. On the morrow the Turks took up the offensive. Skobeleff, exposed to the attack of a far superior foe, prayed in vain for reinforcements. His men, standing in the positions that they had won from the Turks, repelled one onslaught after another, but were ultimately overwhelmed and driven from the field. At the close of the second day's battle the Russians were everywhere beaten back within their own lines, except at the Grivitza redoubt, which was itself but an outwork of the Turkish defences, and faced by more formidable works within. The assailants had sustained a loss approaching that of the Germans at Gravelotte with an army one-third of the Germans' strength. Osman was stronger than at the beginning of the campaign; with what sacrifices Russia would have to purchase its ultimate victory no man could calculate.

[Todleben besieges Plevna.]

[Fall of Plevna, Dec. 10.]

The three defeats at Plevna cast a sinister light upon the Russian military administration and the quality of its chiefs. The soldiers had fought heroically; divisional generals like Skobeleff had done all that man could do in such positions; the faults were those of the headquarters and the officers by whom the Imperial Family were surrounded. After the third catastrophe, public opinion called for the removal of the authors of these disasters and the employment of abler men. Todleben, the defender of Sebastopol, who for some unknown reason had been left without a command, was now summoned to Bulgaria, and virtually placed at the head of the army before Plevna. He saw that the stronghold of Osman could only be reduced by a regular siege, and prepared to draw his lines right round it. For a time Osman kept open his communications with the south-west, and heavy trains of ammunition and supplies made their way into Plevna from this direction; but the investment was at length completed, and the army of Plevna cut off from the world. In the meantime new regiments were steadily pouring into Bulgaria from the interior of Russia. East of the Jantra, after many alternations of fortune, the Turks were finally driven back behind the river Lom. The last efforts of Suleiman failed to wrest the Shipka Pass from its defenders. From the narrow line which the invaders had with such difficulty held during three anxious months their forces, accumulating day by day, spread out south and west up to the slopes of the Balkans, ready to burst over the mountain-barrier and sweep the enemy back to the walls of Constantinople when once Plevna should have fallen and the army which besieged it should be added to the invader's strength. At length, in the second week of December, Osman's supply of food was exhausted. Victor in three battles, he refused to surrender without one more struggle. On the 10th of December, after distributing among his men what there remained of provisions, he made a desperate effort to break out towards the west. His columns dashed in vain against the besieger's lines; behind him his enemies pressed forward into the positions which he had abandoned; a ring of fire like that of Sedan surrounded the Turkish army; and after thousands had fallen in a hopeless conflict, the general and the troops who for five months had held in check the collected forces of the Russian Empire surrendered to their conqueror.

[Crossing of the Balkans, Dec. 25-Jan. 8.]

[Capitulation of Shipka, Jan. 9.]

[Russians enter Adrianople, Jan. 20, 1878.]

If in the first stages of the war there was little that did credit to Russia's military capacity, the energy that marked its close made amends for what had gone before. Winter was descending in extreme severity: the Balkans were a mass of snow and ice; but no obstacle could now bar the invader's march. Gourko, in command of an army that had gathered to the south-west of Plevna, made his way through the mountains above Etropol in the last days of December, and, driving the Turks from Sophia, pressed on towards Philippopolis and Adrianople. Farther east two columns crossed the Balkans by bye-paths right and left of the Shipka Pass, and then, converging on Shipka itself, fell upon the rear of the Turkish army which still blocked the southern outlet. Simultaneously a third corps marched down the pass from the north and assailed the Turks in front. After a fierce struggle the entire Turkish army, thirty-five thousand strong, laid down its arms. There now remained only one considerable force between the invaders and Constantinople. This body, which was commanded by Suleiman, held the road which runs along the valley of the Maritza, at a point somewhat to the east of Philippopolis. Against it Gourko advanced from the west, while the victors of Shipka, descending due south through Kesanlik, barred the line of retreat towards Adrianople. The last encounter of the war took place on the 17th of January. Suleiman's army, routed and demoralised, succeeded in making its escape to the Ægean coast. Pursuit was unnecessary, for the war was now practically over. On the 20th of January the Russians made their entry into Adrianople; in the next few days their advanced guard touched the Sea of Marmora at Rodosto.

[Armistice, Jan. 31.]

Immediately after the fall of Plevna the Porte had applied to the European Powers for their mediation. Disasters in Asia had already warned it not to delay submission too long; for in the middle of October Mukhtar Pasha had been driven from his positions, and a month later Kars had been taken by storm. The Russians had subsequently penetrated into Armenia and had captured the outworks of Erzeroum. Each day that now passed brought the Ottoman Empire nearer to destruction. Servia again declared war; the Montenegrins made themselves masters of the coast-towns and of border-territory north and south; Greece seemed likely to enter into the struggle. Baffled in his attempt to gain the common mediation of the Powers, the Sultan appealed to the Queen of England personally for her good offices in bringing the conflict to a close. In reply to a telegram from London, the Czar declared himself willing to treat for peace as soon as direct communications should be addressed to his representatives by the Porte. On the 14th of January commissioners were sent to the headquarters of the Grand Duke Nicholas at Kesanlik to treat for an armistice and for preliminaries of peace. The Russians, now in the full tide of victory, were in no hurry to agree with their adversary. Nicholas bade the Turkish envoys accompany him to Adrianople, and it was not until the 31st of January that the armistice was granted and the preliminaries of peace signed.

[England.]

[Vote of Credit, Jan. 28-Feb. 8.]

[Fleet passes the Dardanelles, Feb. 6.]

While the Turkish envoys were on their journey to the Russian headquarters, the session of Parliament opened at London. The Ministry had declared at the outbreak of the war that Great Britain would remain neutral unless its own interests should be imperilled, and it had defined these interests with due clearness both in its communications with the Russian Ambassador and in its statements in Parliament. It was laid down that Her Majesty's Government could not permit the blockade of the Suez Canal, or the extension of military operations to Egypt; that it could not witness with indifference the passing of Constantinople into other hands than those of its present possessors; and that it would entertain serious objections to any material alterations in the rules made under European sanction for the navigation of the Bosphorus and Dardanelles.  [552] In reply to Lord Derby's note which formulated these conditions of neutrality Prince Gortschakoff had repeated the Czar's assurance that the acquisition of Constantinople was excluded from his views, and had promised to undertake no military operation in Egypt; he had, however, let it be understood that, as an incident of warfare, the reduction of Constantinople might be necessary like that of any other capital. In the Queen's speech at the opening of Parliament, Ministers stated that the conditions on which the neutrality of England was founded had not hitherto been infringed by either belligerent, but that, should hostilities be prolonged, some unexpected occurrence might render it necessary to adopt measures of precaution, measures which could not be adequately prepared without an appeal to the liberality of Parliament. From language subsequently used by Lord Beaconsfield's colleagues, it would appear that the Cabinet had some apprehension that the Russian army, escaping from the Czar's control, might seize and attempt permanently to hold Constantinople. On the 23rd of January orders were sent to Admiral Hornby, commander of the fleet at Besika Bay, to pass the Dardanelles, and proceed to Constantinople. Lord Derby, who saw no necessity for measures of a warlike character until the result of the negotiations at Adrianople should become known, now resigned office; but on the reversal of the order to Admiral Hornby he rejoined the Cabinet. On the 28th of January, after the bases of peace had been communicated by Count Schouvaloff to the British Government but before they had been actually signed, the Chancellor of the Exchequer moved for a vote of £6,000,000 for increasing the armaments of the country. This vote was at first vigorously opposed on the ground that none of the stated conditions of England's neutrality had been infringed, and that in the conditions of peace between Russia and Turkey there was nothing that justified a departure from the policy which England had hitherto pursued. In the course of the debates, however, a telegram arrived from Mr. Layard, Elliot's successor at Constantinople, stating that notwithstanding the armistice the Russians were pushing on towards the capital; that the Turks had been compelled to evacuate Silivria on the Sea of Marmora; that the Russian general was about to occupy Tchataldja, an outpost of the last line of defence not thirty miles from Constantinople; and that the Porte was in great alarm, and unable to understand the Russian proceedings. The utmost excitement was caused at Westminster by this telegram. The fleet was at once ordered to Constantinople. Mr. Forster, who had led the opposition to the vote of credit, sought to withdraw his amendment; and although on the following day, with the arrival of the articles of the armistice, it appeared that the Russians were simply moving up to the accepted line of demarcation, and that the Porte could hardly have been ignorant of this when Layard's telegram was despatched, the alarm raised in London did not subside, and the vote of credit was carried by a majority of above two hundred.  [553]

[Imminence of war with England.]

When a victorious army is, without the intervention of some external Power, checked in its work of conquest by the negotiation of an armistice, it is invariably made a condition that positions shall be handed over to it which it does not at the moment occupy, but which it might reasonably expect to have conquered within a certain date, had hostilities not been suspended. The armistice granted to Austria by Napoleon after the battle of Marengo involved the evacuation of the whole of Upper Italy; the armistice which Bismarck offered to the French Government of Defence at the beginning of the siege of Paris would have involved the surrender of Strasburg and of Toul. In demanding that the line of demarcation should be carried almost up to the walls of Constantinople the Russians were asking for no more than would certainly have been within their hands had hostilities been prolonged for a few weeks, or even days. Deeply as the conditions of the armistice agitated the English people, it was not in these conditions, but in the conditions of the peace which was to follow, that the true cause of contention between England and Russia, if cause there was, had to be found. Nevertheless, the approach of the Russians to Gallipoli and the lines of Tchataldja, followed, as it was, by the despatch of the British fleet to Constantinople, brought Russia and Great Britain within a hair's breadth of war. It was in vain that Lord Derby described the fleet as sent only for the protection of the lives and property of British subjects. Gortschakoff, who was superior in amenities of this kind, replied that the Russian Government had exactly the same end in view, with the distinction that its protection would be extended to all Christians. Should the British fleet appear at the Bosphorus, Russian troops would, in the fulfilment of a common duty of humanity, enter Constantinople. Yielding to this threat, Lord Beaconsfield bade the fleet halt at a convenient point in the Sea of Marmora. On both sides preparations were made for immediate action. The guns on our ships stood charged for battle; the Russians strewed the shallows with torpedoes. Had a Russian soldier appeared on the heights of Gallipoli, had an Englishman landed on the Asiatic shore of the Bosphorus, war would at once have broken out. But after some weeks of extreme danger the perils of mere contiguity passed away, and the decision between peace and war was transferred from the accidents of tent and quarter deck to the deliberations of statesmen assembled in Congress.

[Treaty of San Stefano, Mar. 3.]

The bases of Peace which were made the condition of the armistice granted at Adrianople formed with little alteration the substance of the Treaty signed by Russia and Turkey at San Stefano, a village on the Sea of Marmora, on the 3rd of March. By this Treaty the Porte recognised the independence of Servia, Montenegro, and Roumania, and made considerable cessions of territory to the two former States. Bulgaria was constituted an autonomous tributary Principality, with a Christian Government and a national militia. Its frontier, which was made so extensive as to include the greater part of European Turkey, was defined as beginning near Midia on the Black Sea, not sixty miles from the Bosphorus; passing thence westwards just to the north of Adrianople; descending to the Ægean Sea, and following the coast as far as the Thracian Chersonese; then passing inland westwards, so as barely to exclude Salonika; running on to the border of Albania within fifty miles of the Adriatic, and from this point following the Albanian border up to the new Servian frontier. The Prince of Bulgaria was to be freely elected by the population, and confirmed by the Porte with the assent of the Powers; a system of administration was to be drawn up by an Assembly of Bulgarian notables; and the introduction of the new system into Bulgaria with the superintendence of its working was to be entrusted for two years to a Russian Commissioner. Until the native militia was organised, Russian troops, not exceeding fifty thousand in number, were to occupy the country; this occupation, however, was to be limited to a term approximating to two years. In Bosnia and Herzegovina the proposals laid before the Porte at the first sitting of the Conference of 1876 were to be immediately introduced, subject to such modifications as might be agreed upon between Turkey, Russia, and Austria. The Porte undertook to apply scrupulously in Crete the Organic Law which had been drawn up in 1868, taking into account the previously expressed wishes of the native population. An analogous law, adapted to local requirements, was, after being communicated to the Czar, to be introduced into Epirus, Thessaly, and the other parts of Turkey in Europe for which a special constitution was not provided by the Treaty. Commissions, in which the native population was to be largely represented, were in each province to be entrusted with the task of elaborating the details of the new organisation. In Armenia the Sultan undertook to carry into effect without further delay the improvements and reforms demanded by local requirements, and to guarantee the security of the Armenians from Kurds and Circassians. As an indemnity for the losses and expenses of the war the Porte admitted itself to be indebted to Russia in the sum of fourteen hundred million roubles; but in accordance with the wishes of the Sultan, and in consideration of the financial embarrassments of Turkey, the Czar consented to accept in substitution for the greater part of this sum the cession of the Dobrudscha in Europe, and of the districts of Ardahan, Kars, Batoum, and Bayazid in Asia. As to the balance of three hundred million roubles left due to Russia, the mode of payment or guarantee was to be settled by an understanding between the two Governments. The Dobrudscha was to be given by the Czar to Roumania in exchange for Bessarabia, which this State was to transfer to Russia. The complete evacuation of Turkey in Europe was to take place within three months, that of Turkey in Asia within six months, from the conclusion of peace.  [554]

[Congress proposed.]

[Opposite purposes of Russia and England.]

It had from the first been admitted by the Russian Government that questions affecting the interests of Europe at large could not be settled by a Treaty between Russia and Turkey alone, but must form the subject of European agreement. Early in February the Emperor of Austria had proposed that a European Conference should assemble at his own capital. It was subsequently agreed that Berlin, instead of Vienna, should be the place of meeting, and instead of a Conference a Congress should be held, that is, an international assembly of the most solemn form, in which each of the Powers is represented not merely by an ambassador or an envoy, but by its leading Ministers. But the question at once arose whether there existed in the mind of the Russian Government a distinction between parts of the Treaty of San Stefano bearing on the interests of Europe generally and parts which affected no States but Russia and Turkey; and whether, in this case, Russia was willing that Europe should be the judge of the distinction, or, on the contrary, claimed for itself the right of withholding portions of the Treaty from the cognisance of the European Court. In accepting the principle of a Congress, Lord Derby on behalf of Great Britain made it a condition that every article of the Treaty without exception should be laid before the Congress, not necessarily as requiring the concurrence of the Powers, but in order that the Powers themselves might in each case decide whether their concurrence was necessary or not. To this demand Prince Gortschakoff offered the most strenuous resistance, claiming for Russia the liberty of accepting, or not accepting, the discussion of any question that might be raised. It would clearly have been in the power of the Russian Government, had this condition been granted, to exclude from the consideration of Europe precisely those matters which in the opinion of other States were most essentially of European import. Phrases of conciliation were suggested; but no ingenuity of language could shade over the difference of purpose which separated the rival Powers. Every day the chances of the meeting of the Congress seemed to be diminishing, the approach of war between Russia and Great Britain more unmistakable. Lord Beaconsfield called out the Reserves and summoned troops from India; even the project of seizing a port in Asia Minor in case the Sultan should fall under Russian influence was discussed in the Cabinet. Unable to reconcile himself to these vigorous measures, Lord Derby, who had long been at variance with the Premier, now finally withdrew from the Cabinet (March 28). He was succeeded in his office by the Marquis of Salisbury, whose comparison of his relative and predecessor to Titus Oates revived the interest of the diplomatic world in a now forgotten period of English history.

[Circular of April 1.]

The new Foreign Secretary had not been many days in office when a Circular, despatched to all the Foreign Courts, summed up the objections of Great Britain to the Treaty of San Stefano. It was pointed out that a strong Slavic State would be created under the control of Russia, possessing important harbours upon the shores of the Black Sea and the Archipelago, and giving to Russia a preponderating influence over political and commercial relations on both those seas; that a large Greek population would be merged in a dominant Slavic majority; that by the extension of Bulgaria to the Archipelago the Albanian and Greek provinces left to the Sultan would be severed from Constantinople; that the annexation of Bessarabia and of Batoum would make the will of the Russian Government dominant over all the vicinity of the Black Sea; that the acquisition of the strongholds of Armenia would place the population of that province under the immediate influence of the Power that held these strongholds, while through the cession of Bayazid the European trade from Trebizond to Persia would become liable to be arrested by the prohibitory barriers of the Russian commercial system. Finally, by the stipulation for an indemnity which it was beyond the power of Turkey to discharge, and by the reference of the mode of payment or guarantee to a later settlement, Russia had placed it in its power either to extort yet larger cessions of territory, or to force Turkey into engagements subordinating its policy in all things to that of St. Petersburg.

[Count Schouvaloff.]

[Secret agreement, May 30th.]

[Convention with Turkey, June 4.]

[Cyprus.]

It was the object of Lord Salisbury to show that the effects of the Treaty of San Stefano, taken in a mass, threatened the peace and the interests of Europe, and therefore, whatever might be advanced for or against individual stipulations of the Treaty, that the Treaty as a whole, and not clauses selected by one Power, must be submitted to the Congress if the examination was not to prove illusory. This was a just line of argument. Nevertheless it was natural to suppose that some parts of the Treaty must be more distasteful than others to Great Britain; and Count Schouvaloff, who was sincerely desirous of peace, applied himself to the task of discovering with what concessions Lord Beaconsfield's Cabinet would be satisfied. He found that if Russia would consent to modifications of the Treaty in Congress excluding Bulgaria from the Ægæan Sea, reducing its area on the south and west, dividing it into two provinces, and restoring the Balkans to the Sultan as a military frontier, giving back Bayazid to the Turks, and granting to other Powers besides Russia a voice in the organisation of Epirus, Thessaly, and the other Christian provinces of the Porte, England might be induced to accept without essential change the other provisions of San Stefano. On the 7th of May Count Schouvaloff quitted London for St. Petersburg, in order to lay before the Czar the results of his communications with the Cabinet, and to acquaint him with the state of public opinion in England. On his journey hung the issues of peace or war. Backed by the counsels of the German Emperor, Schouvaloff succeeded in his mission. The Czar determined not to risk the great results already secured by insisting on the points contested, and Schouvaloff returned to London authorised to conclude a pact with the British Government on the general basis which had been laid down. On the 30th of May a secret agreement, in which the above were the principal points, was signed, and the meeting of the Congress for the examination of the entire Treaty of San Stefano was now assured. But it was not without the deepest anxiety and regret that Lord Beaconsfield consented to the annexation of Batoum and the Armenian fortresses. He obtained indeed an assurance in the secret agreement with Schouvaloff that the Russian frontier should be no more extended on the side of Turkey in Asia; but his policy did not stop short here. By a Convention made with the Sultan on the 4th of June, Great Britain engaged, in the event of any further aggression by Russia upon the Asiatic territories of the Sultan, to defend these territories by force of arms. The Sultan in return promised to introduce the necessary reforms, to be agreed upon by the two Powers, for the protection of the Christian and other subjects of the Porte in these territories, and further assigned the Island of Cyprus to be occupied and administered by England. It was stipulated by a humorous after-clause that if Russia should restore to Turkey its Armenian conquests, Cyprus would be evacuated by England, and the Convention itself should be at an end.  [555]

[Congress of Berlin, June 13-July 13.]

[Treaty of Berlin, July 13.]

The Congress of Berlin, at which the Premier himself and Lord Salisbury represented Great Britain, opened on the 13th of June. Though the compromise between England and Russia had been settled in general terms, the arrangement of details opened such a series of difficulties that the Congress seemed more than once on the point of breaking up. It was mainly due to the perseverance and wisdom of Prince Bismarck, who transferred the discussion of the most crucial points from the Congress to private meetings of his guests, and who himself acted as conciliator when Gortschakoff folded up his maps or Lord Beaconsfield ordered a special train, that the work was at length achieved. The Treaty of Berlin, signed on the 13th of July, confined Bulgaria, as an autonomous Principality, to the country north of the Balkans, and diminished the authority which, pending the establishment of its definitive system of government, would by the Treaty of San Stefano have belonged to a Russian commissioner. The portion of Bulgaria south of the Balkans, but extending no farther west than the valley of the Maritza, and no farther south than Mount Rhodope, was formed into a Province of East Roumelia, to remain subject to the direct political and military authority of the Sultan, under conditions of administrative autonomy. The Sultan was declared to possess the right of erecting fortifications both on the coast and on the land-frontier of this province, and of maintaining troops there. Alike in Bulgaria and in Eastern Roumelia the period of occupation by Russian troops was limited to nine months. Bosnia and Herzegovina were handed over to Austria, to be occupied and administered by that Power. The cessions of territory made to Servia and Montenegro in the Treaty of San Stefano were modified with the object of interposing a broader strip between these two States; Bayazid was omitted from the ceded districts in Asia, and the Czar declared it his intention to erect Batoum into a free port, essentially commercial. At the instance of France the provisions relating to the Greek Provinces of Turkey were superseded by a vote in favour of the cession of part of these Provinces to the Hellenic Kingdom. The Sultan was recommended to cede Thessaly and part of Epirus to Greece, the Powers reserving to themselves the right of offering their mediation to facilitate the negotiations. In other respects the provisions of the Treaty of San Stefano were confirmed without substantial change.

[Comparison of the two Treaties.]

Lord Beaconsfield returned to London, bringing, as he said, peace with honour. It was claimed, in the despatch to our Ambassadors which accompanied the publication of the Treaty of Berlin, that in this Treaty the cardinal objections raised by the British Government to the Treaty of San Stefano had found an entire remedy. "Bulgaria," wrote Lord Salisbury, "is now confined to the river-barrier of the Danube, and consequently has not only ceased to possess any harbour on the Archipelago, but is removed by more than a hundred miles from the neighbourhood of that sea. On the Euxine the important port of Bourgas has been restored to the Government of Turkey; and Bulgaria retains less than half the sea-board originally assigned to it, and possesses no other port except the roadstead of Varna, which can hardly be used for any but commercial purposes. The replacement under Turkish rule of Bourgas and the southern half of the sea-board on the Euxine, and the strictly commercial character assigned to Batoum, have largely obviated the menace to the liberty of the Black Sea. The political outposts of Russian power have been pushed back to the region beyond the Balkans; the Sultan's dominions have been provided with a defensible frontier." It was in short the contention of the English Government that while Russia, in the pretended emancipation of a great part of European Turkey by the Treaty of San Stefano, had but acquired a new dependency, England, by insisting on the division of Bulgaria, had baffled this plan and restored to Turkey an effective military dominion over all the country south of the Balkans. That Lord Beaconsfield did well in severing Macedonia from the Slavic State of Bulgaria there is little reason to doubt; that, having so severed it, he did ill in leaving it without a European guarantee for good government, every successive year made more plain; the wisdom of his treatment of Bulgaria itself must, in the light of subsequent events, remain matter for controversy. It may fairly be said that in dealing with Bulgaria English statesmen were, on the whole, dealing with the unknown. Nevertheless, had guidance been accepted from the history of the other Balkan States, analogies were not altogether wanting or altogether remote. During the present century three Christian States had been formed out of what had been Ottoman territory: Servia, Greece, and Roumania. Not one of these had become a Russian Province, or had failed to develop and maintain a distinct national existence. In Servia an attempt had been made to retain for the Porte the right of keeping troops in garrison. This attempt had proved a mistake. So long as the right was exercised it had simply been a source of danger and disquiet, and it had finally been abandoned by the Porte itself. In the case of Greece, Russia, with a view to its own interests, had originally proposed that the country should be divided into four autonomous provinces tributary to the Sultan: against this the Greeks had protested, and Canning had successfully supported their protest. Even the appointment of an ex-Minister of St. Petersburg, Capodistrias, as first President of Greece in 1827 had failed to bring the liberated country under Russian influence; and in the course of the half-century which had since elapsed it had become one of the commonplaces of politics, accepted by every school in every country of Western Europe, that the Powers had committed a great error in 1833 in not extending to far larger dimensions the Greek Kingdom which they then established. In the case of Roumania, the British Government had, out of fear of Russia, insisted in 1856 that the provinces of Moldavia and Wallachia should remain separate: the result was that the inhabitants in defiance of England effected their union, and that after a few years had passed there was not a single politician in England who regarded their union otherwise than with satisfaction. If history taught anything in the solution of the Eastern question, it taught that the effort to reserve for the Sultan a military existence in countries which had passed from under his general control was futile, and that the best barrier against Russian influence was to be found not in the division but in the strengthening and consolidation of the States rescued from Ottoman dominions.

It was of course open to English statesmen in 1878 to believe that all that had hitherto passed in the Balkan Peninsula had no bearing upon the problems of the hour, and that, whatever might have been the case with Greece, Servia, and Roumania, Bulgaria stood on a completely different footing, and called for the application of principles not based on the experience of the past but on the divinations of superior minds. Should the history of succeeding years bear out this view, should the Balkans become a true military frontier for Turkey, should Northern Bulgaria sink to the condition of a Russian dependency, and Eastern Roumelia, in severance from its enslaved kin, abandon itself to a thriving ease behind the garrisons of the reforming Ottoman, Lord Beaconsfield will have deserved the fame of a statesman whose intuitions, undimmed by the mists of experience, penetrated the secret of the future, and shaped, because they discerned, the destiny of nations. It will be the task of later historians to measure the exact period after the Congress of Berlin at which the process indicated by Lord Beaconsfield came into visible operation; it is the misfortune of those whose view is limited by a single decade to have to record that in every particular, with the single exception of the severance of Macedonia from the Slavonic Principality, Lord Beaconsfield's ideas, purposes and anticipations, in so far as they related to Eastern Europe, have hitherto been contradicted by events. What happened in Greece, Servia, and Roumania has happened in Bulgaria. Experience, thrown to the winds by English Ministers in 1878, has justified those who listened to its voice. There exists no such thing as a Turkish fortress on the Balkans; Bourgas no more belongs to the Sultan than Athens or Belgrade; no Turkish soldier has been able to set foot within the territory whose very name, Eastern Roumelia, was to stamp it as Turkish dominion. National independence, a living force in Greece, in Servia, in Roumania, has proved its power in Bulgaria too. The efforts of Russia to establish its influence over a people liberated by its arms have been repelled with unexpected firmness. Like the divided members of Roumania, the divided members of Bulgaria have effected their union. In this union, in the growing material and moral force of the Bulgarian State, Western Europe sees a power wholly favourable to its own hopes for the future of the East, wholly adverse to the extension of Russian rule: and it has been reserved for Lord Beaconsfield's colleague at the Congress of Berlin, regardless of the fact that Bulgaria north of the Balkans, not the southern Province, created that vigorous military and political organisation which was the precursor of national union, to explain that in dividing Bulgaria into two portions the English Ministers of 1878 intended to promote its ultimate unity, and that in subjecting the southern half to the Sultan's rule they laid the foundation for its ultimate independence.

[1]

Chapters I. to XI. of this Edition.

[2]

Chapters XII. to XVIII. of this Edition.

[3]

Page 362 of this Edition.

[4]

Ranke, Ursprung und Beginn der Revolutionskriege, p. 90. Vivenot, Quellen zur Geschichte der Kaiserpolitik Oesterreichs, i. 185, 208.

[5]

Von Sybel, Geschichte der Revolutionszeit, i. 289.

[6]

Vivenot, Quellen, i. 372. Buchez et Roux, xiii. 340, xiv. 24.

[7]

Häusser, Deutsche Geschichte, i. 88. Vivenot, Herzog Albrecht, i. 78.

[8]

Springer, Geschichte Oesterreichs, i. 46.

[9]

Pertz, Leben Stein, ii. 402. Paget, Travels in Hungary, i. 131.

[10]

Ranke, Ursprung und Beginn, p. 256. Vivenot, Quellen, i. 133, 165. The acquisition of Bavaria was declared by the Austrian Cabinet to be the summum bonum of the monarchy.

[11]

Biedermann, Deutschland im Achtzehnten Jahrhundert, iv. 1144.

[12]

Carlyle, Friedrich, vi. 667.

[13]

Häusser, i. 197. Hardenberg (Ranke), i. 139. Von Sybel, i. 272.

[14]

"The connection with the House of Austria and the present undertaking continue to be very unpopular. It is openly said that one half of the treasure was uselessly spent at Reichenbach, and that the other half will be spent on the present occasion, and that the sovereign will be reduced to his former level of Margrave of Brandenburg." Eden, from Berlin; June 19, 1792. Records: Prussia, vol. 151. "He (Möllendorf) reprobated the alliance with Austria, condemning the present interference in the affairs of France as ruinous, and censuring as undignified and contrary to the most important interests of this country the leaving Russia sole arbitress of the fate of Poland. He, however, said, what every Prussian without any exception of party will say, that this country can never acquiesce in the establishment of a good government in Poland, since in a short time it would rise to a very decided superiority," Id., July 17. Mr. Cobden's theory that the partition of Poland was effected in the interest of good government must have caused some surprise at Berlin.

[15]

The condition of Mecklenburg is thus described in a letter written by Stein during a journey in 1802:-"I found the aspect of the country as cheerless as its misty northern sky; great estates, much of them in pasture or fallow; an extremely thin population; the entire labouring class under the yoke of serfage; stretches of land attached to solitary ill-built farmhouses; in short, a monotony, a dead stillness, spreading over the whole country, an absence of life and activity that quite overcame my spirits. The home of the Mecklenburg noble, who weighs like a load on his peasants instead of improving their condition, gives me the idea of the den of some wild beast, who devastates even thing about him, and surrounds himself with the silence of the grave." Pertz, Leben Stein, i. 192. For a more cheerful description of Münster, see id., i. 241.

[16]

Perthes, Staatsleben, p. 116. Rigby, Letters from France, p. 215.

[17]

Buchez et Roux, xvi. 279. One of the originals of this declaration, handed to the British ambassador, is in the London Records: Prussia, vol. 151.

[18]

The accounts of the emigrants sent to England by Lord Elgin, envoy at Brussels, and Sir J. Murray, our military attaché with Brunswick's army (in Records: Flanders, vol. 221) are instructive: "The conduct of the army under the Princes of France is universally reprobated. Their appearance in dress, in attendants, in preparations, is ridiculous. As an instance, however trivial, it may be mentioned that on one of the waggons was written Toilette de Monsieur. The spirit of vengeance, however, which they discover on every occasion is far more serious. Wherever they have passed, they have exercised acts of cruelty, in banishing and severely punishing those persons who, though probably culpable, had yet been left untouched by the Prussian commanders. To such an extent has this been carried that the commander at Verdun would not suffer any Frenchman (emigrant) to pass a night in the town without a special permission." Sept. 21. After the failure of the campaign, Elgin writes of the emigrants: "They everywhere added to the cruelties for some of which several hussars had been executed: carried to its extent the vengeance threatened in the Duke of Brunswick's Declaration, in burning whole villages where a shot was fired on them: and on the other hand by their self-sufficiency, want of subordination and personal disrespect, have drawn upon themselves the contempt of the combined armies." Oct. 6. So late as 1796, the exile Louis XVIII. declared his intention to restore the "property and rights" (i.e. tithes, feudal dues, etc.) of the nobles and clergy, and to punish the men who had "committed offences." See Letter to Pichegru, May 4, 1796, in Manuscrit Inédit de Louis XVIII., p. 464.

[19]

Wordsworth, Prelude, book ix.

[20]

The correspondence is in Ranke, Ursprung und Beginn, p. 371. Such was the famine in the Prussian camp that Dumouriez sent the King of Prussia twelve loaves, twelve pounds of coffee, and twelve pounds of sugar. The official account of the campaign is in the Berlinische Zeitung of Oct. 11, 1792.

[21]

Forster, Werke, vi. 386.

[22]

"The very night the news of the late Emperor's (Leopold's) death arrived here (Brussels), inflammatory advertisements and invitations to arm were distributed." One culprit "belonged to the Choir of St. Gudule: he chose the middle of the day, and in the presence of many people posted up a paper in the church, exhorting to a general insurrection. The remainder of this strange production was the description of a vision he pretended to have seen, representing the soul of the late emperor on its way to join that of Joseph, already suffering in the other world." Col. Gardiner, March 20, 1792. Records: Flanders, vol. 220.

[23]

Elgin, from Brussels, Nov. 6. "A brisk cannonade has been heard this whole forenoon in the direction of Mons. It is at this moment somewhat diminished, though not at an end" Nov. 7. "Several messengers have arrived from camp in the course of the night, but all the Ministers (I have seen them all) deny having received one word of detail.... Couriers have been sent this night in every direction to call in all the detachments on the frontiers.... The Government is making every arrangement for quitting Brussels: their papers are already prepared, their carriages ready." ... Then a PS. "A cannonade is distinctly heard again.... All the emigrants now here are removing with the utmost haste." Nov. 9th. "The confusion throughout the country is extreme. The roads are covered with emigrants, and persons of these provinces flying from the French armies," Records: Flanders, vol. 222.

[24]

In Nov. 1792, Grenville ordered the English envoys at Vienna and Berlin to discover, if possible, the real designs of aggrandisement held by those Courts. Mr. Straton, at Vienna, got wind of the agreement against Poland. "I requested Count Philip Cobenzl" (the Austrian Minister) "that he would have the goodness to open himself confidentially to me on the precise object which the two allied Courts might have in contemplation. This, however, the Count was by no means disposed to do; on the contrary, he went round the compass of evasion in order to avoid a direct answer. But determined as I was to push the Austrian Minister, I heaped question on question, until I forced him to say, blushing, and with evident signs of embarrassment, 'Count Stadion' (Ambassador at London) 'will be able to satisfy the curiosity of the British Minister, to whatever point it may be directed.'" Jan. 20, 1793. Records: Austria, vol. 32. Stadion accordingly informed Lord Grenville of the Polish and Bavarian plans. Grenville expressed his concern and regret at the aggression on Poland, and gave reasons against the Bavarian exchange. To our envoy with the King of Prussia Grenville wrote: "It may possibly be the intention of the Courts to adopt a plan of indemnifying themselves for the expense of the war by fresh acquisitions in Poland, and carrying into execution a new partition of that country. You will not fail to explain in the most distinct and pointed manner his Majesty's entire disapprobation of such a plan, and his determination on no account to concur in any measures which may tend to the completion of a design so unjust in itself." Jan. 4, 1793. Records: Army in Germany, vol. 437. At Vienna Cobenzl declared, Feb. 9, that Austria could not now "even manifest a wish to oppose the projects of Prussia in Poland, as in that case his Prussian Majesty would probably withdraw his assistance from the French war; nay, perhaps even enter into an alliance with that nation and invade Bohemia." Records: Austria, vol. 32.

[25]

Auckland, ii. 464. Papers presented to Parliament, 1793. Mr. Oscar Browning, in Fortnightly Review, Feb., 1883.

[26]

Von Sybel, ii. 259. Thugut, Vertrauliche Briefe, i. 17. Letters from Brussels, 23rd March in Records: Flanders, vol. 222. "The Huzars are in motion all round, so that we hope to have them here to-morrow. Most of the French troops who arrived last, and which are mostly peasants armed with pikes, are returning home, besides a great number of their volunteers." 24th March. "At this moment we hear the cannon. The French have just had it cry'd in the town that all the tailors who are making coats for the army must bring them made or unmade, and be paid directly.... They beat the drums to drown the report of the cannon.... You have not a conception of the confusion in the town.... This moment passed four Austrians with their heads cut to pieces, and one with his eye poked out. The French are retiring by the Porte d'Anderlecht." Ostend, April 4th. "This day, before two of the clock, twenty-five Austrian huzars enter'd the town while the inhabitants were employed burning the tree of liberty."

[27]

Mortimer-Ternaux, vii. 412.

[28]

Berriat-St.-Prix, La Justice Révolutionnaire, introd.

[29]

"The King of Prussia has been educated in the persuasion that the execution of that exchange involves the ruin of his family, and he is the more sore about it that by the qualified consent which he has given to its taking place he has precluded himself from opposing it by arms. Accordingly, every idle story which arrives from Munich which tends to revive this apprehension makes an impression which I am unable, at the first moment, to efface." Lord Yarmouth, from the Prussian camp, Aug. 12, 1793, Records: Army in Germany, 437. "Marquis Lucchesini, the effectual director, is desirous of avoiding every expense and every exertion of the troops; of leaving the whole burden of the war on Austria and the other combined Powers; and of seeing difficulties multiply in the arrangements which the Court of Vienna may wish to form I do not perceive any object beyond this; no desire of diminishing the power of France; no system or feeling for crushing the opinions, the doctrines, of that country." Elgin, May 17. Records: Flanders, vol. 223.

[30]

Auckland, iii. 24. Thugut, Vertrauliche Briefe, i. 13. Grenville to Eden, Sept. 7th, 1793, Records: Austria, vol. 34: a most important historical document, setting out the principles of alliance between England and Austria. Austria, if it will abandon the Bavarian exchange, may claim annexations on the border of the Netherlands, in Alsace and Lorraine, and in the intermediate parts of the frontier of France. England's indemnity "must be looked for in the foreign settlements and colonies of France.... His Majesty has an interest in seeing the House of Austria strengthen itself by acquisitions on the French frontier. The Emperor must see with pleasure the relative increase of the naval and commercial resources of this country beyond those of France." In the face of this paper, it cannot be maintained that the war of 1793 was, after the first few months, purely defensive on England's part; though no doubt Pitt's notion of an indemnity was fair and modest in comparison with the schemes and acts of his enemy.

[31]

The first mention of Bonaparte's name in any British document occurs in an account of the army of Toulon sent to London in Dec. 1793 by a spy. "Les capitaines d'artillérie, élévé dans cet état, connoissent leur service et ont tous du talens. Ils préféroient l'employer pour une meilleure cause.... Le sixtèrne, nommé Bonaparte, trés republicain, a été tué sous les murs de Toulon." Records: France, vol. 599. Austria undertook to send 5,000 troops from Lombardy to defend Toulon, but broke its engagement. "You will wait on M. Thugut (the Austrian Minister) and claim in the most peremptory terms the performance of this engagement. It would be very offensive to his Majesty that a request made so repeatedly on his part should be neglected; but it is infinitely more so to see that, when this country is straining every nerve for the common cause, a body of troops for the want of which Toulon may possibly at this moment be lost, have remained inactive at Milan. You will admit of no further excuses." Grenville to Eden, Nov. 24, 1793. Thugut's written answer was, "The Emperor gave the order of march at a moment when the town of Toulon had no garrison. Its preservation then seemed matter of pressing necessity, but now all inquietude on this score has happily disappeared. The troops of different nations already assembled at Toulon put the place out of all danger." Records: Austria, vol. 35.

[32]

Häusser, i. 482. "La Prusse," wrote Thugut at this time, "parviendra au moyen de son alliance à nous faire plus de mal qu'elle ne nous a fait par les guerres les plus sanglantes." Briefe, i. 12, 15. Thugut even proposed that England should encourage the Poles to resist. Eden, April 15; Records: Austria, vol. 33.

[33]

The English Government found that Thugut was from the first indifferent to their own aim, the restoration of the Bourbons, or establishment of some orderly government in France. In so far as he concerned himself with the internal affairs of France, he hoped rather for continued dissension, as facilitating the annexation of French territory by Austria. "Qu'on profite de ce conflit des partis en France pour tâcher de se rendre mâitre des forteresses, afin de faire la loi au parti qui aura prévalu, et l'obliger d'acheter la paix et la protection de l'empereur, en lui cedant telle partie de ses conquêtes que S.M. jugera de sa covenance." Briefe, i. 13.

[34]

The despatches of Lord Yarmouth from the Prussian and Austrian headquarters, from July 17 to Nov. 22, 1793, give a lively picture both of the military operations and of the political intrigues of this period. They are accompanied by the MS. journal of the Austrian army from Sept. 15 to Dec. 14, each copy apparently with Wurmser's autograph, and by the original letter of the Prussian Minister, Lucchesini, to Lord Yarmouth, announcing the withdrawal of Prussia from the war, "M. de Lucchesini read it to me very hastily, and seemed almost ashamed of a part of its contents." Records: Army in Germany, vols. 437, 438, 439.

[35]

Hardenberg (Ranke), i. 181, Vivenot, Herzog Albrecht, i. 10.

[36]

Elgin reports after this engagement, May 1st, 1794-"The French army appears to continue much what it has hitherto been, vigorous and persevering where (as in villages and woods) the local advantages are of a nature to supply the defects of military science; weak and helpless beyond belief where cavalry can act, and manoeuvres are possible.... The magazines of the army are stored, and the provisions regularly given out to the troops, and good in quality. Indeed, it is singular to observe in all the villages where we have been forward forage, etc., in plenty, and all the country cultivated as usual. The inhabitants, however, have retired with the French army; and to that degree that the tract we have lately taken possession of is absolutely deserted.... The execution of Danton has produced no greater effect in the army than other executions, and we have found many papers on those who fell in the late actions treating it with ridicule, and as a source of joy." Records: Flanders, 226. "I am in hopes to hear from you on the subject of the French prisoners, as to where I am to apply for the money I advance for their subsistence. They are a great number of them almost naked, some entirely so. It is absolutely shocking to humanity to see them. I would purchase some coarse clothing for those that are in the worst state, but know not how far I should be authorised. They are mostly old men and boys." Consul Harward, at Ostend, March 4th, id.

[37]

These events are the subject of controversy. See Hüffer, Oestreich und Preussen, p. 62 Von Sybel, iii. 138. Vivenot, Clerfayt, p. 38. The old belief, defended by Von Sybel, was that Thugut himself had determined upon the evacuation of Belgium, and treacherously deprived Coburg of forces for its defence. But, apart from other evidence, the tone of exasperation that runs through Thugut's private letters is irreconcilable with this theory. Lord Elgin, whose reports are used by Von Sybel, no doubt believed that Thugut was playing false; but he was a bad judge, being in the hands of Thugut's opponents, especially General Mack, whom he glorifies in the most absurd way. The other English envoy in Belgium, Lord Yarmouth, reported in favour of Thugut's good faith in this matter, and against military intriguers. Records: Army in Germany, vol. 440. A letter of Prince Waldeck's in Thugut, i. 387, and a conversation between Mack and Sir Morton Eden, on Feb. 3rd, 1797, reported by the latter in Records: Austria, vol. 48, appear to fix the responsibility for the evacuation of Belgium on these two generals, Waldeck and Mack, and on the Emperor's confidential military adviser, Rollin.

[38]

"Should the French come they will find this town perfectly empty. Except my own, I do not think there are three houses in Ostend with a bed in them. So general a panic I never witnessed." June 30th.-"To remain here alone would be a wanton sacrifice. God knows 'tis an awful stroke to me to leave a place just as I began to be comfortably settled." Consul Harward: Records: Army in Germany, vol. 440. "All the English are arrested in Ostend; the men are confined in the Capuchin convent, and the women in the Convent des Soeurs Blancs. All the Flamands from the age of 17 to 32 are forced to go for soldiers. At Bruges the French issued an order for 800 men to present themselves. Thirty only came, in consequence of which they rang a bell on the Grand Place, and the inhabitants thinking that it was some ordinance, quitted their houses to hear it, when they were surrounded by the French soldiers, and upwards of 1,000 men secured, gentle and simple, who were all immediately set to work on the canals." Mr. W. Poppleton, Flushing, Sept. 4. Records: Flanders, vol. 227.

[39]

Malmesbury, ii. 125. Von Sybel, iii. 168. Grenville made Coburg's dismissal a sine qua non of the continuance of English co-operation. Instructions to Lord Spencer, July 19, 1794. Records: Austria, 36. But for the Austrian complaints against the English, see Vivenot, Clerfayt, p. 50.

[40]

Schlosser, xv. 203: borne out by the Narrative of an Officer, printed in Annual Register, 1795, p. 143.

[41]

Vivenot, Herzog Albrecht, iii. 59, 512. Martens, Recueil des Traités, vi. 45, 52. Hardenberg, i. 287. Vivenot, Clerfayt, p. 32. "Le Roi de Prusse," wrote the Empress Catherine, "est une méchante bête et un grand cochon." Prussia made no attempt to deliver the unhappy son of Louis XVI. from his captivity.

[42]

The British Government had formed the most sanguine estimate of the strength of the Royalist movement in France. "I cannot let your servant return without troubling you with these few lines to conjure you to use every possible effort to give life and vigour to the Austrian Government at this critical moment. Strongly as I have spoken in my despatch of the present state of France, I have said much less than my information, drawn from various quarters, and applying to almost every part of France, would fairly warrant. We can never hope that the circumstances, as far as they regard the state of France, can be more favourable than they now are. For God's sake enforce these points with all the earnestness which I am sure you will feel upon them." Grenville to Eden, April 17, 1795; Records: Austria, vol. 41. After the failure of the expedition, the British Government made the grave charge against Thugut that while he was officially sending Clerfayt pressing orders to advance, he secretly told him to do nothing. "It is in vain to reason with the Austrian Ministers on the folly and ill faith of a system which they have been under the necessity of concealing from you, and which they will probably endeavour to disguise" Grenville to Eden, Oct., 1795; id., vol. 43. This charge, repeated by historians, is disproved by Thugut's private letters. Briefe, i. 221, seq. No one more bitterly resented Clerfayt's inaction.

[43]

The documents relating to the expedition to Quiberon, with several letters of D'Artois, Charette, and the Vendean leaders, are in Records: France, vol. 600.

[44]

Von Sybel, iii. 537. Buchez et Roux, xxxvi. 485.

[45]

For the police interpretation of the Zauberflöte, see Springer, Geschichte Oesterreichs, vol. i. p. 49.

[46]

Zobi, Storia Civile della Toscana, i. 284.

[47]

Galanti, Descrizione delle Sicilie, 1786, i. 279. He adds, "The Samnites and the Lucanians could not have shown so horrible a spectacle, because they had no feudal laws." Galanti's book gives perhaps the best idea of the immense task faced by monarchy in the eighteenth century in its struggle against what he justly calls "gli orrori del governo feudale." Nothing but a study of these details of actual life described by eye-witnesses can convey an adequate impression of the completeness and the misery of the feudal order in the more backward countries of Europe till far down in the eighteenth century. There is a good anonymous account of Sicily in 1810 in Castlereagh, 8, 217.

[48]

Correspondance de Napoleon, i. 260. Botta, lib. vi. Despatches of Col. Graham, British attaché with the Austrian army, in Records: Italian States, vol. 57. These most interesting letters, which begin on May 19, show the discord and suspicion prevalent from the first in the Austrian army. "Beaulieu has not met with cordial co-operation from his own generals, still less from the Piedmontese. He accuses them of having chosen to be beat in order to bring about a peace promised in January last." "Beaulieu was more violent than ever against his generals who have occasioned the failure of his plans. He said nine of them were cowards. I believe some of them are ill-affected to the cause." June 15.-"Many of the officers comfort themselves with thinking that defeat must force peace, and others express themselves in terms of despair." July 25,-Beaulieu told Graham that if Bonaparte had pushed on after the battle of Lodi, he might have gone straight into Mantua. The preparations for defence were made later.

[49]

Thugut, Briefe i. 107. A correspondence on this subject was carried on in cypher between Thugut and Ludwig Cobenzl, Austrian Ambassador at St. Petersburg in 1793-4. During Thugut's absence in Belgium, June, 1794, Cobenzl sent a duplicate despatch, not in cypher, to Vienna. Old Prince Kaunitz, the ex-minister, heard that a courier had arrived from St Petersburg, and demanded the despatch at the Foreign Office "like a dictator." It was given to him. "Ainsi," says Thugut, "adieu au secret qui depuis un an a été conservé avec tant de soins!"

[50]

Wurmser's reports are in Vivenot, Clerfayt, p. 477. Graham's daily despatches from the Austrian head-quarters give a vivid picture of these operations, and of the sudden change from exultation to despair. Aug. 1.-"I have the honour to inform your lordship that the siege of Mantua is raised, the French having retreated last night with the utmost precipitation." Aug. 2.-"The Austrians are in possession of all the French mortars and cannon, amounting to about 140, with 190,000 shells and bombs; the loss of the Imperial army is inconsiderable." Aug. 5.-"The rout of this day has sadly changed the state of affairs. There are no accounts of General Quosdanovich." Aug. 9.-"Our loss in men and cannon was much greater than was imagined. I had no idea of the possibility of the extent of such misfortunes as have overwhelmed us" Aug. 17.-"It is scarcely possible to describe the state of disorder and discouragement that prevails in the army. Were I free from apprehension, about the fate of my letter" (he had lost his baggage and his cypher in it), "I should despair of finding language adequate to convey a just idea of the discontent of the officers with General Wurmser. From generals to subalterns the universal language is 'qu'il faut faire la paix, car nous ne savons pas faire la guerre.'" Aug. 18.-"Not only the commander-in-chief, but the greatest number of the generals are objects of contempt and ridicule." Aug. 27.-"I do not exaggerate when I say that I have met with instances of down-right dotage." "It was in general orders that wine should be distributed to the men previous to the attack of the 29th. There was some difficulty in getting it up to Monte Baldo. General Bayolitzy observed that 'it did not signify, for the men might get the value in money afterwards.' The men marched at six in the evening without it, to attack at daybreak, and received four kreutzers afterwards. This is a fact I can attest. In action I saw officers sent on urgent messages going at a foot's pace: they say that their horses are half starved, and that they cannot afford to kill them."

[51]

Grundsätze (Archduke Charles), ii. 202. Bulletins in Wiener Zeitung, June-Oct., 1796.

[52]

Martens, vi. 59.

[53]

This seems to me to be the probable truth about Austria's policy in 1796, of which opposite views will be found in Häusser, vol. ii. ch. 1-3, and in Hüffer, Oestreich und Preussen, p. 142. Thugut professed in 1793 to have given up the project of the Bavarian exchange in deference to England. He admitted, however, soon afterwards, that he had again been pressing the King of Prussia to consent to it, but said that this was a ruse, intended to make Prussia consent to Austria's annexing a large piece of France instead. Eden, Sept., 1793; Records: Austria, vol. 34. The incident shows the difficulty of getting at the truth in diplomacy.

[54]

Yet the Government had had warning of this in a series of striking reports sent by one of Lord Elgin's spies during the Reign of Terror. "Jamais la France ne fut cultivée comme elle l'est. Il n'y a pas un arpent qui ne soit ensemencé, sauf dans les lieux où opèrent les armées belligérantes. Cette culture universelle a été forcée par les Directrices là où on ne la faisait pas volontairement." June 8, 1794; Records: Flanders, vol. 226. Elgin had established a line of spies from Paris to the Belgian frontier. Every one of these persons was arrested by the Revolutionary authorities. Elgin then fell in with the writer of the above, whose name is concealed, and placed him on the Swiss frontier. He was evidently a person thoroughly familiar with both civil and military administration. He appears to have talked to every Frenchman who entered Switzerland; and his reports contain far the best information that readied England during the Reign of Terror, contradicting the Royalists, who said that the war was only kept up by terrorism. He warned the English Government that the French nation in a mass was on the side of the Revolution, and declared that the downfall of Robespierre and the terrorists would make no difference in the prosecution of the war. The Government seems to have paid no attention to his reports, if indeed they were ever read.

[55]

Correspondance de Napoleon, ii. 28. Thugut, about this time, formed the plan of annexing Bologna and Ferrara to Austria, and said that if this result could be achieved, the French attack upon the Papal States would be no bad matter. See the instructions to Allvintzy, in Vivenot, Clerfayt, p. 511, which also contain the first Austrian orders to imprison Italian innovators, the beginning of Austria's later Italian policy.

[56]

Wurmser had orders to break out southwards into the Papal States. "These orders he (Thugut) knew had reached the Marshal, but they were also known to the enemy, as a cadet of Strasoldo's regiment, who was carrying the duplicate, had been taken prisoner, and having been seen to swallow a ball of wax, in which the order was wrapped up, he was immediately put to death and the paper taken out of his stomach." Eden, Jan., 1797; Records: Austria, vol. 48. Colonel Graham, who had been shut up in Mantua since Sept. 10, escaped on Dec 17, and restored communication between Wurmser and Allvintzy. He was present at the battle of Rivoli, which is described in his despatches.

[57]

"We expect every hour to hear of the entry of the Neapolitan troops and the declaration of a religious war. Every preparation has been made for such an event." Graves to Lord Grenville, Oct. 1, 1796; Records; Rome, vol. 56.

[58]

"The clamours for peace have become loud and importunate. His Imperial Majesty is constantly assailed by all his Ministers, M. de Thugut alone excepted, and by all who approach his person. Attempts are even made to alarm him with a dread of insurrection. In the midst of these calamities M. de Thugut retains his firmness of mind, and continues to struggle against the united voice of the nobility and the numerous and trying adversities that press upon him." Eden, April 1. "The confusion at the army exceeds the bounds of belief. Had Bonaparte continued his progress hither (Vienna), no doubt is entertained that he might have entered the place without opposition. That, instead of risking this enterprise, he should have stopped and given the Austrians six days to recover from their alarm and to prepare for defence, is a circumstance which it is impossible to account for." April 12. "He" (Mack) "said that when this place was threatened by the enemy, Her Imperial Majesty broke in upon the Emperor while in conference with his Minister, and, throwing herself and her children at his feet, determined His Majesty to open the negotiation which terminated in the shameful desertion of his ally." Aug. 16; Records: Austria, vols. 49, 50. Thugut subsequently told Lord Minto that if he could have laid his hand upon £500,000 in cash to stop the run on the Bank of Vienna, the war would have been continued, in which case he believed he would have surrounded Bonaparte's army.

[59]

The cession of the Rhenish Provinces was not, as usually stated, contained in the Preliminaries. Corr. de Napoleon, 2, 497; Hüffer, p. 259, where the details of the subsequent negotiations will be found.

[60]

Gohier, Mémoires i. Carnot, Réponse à Bailleul. Correspondance de Napoleon, ii. 188. Miot de Melito, ch. vi.

[61]

Martens, Traités, vi. 420; Thugut, Briefe, ii. 64. These letters breathe a fire and passion rare among German statesmen of that day, and show the fine side of Thugut's character. The well-known story of the destruction of Cobenzl's vase by Bonaparte at the last sitting, with the words, "Thus will I dash the Austrian Monarchy to pieces," is mythical. Cobenzl's own account of the scene is as follows;-"Bonaparte, excited by not having slept for two nights, emptied glass after glass of punch. When I explained with the greatest composure, Bonaparte started up in a violent rage, and poured out a flood of abuse, at the same time scratching his name illegibly at the foot of the statement which he had handed in as protocol. Then without waiting for our signatures, he put on his hat in the conference-room itself, and left us. Until he was in the street he continued to vociferate in a manner that could only be ascribed to intoxication, though Clarke and the rest of his suite, who were waiting in the hall, did their best to restrain him." "He behaved as if he had escaped from a lunatic asylum. His own people are all agreed about this." Hüffer, Oestreich und Preussen, p. 453.

[62]

Häusser, Deutsche Geschichte, ii. 147. Vivenot, Rastadter Congress, p. 17. Von Lang, Memoiren, i. 33. It is alleged that the official who drew up this document had not been made acquainted with the secret clauses.

[63]

"Tout annonce qu'il sera de toute impossibilité de finir avec ces gueux de Français autrement que par moyens de fermeté." Thugut, ii. 105. For the negotiation at Seltz, see Historische Zeitschrift, xxiii. 27.

[64]

Botta, lib. xiii. Letters of Mr. J. Denham and others in Records: Sicily, vol. 44.

[65]

Nelson Despatches, iii. 48.

[66]

Bernhardi, Geschichte Russlands, ii. 2, 382.

[67]

"Quel bonheur, quelle gloire, quelle consolation pour cette grande et illustre nation! Que je vous suis obligée, reconnaissante! J'ai pleuré et embrassé mes enfans, mon mari. Si jamais on fait un portrait du brave Nelson je le veux avoir dans ma chambre. Hip, Hip, Hip, Ma chère Miladi je suis folle de joye." Queen of Naples to Lady Hamilton, Sept. 4, 1798; Records: Sicily, vol. 44. The news of the overwhelming victory of the Nile seems literally to have driven people out of their senses at Naples. "Lady Hamilton fell apparently dead, and is not yet (Sept 25) perfectly recovered from her severe bruises." Nelson Despatches, 3, 130. On Nelson's arrival, "up flew her ladyship, and exclaiming, 'O God, is it possible?' she fell into my arms more dead than alive." It has been urged in extenuation of Nelson's subsequent cruelties that the contagion of this frenzy, following the effects of a severe wound in the head, had deprived his mind of its balance. "My head is ready to split, and I am always so sick." Aug. 10. "It required all the kindness of my friends to set me up." Sept. 25.

[68]

Sir W. Hamilton's despatch, Nov. 28, in Records: Sicily, vol. 44, where there are originals of most of the Neapolitan proclamations, etc., of this time. Mack had been a famous character since the campaign of 1793. Elgin's letters to Lord Grenville from the Netherlands, private as well as public, are full of extravagant praise of him. In July, 1796, Graham writes from the Italian army: "In the opinion of all here, the greatest general in Europe is the Quartermaster Mack, who was in England in 1793. Would to God he was marching, and here now." Mack, on the other hand, did not grudge flattery to the English:-"Je perdrais partout espoir et patience si je n'avais pas vu pour mon bonheur et ma consolation l'adorable Triumvirat" (Pitt, Grenville, Dundas) "qui surveille à Londres nos affaires. Soyez, mon cher ami, l'organe de ma profonde vénération envers ces Ministres incomparables." Mack to Elgin, 23. Feb., 1794. The British Government was constantly pressing Thugut to make Mack commander-in chief. Thugut, who had formed a shrewd notion of Mack's real quality, gained much obloquy by his steady refusal.

[69]

Signed by Mack. Colletta, p. 176. Mack's own account of the campaign is in Vivenot, Rastadter Congress, p. 83.

[70]

Nelson, iii. 210: Hamilton's despatch, Dec. 28, 1798, in Records; Sicily, vol. 44. "It was impossible to prevent a suspicion getting abroad of the intention of the Royal Family to make their escape. However, the secret was so well kept that we contrived to get their Majesties' treasure in jewels and money, to a very considerable extent, on board of H.M. ship the Vanguard the 20th of December, and Lord Nelson went on the next night by a secret passage into the Palace, and brought off in his boats their Sicilian Majesties and all the Royal Family. It was not discovered at Naples, until very late at night, that the Royal Family had escaped.... On the morning of Christmas Day, some hours before we got into Palermo, Prince Albert, one of their Majesties' sons, six years of age, was, either from fright or fatigue, taken with violent convulsions, and died in the arms of Lady Hamilton, the Queen, the Princesses, and women attendants being in such confusion as to be incapable of affording any assistance."

[71]

See Helfert, Der Rastatter Gesandtenmord, and Sybel's article thereon, in Hist. Zeitschrift, vol. 32.

[72]

Danilevsky-Miliutin, ii. 214. Despatch of Lord W. Bentinck from the allied head-quarters at Piacenza, June 23, in Records: Italian States, vol. 58. Bentinck arrived a few days before this battle; his despatches cover the whole North-Italian campaign from this time.

[73]

Nelson Despatches, iii. 447; Sir W. Hamilton's Despatch of July 14, in Records: Sicily, vol. 45. Helfert, Königin Karolina, p. 38. Details of the proscription in Colletta, v. 6. According to Hamilton, some of the Republicans in the forts had actually gone to their homes before Nelson pronounced the capitulation void. "When we anchored in the Bay, the 24th of June, the capitulation of the castles had in some measure taken place. Fourteen large polacks had taken on board out of the castles the most conspicuous and criminal of the Neapolitan rebels that had chosen to go to Toulon; the others had already been permitted to return to their homes." If this is so, Nelson's pretext that the capitulation had not been executed was a mere afterthought. Helfert is mistaken in calling the letter or proclamation of July 8th repudiating the treaty, a forgery. It is perfectly genuine. It was published by Nelson in the King's name, and is enclosed in Hamilton's despatch. Hamilton's exultations about himself and his wife, and their share in these events, are sorry reading. "In short, Lord Nelson and I, with Emma, have carried affairs to this happy crisis. Emma is really the Queen's bosom friend.... You may imagine, when we three agree, what real business is done.... At least I shall end my diplomatical career gloriously, as you will see by what the King of Naples writes from this ship to his Minister in London, owing the recovery of his kingdom to the King's fleet, and Lord Nelson and me." (Aug. 4, id.) Hamilton states the number of persons in prison at Naples on Sept. 12 to be above eight thousand.

[74]

Castlereagh, iv.; Records: Austria, 56. Lord Minto had just succeeded Sir Morton Eden as ambassador. The English Government was willing to grant the House of Hapsburg almost anything for the sake "of strengthening that barrier which the military means and resources of Vienna can alone oppose against the future enterprises of France." Grenville to Minto, May 13, 1800. Though they felt some regard for the rights of the King of Piedmont, Pitt and Grenville were just as ready to hand over the Republic of Genoa to the Hapsburgs as Bonaparte had been to hand over Venice; in fact, they looked forward to the destruction of the Genoese State with avowed pleasure, because it easily fell under the influence of France. Their principal anxiety was that if Austria "should retain Venice and Genoa and possibly acquire Leghorn," it should grant England an advantageous commercial treaty. Grenville to Minto, Feb. 8, 1800; Castlereagh, v. 3-11.

[75]

Lord Mulgrave to Grenville, Sept. 12, 1799; Records: Army of Switzerland, vol. 80. "Suvaroff opened himself to me in the most unreserved manner. He began by stating that he had been called at a very advanced period of life from his retirement, where his ample fortune and honours placed him beyond the allurement of any motives of interest. Attachment to his sovereign and zeal for his God inspired him with the hope and the expectation of conquests. He now found himself under very different circumstances. He found himself surrounded by the parasites or spies of Thugut, men at his devotion, creatures of his power: an army bigoted to a defensive system, afraid even to pursue their successes when that system had permitted them to obtain any; he had to encounter the further check of a Government at Vienna averse to enterprise, etc."

[76]

Miliutin, 2, 20, 3, 186; Minto, Aug. 10, 1799; Records: Austria, vol. 56. "I had no sooner mentioned this topic (Piedmont) than I perceived I had touched a very delicate point. M. de Thugut's manner changed instantly from that of coolness and civility to a great show of warmth attended with some sharpness. He became immediately loud and animated, and expressed chagrin at the invitation sent to the King of Sardinia.... He considers the conquest of Piedmont as one made by Austria of an enemy's country. He denies that the King of Sardinia can be considered as an ally or as a friend, or even as a neuter; and, besides imputing a thousand instances of ill-faith to that Court, relies on the actual alliance made by it with the French Republic by which the King of Sardinia had appropriated to himself part of the Emperor's dominions in Lombardy, an offence which, I perceive, will not be easily forgotten.... I mention these circumstances to show the degree of passion which the Court of Vienna mixes with this discussion." Minto answered Thugut's invective with the odd remark "that perhaps in the present extraordinary period the most rational object of this war was to restore the integrity of the moral principle both in civil and political life, and that this principle of justice should take the lead in his mind of those considerations of temporary convenience which in ordinary times might not have escaped his notice." Thugut then said "that the Emperor of Russia had desisted from his measure of the King of Sardinia's immediate recall, leaving the time of that return to the Emperor." On the margin of the despatch, against this sentence, is written in pencil, in Lord Grenville's handwriting, "I am persuaded this is not true."

[77]

Miliutin, 3, 117. And so almost verbatim in a conversation described in Eden's despatch, Aug. 31 Records: Austria, vol. 55. "M. de Thugut's answer was evidently dictated by a suspicion rankling in his mind that the Netherlands might be made a means of aggrandisement for Prussia. His jealousy and aversion to that Power are at this moment more inveterate than I have before seen them. It is probable that he may have some idea of establishing there the Great Duke of Tuscany."

[78]

Thugut's territorial policy did actually make him propose to abolish the Papacy not only as a temporal Power, but as a religious institution. "Baron Thugut argued strongly on the possibility of doing without a Pope, and of each sovereign taking on himself the function of head of the National Church, as in England. I said that as a Protestant, I could not be supposed to think the authority of the Bishop of Rome necessary; but that in the present state of religious opinion, and considering the only alternative in those matters, viz. the subsistence of the Roman Catholic faith or the extinction of Christianity itself, I preferred, though a Protestant, the Pope to the Goddess of Reason. However, the mind of Baron Thugut is not open to any reasoning of a general nature when it is put in competition with conquest or acquisition of territory." Minto to Grenville, Oct. 22, 1799; Records: Austria, vol. 57. The suspicions of Austria current at the Neapolitan Court are curiously shown in the Nelson Correspondence. Nelson writes to Minto (Aug. 20) at Vienna: "For the sake of the civilised world, let us work together, and as the best act of our lives manage to hang Thugut ... As you are with Thugut, your penetrating mind will discover the villain in all his actions.... That Thugut is caballing.... Pray keep an eye upon the rascal, and you will soon find what I say is true. Let us hang these three miscreants, and all will go smooth." Suvaroff was not more complimentary. "How can that desk-worm, that night-owl, direct an army from his dusky nest, even if he had the sword of Scanderbeg?" (Sept. 3.)

[79]

Miliutin, iii. 37; Bentinck, Aug. 16, from the battle-field; Records: Italian States, vol. 58. His letter ends "I must apologise to your Lordship for the appearance of this despatch" (it is on thin Italian paper and almost illegible): "we" (i.e., Suvaroff's staff) "have had the misfortune to have had our baggage plundered by the Cossacks."

[80]

Every capable soldier saw the ruinous mischief of the Archduke's withdrawal. "Not only are all prospects of our making any progress in Switzerland at an end, but the chance of maintaining the position now occupied is extremely precarious. The jealousy and mistrust that exists between the Austrians and Russians is inconceivable. I shall not pretend to offer an opinion on what might be the most advantageous arrangement for the army of Switzerland, but it is certain that none can be so bad as that which at present exists." Colonel Crauford, English military envoy, Sept. 5, 1799; Records: Army of Switzerland, vol. 79. The subsequent Operations of Korsakoff are described in despatches of Colonel Ramsay and Lord Mulgrave, id. vol. 80, 81, Conversations with the Archduke Charles in those of Mr. Wickham, id. vol. 77.

[81]

The despatches of Colonel Clinton, English attaché with Suvaroff, are in singular contrast to the highly-coloured accounts of this retreat common in histories. Of the most critical part he only says: "On the 6th the army passed the Panix mountain, which the snow that had fallen during the last week had rendered dangerous, and several horses and mules were lost on the march." He expresses the poorest opinion of Suvaroff and his officers: "The Marshal is entirely worn out and incapable of any exertion: he will not suffer the subject of the indiscipline of his army to be mentioned to him. He is popular with his army because he puts no check whatever in its licentiousness. His honesty is now his only remaining good quality." Records: Army of Switzerland, vol. 80. The elaborate plan for Suvaroff's and Korsakoff's combined movements, made as if Switzerland had been an open country and Massena's army a flock of sheep, was constructed by the Austrian colonel Weyrother, the same person who subsequently planned the battle of Austerlitz. On learning the plan from Suvaroff, Lord Mulgrave, who was no great genius, wrote to London demonstrating its certain failure, and predicting almost exactly the events that took place.

[82]

Miot de Melito, ch. ix. Lucien Bonaparte, Révolution de Brumaire, p. 31.

[83]

Law of Feb. 17, 1800 (28 Pluviöse, viii.).

[84]

M. Thiers, Feb. 21, 1872.

[85]

Parl. Hist, xxxiv. 1198. Thugut, Briefe ii. 445.

[86]

Memorial du Dépôt de la Guerre, 1826, iv. 268. Bentinck's despatch, June 16; Records: Italian States, vol. 59.

[87]

Thugut, Briefe ii. 227, 281, 393; Minto's despatch, Sept. 24, 1800; Records: Austria, vol. 60. "The Emperor was in the act of receiving a considerable subsidy for a vigorous prosecution of the war at the very moment when he was clandestinely and in person making the most abject submission to the common enemy. Baron Thugut was all yesterday under the greatest uneasiness concerning the event which he had reason to apprehend, but which was not yet certain. He still retained, however, a slight hope, from the apparent impossibility of anyone's committing such an act of infamy and folly. I never saw him or any other man so affected as he was when he communicated this transaction to me to-day. I said that these fortresses being demanded as pledges of sincerity, the Emperor should have given on the same principle the arms and ammunition of the army. Baron Thugut added that after giving up the soldiers' muskets, the clothes would be required off their backs, and that if the Emperor took pains to acquaint the world that he would not defend his crown, there would not be wanting those who would take it from his head, and perhaps his head with it. He became so strongly affected that, in laying hold of my hand to express the strong concern he felt at the notion of having committed me and abused the confidence I had reposed in his counsels, he burst into tears and literally wept. I mention these details because they confirm the assurance that every part of these feeble measures has either been adopted against his opinion or executed surreptitiously and contrary to the directions he had given." After the final collapse of Austria, Minto writes of Thugut: "He never for a moment lost his presence of mind or his courage, nor ever bent to weak and unbecoming counsels. And perhaps this can be said of him alone in this whole empire." Jan. 3, 1801, id.

[88]

Martens, vii. 296.

[89]

Koch und Schoell, Histoire des Traités, vi. 6. Nelson Despatches, iv. 299.

[90]

De Clercq, Traités de la France i. 484.

[91]

Parl. Hist., Nov. 3, 1801.

[92]

Gagern, Mein Antheil, i. 119. He protests that he never carried the dog. The waltz was introduced about this time at Paris by Frenchmen returning from Germany, which gave occasion to the mot that the French had annexed even the national dance of the Germans.

[93]

Perthes, Politische Zustände, i. 311.

[94]

Koch und Schoell, vi. 247. Beer, Zehn Jahre Oesterreichischer Politik, p. 35 Häusser, ii. 398.

[95]

Perthes, Politische Zustände, ii. 402, seq.

[96]

Friedrich, Geschichte des Vatikanischen Konzils, i. 27, 174.

[97]

Pertz, Leben Stein, i. 257. Seeley's Stein, i. 125.

[98]

The first-hand account of the formation of the Code Napoleon, with the Procès Verbal of the Council of State and the principal reports, speeches, etc., made in the Tribunate and the Legislative Bodies, is to be found in the work of Baron Locré, "La Legislation de la France," published at Paris in 1827. Locré was Secretary of the Council of State under the Consulate and the Empire, and possessed a quantity of records which had not been published before 1827. The Procès Verbal, though perhaps not always faithful, contains the only record of Napoleon's own share in the discussions of the Council of State.

[99]

The statement, so often repeated, that the Convention prohibited Christian worship, or "abolished Christianity," in France, is a fiction. Throughout the Reign of Terror the Convention maintained the State Church as established by the Constituent Assembly in 1791. Though the salaries of the clergy fell into arrear, the Convention rejected a proposal to cease paying them. The non-juring priests were condemned by the Convention to transportation, and were liable to be put to death if they returned to France. But where churches were profaned, or constitutional priests molested, it was the work of local bodies or of individual Conventionalists on mission, not of the law. The Commune of Paris shut up most, but not all, of the churches in Paris. Other local bodies did the same. After the Reign of Terror ended, the Convention adopted the proposal which it had rejected before, and abolished the State salary of the clergy (Sept. 20th, 1794). This merely placed all sects on a level. But local fanatics were still busy against religion; and the Convention accordingly had to pass a law (Feb. 23, 1795), forbidding all interference with Christian services. This law required that worship should not be held in a distinctive building (i.e. church), nor in the open air. Very soon afterwards the Convention (May 23) permitted the churches to be used for worship. The laws against non-juring priests were not now enforced, and a number of churches in Paris were actually given up to non-juring priests. The Directory was inclined to renew the persecution of this class in 1796, but the Assemblies would not permit it; and in July, 1797, the Council of Five Hundred passed a motion totally abolishing the legal penalties of non-jurors. This was immediately followed by the coup d'état of Fructidor.

[100]

Grégoire, Mémoires, ii. 87. Annales de la Religion, x. 441; Pressensé, L'Eglise et la Révolution, p. 359.

[101]

Papers presented to Parliament, 1802-3, p. 95.

[102]

"The King and his Ministers are in the greatest distress and embarrassment. The latter do not hesitate to avow it, and the King has for the last week shown such evident symptoms of dejection that the least observant could not but remark it. He has expressed himself most feelingly upon the unfortunate predicament in which he finds himself. He would welcome the hand that should assist him and the voice that should give him courage to extricate himself."-F. Jackson's despatch from Berlin, May 16, 1803; Records; Prussia, vol. 189.

[103]

Häusser ii. 472. There are interesting accounts of Lombard and the other leading persons of Berlin in F. Jackson's despatches of this date. The charge of gross personal immorality made against Lombard is brought against almost every German public man of the time in the writings of opponents. History and politics are, however, a bad tribunal of private character.

[104]

Fournier, Gentz und Cobenzl, p. 79. Beer, Zehn Jahre, p. 49. The despatches of Sir J. Warren of this date from St. Petersburg (Records: Russia, vol. 175) are full of plans for meeting an expected invasion of the Morea and the possible liberation of the Greeks by Bonaparte. They give the impression that Eastern affairs were really the dominant interest with Alexander in his breach with France.

[105]

Miot de Melito, i. 16. Savary, ii. 32.

[106]

A protest handed in at Vienna by Louis XVIII. against Napoleon's title was burnt in the presence of the French ambassador. The Austrian title was assumed on August 10, but the publication was delayed a day on account of the sad memories of August 10, 1792. Fournier, p. 102. Beer, p. 60.

[107]

Papers presented to Parliament, 28th January, 1806, and 5th May, 1815.

[108]

Hardenberg, ii. 50: corrected in the articles on Hardenberg and Haugwitz in the Deutsche Allgemeine Biographie.

[109]

Hardenberg, v. 167. Hardenberg was meanwhile representing himself to the British and Russian envoys as the partisan of the Allies. "He declared that he saw it was become impossible for this country to remain neutral, and that he should unequivocally make known his sentiments to that effect to the King. He added that if the decision depended upon himself, Russia need entertain no apprehension as to the part he should take."-Jackson, Sept. 3, 1805; Records: Prussia, vol. 194.

[110]

Gentz, Schriften, iii. 60, Beer, 132, 141. Fournier, 104. Springer, i. 64.

[111]

Rustow, Krieg von, 1805, p. 55.

[112]

Nelson Despatches, vi. 457.

[113]

"The reports from General Mack are of the most satisfactory nature, and the apprehensions which were at one time entertained from the immense force which Bonaparte is bringing into Germany gradually decrease."-Sir A. Paget's Despatch from Vienna, Sept, 18; Records: Austria, vol. 75.

[114]

Rustow, p. 154. Schönhals, Krieg von, 1805, p. 33. Paget's despatch, Oct. 25; Records: Austria, vol. 75. "The jealousy and misunderstanding among the generals had reached such a pitch that no communication took place between Ferdinand and Mack but in writing. Mack openly attributed his calamities to the ill-will and opposition of the Archduke and the rest of the generals. The Archduke accuses Mack of ignorance, of madness, of cowardice, and of treachery. The consternation which prevails here (Vienna) is at the highest pitch. The pains which are taken to keep the public in the dark naturally increase the alarm. Not a single newspaper has been delivered for several days past except the wretched Vienna. Gazette. The Emperor is living at a miserable country-house, in order, as people say, that he may effect his escape. Every bark on the Danube has been put in requisition by the Government. The greatest apprehensions prevail on account of the Russians, of whose excesses loud complaints are made. Their arrival here is as much dreaded as that of the French. Cobenzl and Collenbach are in such a state of mind as to render them totally unfit for all business." Cobenzl was nevertheless still able to keep up his jocular style in asking the ambassador for the English subsidies:-"Vous êtes malade, je le suis aussi un peu, mais ce qui est encore plus malade que nous deux ce sont nos finances: ainsi pour l'amour de Dieu dépêchez vous de nous donner vos deux cent mille livres sterlings. Je vous embrasse de tout mon coeur,"-Cobenzl to Paget, enclosed in id.

[115]

Hardenberg, ii. 268. Jackson, Oct. 7. Records: Prussia, vol. 195. "The intelligence was received yesterday at Potsdam, while M. de Hardenberg was with the King of Prussia. His Prussian Majesty was very violently affected by it, and in the first moment of anger ordered M. de Hardenberg to return to Berlin and immediately to dismiss the French ambassador. After a little reflection, however, he said that that measure should be postponed."

[116]

Rapp, Mémoires, p. 58. Beer, p. 188.

[117]

"The scarcity of provisions had been very great indeed. Much discouragement had arisen in consequence, and a considerable degree of insubordination, which, though less easy to produce in a Russian army than in any other, is, when it does make its appearance, most prejudicial, was beginning to manifest itself in various ways. The bread waggons were pillaged on their way to the camp, and it became very difficult to repress the excesses of the troops."-Report of General Ramsay, Dec. 10; Records: Austria, vol. 78.

[118]

Hardenberg, ii. 345, Haugwitz had just become joint Foreign Minister with Hardenberg.

[119]

Haugwitz' justification of himself, with Hardenberg's comments upon it, is to be seen in Hardenberg, v. 220. But see also, for Hardenberg's own bad faith, id. i. 551.

[120]

Lord Harrowby's despatch from Berlin, Dec. 7; Records: Prussia, vol. 196. The news of Austerlitz reached Berlin on the night of Dec. 7. Next day Lord Harrowby called on Hardenberg. "He told me that in a council of war held since the arrival of the first accounts of the disaster, it had been decided to order a part of the Prussian army to march into Bohemia. These events, he said, need not interrupt our negotiations." Then, on the 12th came the news of the armistice: Harrowby saw Hardenberg that evening. "I was struck with something like irritation in his manner, with a sort of reference to the orders of the King, and with an expression which dropped from him that circumstances might possibly arise in which Prussia could look only to her own defence and security. I attributed this in a great degree to the agitation of the moment, and I should have pushed the question to a point if the entrance of Count Metternich and M. d'Alopeus had not interrupted me.... Baron Hardenberg assured us that the military movements of the Prussian army were proceeding without a moment's loss of time." On the 25th Haugwitz arrived with his treaty. Hardenberg then feigned illness. "Baron Hardenberg was too ill to see me, or, as far as I could learn, any other person; and it has been impossible for me to discover what intelligence is brought by Count Haugwitz."

[121]

Lefebvre, Histoire des Cabinets, ii. 217.

[122]

Martens, viii. 388; viii. 479. Beer, p. 232.

[123]

Correspondence de Napoleon, xii. 253.

[124]

The story of Pitt's "Austerlitz look" preceding his death is so impressive and so well known that I cannot resist giving the real facts about the reception of the news of Austerlitz in England. There were four Englishmen who were expected to witness the battle, Sir A. Paget, ambassador at Vienna, Lord L. Gower, ambassador with the Czar, Lord Harrington and General Ramsay, military envoys. Of these, Lord Harrington had left England too late to reach the armies; Sir A. Paget sat writing despatches at Olmütz without hearing the firing, and on going out after the post left, was astonished to fall in with the retreating army; Gower was too far in the rear; and General Ramsay unfortunately went off on that very day to get some new passes. In consequence no Englishman witnessed the awful destruction that took place; and Paget's despatch, the first that reached England, quite misrepresented the battle, treating the defeat as not a decisive one. Pitt actually thought at first that the effect of the battle was favourable to his policy, and likely to encourage Prussia in its determination to fight. So late as December 20th the following instructions were sent to Harrowby at Berlin: "Even supposing the advantage of the day to have been decidedly with Bonaparte, it must have been obtained with a loss which cannot have left his force in a condition to contend with the army of Prussia and at the same time to make head against the Allies. If on the other hand it should appear that the advantage has been with the Allies, there is every reason to hope that Prussia will come forward with vigour to decide the contest." Records: Prussia, vol. 196. It was the surrender of Ulm which really gave Pitt the shock attributed to Austerlitz. The despatch then written-evidently from Pitt's dictation-exhorting the Emperor to do his duty, is the most impassioned and soul-stirring thing in the whole political correspondence of the time.

[125]

Hardenberg, ii. 463. Hardenberg, who, in spite of his weak and ambiguous conduct up to the end of 1805, felt bitterly the disgraceful position in which Prussia had placed itself, now withdrew from office. "I received this morning a message from Baron Hardenberg requesting me to call on him. He said that he could no longer remain in office consistently with his honour, and that he waited only for the return of Count Haugwitz to give up to him the management of his department. 'You know,' he said, 'my principles, and the efforts that I have made in favour of the good cause; judge then of the pain that I must experience when I am condemned to be accessory to this measure. You know, probably, that I was an advocate for the acquisition of Hanover, but I wished it upon terms honourable to both parties. I thought it a necessary bulwark to cover the Prussian dominions, and I thought that the House of Hanover might have been indemnified elsewhere. But now,' he added, 'j'abhorre les moyens infames par lesquels nous faisons cette acquisition. Nous pourrions rester les amis de Bonaparte sans être ses esclaves.' He apologised for this language, and said I must not consider it as coming from a Prussian Minister, but from a man who unbosomed himself to his friend.... I have only omitted the distressing picture of M. de Hardenberg's agitation during this conversation. He bewailed the fate of Prussia, and complained of the hardships he had undergone for the last three months, and of the want of firmness and resolution in his Prussian Majesty. He several times expressed the hope that his Majesty's Government and that of Russia would make some allowances for the situation of this country. They had the means, he said, to do it an infinity of mischief. The British navy might destroy the Prussian commerce, and a Russian army might conquer some of her eastern provinces; but Bonaparte would be the only gainer, as thereby Prussia would be thrown completely into his arms."-F. Jackson's despatch from Berlin, March 27, 1806; Records: Prussia, vol. 197.

[126]

On the British envoy demanding his passports, Haugwitz entered into a long defence of his conduct, alleging grounds of necessity. Mr. Jackson said that there could be no accommodation with England till the note excluding British vessels was reversed. "M. de Haugwitz immediately rejoined, 'I was much surprised when I found that that note had been delivered to you.' 'How,' I said, 'can you be surprised who was the author of the measures that give rise to it?' The only answer I received was, 'Ah! ne dites pas cela.' He observed that it would be worth considering whether our refusal to acquiesce in the present state of things might not bring about one still more disastrous. I smiled, and asked if I was to understand that a Prussian army would take a part in the threatened invasion of England. He replied that he did not now mean to insinuate any such thing, but that it might be impossible to answer for events."-Jackson's Despatch, April 25. id.

[127]

Papers presented to Parliament, 1806, p. 63.

[128]

"An order has been issued to the officers of the garrison of Berlin to abstain, under severe penalties, from speaking of the state of public affairs. This order was given in consequence of the very general and loud expressions of dissatisfaction which issued from all classes of people, but particularly from the military, at the recent conduct of the Government; for it has been in contemplation to publish an edict prohibiting the public at large from discussing questions of state policy. The experience of a very few days must convince the authors of this measure of the reverse of their expectation, the satires and sarcasms upon their conduct having become more universal than before."-Jackson's Despatch, March 22, id. "On Thursday night the windows of Count Haugwitz' house were completely demolished by some unknown person. As carbine bullets were chiefly made use of for the purpose, it is suspected to have been done by some of the garrison. The same thing had happened some nights before, but the Count took no notice of it. Now a party of the police patrol the street"-Id., April 27.

[129]

Pertz, i. 331. Seeley, i. 271.

[130]

Hopfner, Der Krieg von 1806, i. 48.

[131]

A list of all Prussian officers in 1806 of and above the rank of major is given in Henckel von Donnersmarck, Erinnerungen, with their years of service. The average of a colonel's service is 42 years; of a major's, 35.

[132]

Müffling, Aus Meinem Leben, p. 15. Hopfner, i. 157. Correspondence de Napoleon, xiii. 150.

[133]

Hopfner, ii. 390. Hardenberg, iii. 230.

[134]

"Count Stein, the only man of real talents in the administration, has resigned or was dismissed. He is a considerable man, of great energy, character, and superiority of mind, who possessed the public esteem in a high degree, and, I have no doubt, deserved it.... During the negotiation for an armistice, the expenses of Bonaparte's table and household at Berlin were defrayed by the King of Prussia. Since that period one of the Ministers called upon Stein, who was the chief of the finances, to pay 300,000 crowns on the same account. Stein refused with strong expressions of indignation. The King spoke to him: he remonstrated with his Majesty in the most forcible terms, descanted on the wretched humiliation of such mean conduct, and said that he never could pay money on such an account unless he had the order in writing from his Majesty. This order was given a few days after the conversation."-Hutchinson's Despatch, Jan. 1, 1807; Records: Prussia, vol. 200.

[135]

Corr. Nap. xiii. 555.

[136]

"It is still doubtful who commands, and whether Kamensky has or has not given up the command. I wrote to him on the first moment of my arrival, but have received no answer from him. On the 23rd, the day of the first attack, he took off his coat and waistcoat, put all his stars and ribbons over his shirt, and ran about the streets of Pultusk encouraging the soldiers, over whom he is said to have great influence."-Lord Hutchinson's Despatch, Jan. 1, 1807; Records: Prussia, vol. 200.

[137]

Hutchinson's letter, in Adair, Mission to Vienna, p. 373.

[138]

For the Whig foreign policy, see Adair, p. 11-13. Its principle was to relinquish the attempt to raise coalitions of half-hearted Governments against France by means of British subsidies, but to give help to States which of their own free will entered into war with Napoleon.

[139]

The battle of Friedland is described in Lord Hutchinson's despatch (Records: Prussia, vol. 200-in which volume are also Colonel Sonntag's reports, containing curious details about the Russians, and some personal matter about Napoleon in a letter from an inhabitant of Eylau; also Gneisenau's appeal to Mr. Canning from Colberg).

[140]

Bignon, vi. 342.

[141]

Papers presented to Parliament, 1808, p. 106. The intelligence reached Canning on the 21st of July. Canning's despatch to Brook Taylor, July 22; Records: Denmark, vol. 196. It has never been known who sent the information, but it must have been some one very near the Czar, for it purported to give the very words used by Napoleon in his interview with Alexander on the raft. It is clear, from Canning's despatch of July 22, that this conversation and nothing else had up till then been reported. The informant was probably one of the authors of the English alliance of 1805.

[142]

Napoleon to Talleyrand, July 31, 1807. He instructs Talleyrand to enter into certain negotiations with the Danish Minister, which would be meaningless if the Crown Prince had already promised to hand over the fleet. The original English documents, in Records: Denmark, vols. 196, 197, really show that Canning never considered that he had any proof of the intentions of Denmark, and that he justified his action only by the inability of Denmark to resist Napoleon's demands.

[143]

Cevallos, p. 73.

[144]

Pertz, ii. 23. Seeley, i. 430.

[145]

Cevallos, p. 13. Baumgarten, Geschichte Spaniens, i. 131.

[146]

Escoiquiz, Exposé, p. 57, 107.

[147]

Miot de Melito, ii. ch. 7. Murat was made King of Naples.

[148]

Baumgarten, i. 242.

[149]

Wellington Despatches, iii. 135.

[150]

Häusser, iii. 133. Seeley, i. 480.

[151]

For the striking part played at Erfurt by Talleyrand in opposition to Napoleon see Metternich's paper of December 4, in Beer, p. 516. It seems that Napoleon wished to involve the Czar in active measures against Austria, but was thwarted by Talleyrand.

[152]

Baumgarten i. 311.

[153]

Napier, ii. 17.

[154]

Metternich, ii. 147.

[155]

Gentz, Tagebücher, i. 60.

[156]

Steffens, vi. 153. Mémoires du Roi Jérome, iii. 340.

[157]

Beer, p. 370. Häusser, iii. 278.

[158]

Correspondance de Napoleon, xviii. 459, 472. Gentz, Tagebücher, i. 120, Pelet, Mémoires sur la Guerre de 1809, i. 223.

[159]

"Je n'ai jamais vu d'affaire aussi sanglante et aussi meurtrière." Report of the French General, Mémoires de Jérome, iv. 109.

[160]

See Arndt's Poem on Schill. Gedichte, i. 328 (ed. 1837).

[161]

Wellington Despatches, iv. 533. Sup. Desp. vi. 319, Napier, ii. 357.

[162]

Correspondance de Napoleon: Décision, Mai 23, 1806. Parliamentary Papers, 1810, p. 123, 697.

[163]

Beer, p. 445, Gentz, Tagebücher, i. 82, 118.

[164]

Correspondance de Napoleon, xix. 15, 265.

[165]

Corresp. de Napoleon, xxiii. 62, Décret, 9 Déc., 1811.

[166]

Mémoires de Jérome, v. 185.

[167]

Wellington Supplementary Despatches, vi. 41. Napier, iii. 250.

[168]

Baumgarten, Geschichte Spaniens, i. 405.

[169]

Hardenberg (Ranke), iv. 268. Häusser, iii. 535. Seeley, ii. 447.

[170]

Martens, Nouveau Recueil, i. 417. A copy, or the original, of this Treaty was captured by the Russians with other of Napoleon's papers during the retreat from Moscow, and a draft of it sent to London, which remains in the Records.

[171]

Metternich, i. 122.

[172]

Mémoires de Jérome, v. 247.

[173]

Bogdanowitsch, i. 72; Chambray, i. 186. Sir R. Wilson, Invasion of Russia, p. 15.

[174]

Droysen, Leben des Grafen York. I. 394.

[175]

Pertz, iii. 211, seq. Seeley, iii. 21.

[176]

Oncken, Oesterreich und Preussen, i. 28.

[177]

Martens, N.R., III. 234. British and Foreign State Papers (Hertslet), i. 49.

[178]

For Breslau in February, see Steffens, 7. 69.

[179]

For the difference between the old and the new officers, see Correspondance de Napoléon, 27 Avril, 1813.

[180]

Henckel von Donnersmarck, p. 187. The battles of Lützen, Bautzen, and Leipzig are described in the despatches of Lord Cathcart, who witnessed them in company with the Czar and King Frederick William. Records: Russia, 207, 209.

[181]

The account given in the following pages of Napoleon's motives and action during the armistice is based upon the following letters printed in the twenty-fifth volume of the Correspondence:-To Eugène, June 2, July 1, July 17, Aug. 4; to Maret, July 8; to Daru, July 17; to Berthier, July 23; to Davoust, July 24, Aug. 5; to Ney, Aug. 4, Aug. 12. The statement of Napoleon's error as to the strength of the Austrian force is confirmed by Metternich, i. 150.

[182]

Oncken, i. 80.

[183]

Napoleon to Eugène, 1st July, 1813.

[184]

Metternich, i. 163.

[185]

Häusser, iv. 59. One of the originals is contained in Lord Cathcart's despatch from Kalisch, March 28th, 1813. Records: Russia, Vol. 206.

[186]

Mémoires de Jérome, vi. 223.

[187]

"Your lordship has only to recollect the four days' continued fighting at Leipzig, followed by fourteen days' forced marches in the worst weather, in order to understand the reasons that made some repose absolutely necessary. The total loss of the Austrians alone, since the 10th of August, at the time of our arrival at Frankfort, was 80,000 men. We were entirely unprovided with heavy artillery, the nearest battery train not having advanced further than the frontiers of Bohemia." It was thought for a moment that the gates of Strasburg and Huningen might be opened by bribery, and the Austrian Government authorised the expenditure of a million florins for this purpose; in that case the march into Switzerland would have been abandoned. The bribing plan, however, broke down.-Lord Aberdeen's despatches, Nov. 24, Dec. 25, 1813. Records; Austria, 107.

[188]

Castlereagh's despatch from Langres, Jan. 29, 1814. Records: Continent, Vol. II.: "As far as I have hitherto felt myself called on to give an opinion, I have stated that the British Government did not decline treating with Bonaparte." "The Czar said he observed my view of the question was different from what he believed prevailed in England" (id. Feb. 16). See Southey's fine Ode on the Negotiations of 1814.

[189]

British and Foreign State Papers, I. 131.

[190]

Béranger, Biographie, ed. duod., p. 354.

[191]

British and Foreign State Papers, I. 151.

[192]

Lord W. Bentinck, who was with Murat, warned him against the probable consequences of his duplicity. Bentinck had, however, to be careful in his language, as the following shows. Murat having sent him a sword of honour, he wrote to the English Government, May 1, 1814: "It is a severe violence to my feelings to incur any degree of obligation to an individual whom I so entirely despise. But I feel it my duty not to betray any appearance of a spirit of animosity." To Murat he wrote on the same day: "The sword of a great captain is the most flattering present which a soldier can receive. It is with the highest gratitude that I accept the gift, Sire, which you have done me the honour to send."-Records: Sicily, Vol. 98.

[193]

Treaties of Teplitz, Sept. 9, 1813. In Bianchi, Storia Documentata della Diplomazia Europea, i. 334, there is a long protest addressed by Metternich to Castlereagh on May 26, 1814, referring with great minuteness to a number of clauses in a secret Treaty signed by all the Powers at Prague on July 27, 1813, and ratified at London on August 23, giving Austria the disposal of all Italy. This protest, which has been accepted as genuine in Reuchlin's Geschichte Italiens and elsewhere, is, with the alleged secret Treaty, a forgery. My grounds for this statement are as follows:-(1) There was no British envoy at Prague in July, 1813. (2) The private as well as the official letters of Castlereagh to Lord Cathcart of Sept. 13 and 18, and the instructions sent to Lord Aberdeen during August and September, prove that no joint Treaty existed up to that date, to which both England and Austria were parties. Records: Russia, 207, 209 A. Austria, 105. (3) Lord Aberdeen's reports of his negotiations with Metternich after this date conclusively prove that almost all Italian questions, including even the Austrian frontier, were treated as matters to be decided by the Allies in common. While Austria's right to a preponderance in upper Italy is admitted, the affairs of Rome and Naples are always treated as within the range of English policy.

[194]

The originals of the Genoese and Milanese petitions for independence are in Records: Sicily, Vol. 98. "The Genoese universally desire the restoration of their ancient Republic. They dread above all other arrangements their annexation to Piedmont, to the inhabitants of which there have always existed a peculiar aversion."-Bentinck's Despatch, April 27, 1814, id.

[195]

Castlereagh, x. 18.

[196]

As Arndt, Schriften, ii. 311, Fünf oder sechs Wunder Gottes.

[197]

Bernhardi, Geschichte Russlands, iii. 26.

[198]

Parl. Debates, xxvii. 634, 834.

[199]

Wellington, Sup. Des., x. 468; Castlereagh, x. 145. Records, Sicily, vol. 97. The future King Louis Philippe was sent by his father-in-law, Ferdinand, to England, to intrigue against Murat among the Sovereigns and Ministers then visiting England. His own curious account of his proceedings, with the secret sign for the Prince Regent, given him by Louis XVIII., who was afraid to write anything, is in id., vol. 99.

[200]

Wippermann, Kurhessen, pp. 9-13. In Hanover torture was restored, and occasionally practised till the end of 1818: also the punishment of death by breaking on the wheel. See Hodgskin, Travels, ii. 51, 69.

[201]

Baumgarten, Geschichte Spaniens, ii. 30, Wellington, D., xii. 27; S. D., ix. 17.

[202]

Wellington, S.D., ix. 328.

[203]

Compare his cringing letter to Pichegru in Manuscrit de Louis XVIII., p. 463, with his answer in 1797 to the Venetian Senate, in Thiers.

[204]

Moniteur, 5 Juin. British and Foreign State Papers, 1812-14, ii. 960.

[205]

The payment of £13 per annum in direct taxes. No one could be elected who did not pay £40 per annum in direct taxes,-so large a sum, that the Charta provided for the case of there not being fifty persons in a department eligible.

[206]

Fourteen out of Napoleon's twenty marshals and three-fifths of his Senators were called to the Chamber of Peers. The names of the excluded Senators will be found in Vaulabelle, ii. 100; but the reader must not take Vaulabelle's history for more than a collection of party-legends.

[207]

Ordonnance, in Moniteur, 26 Mai.

[208]

This poor creature owed his life, as he owes a shabby immortality, to the beautiful and courageous Grace Dalrymple Elliot. Journal of Mrs. G.D. Elliot, p. 79.

[209]

Carnot, Mémoire adressé au Roi, p. 20.

[210]

Wellington Despatches, xii. 248. On the ground of his ready-money dealings, it has been supposed that Wellington understood the French people. On the contrary, he often showed great want of insight, both in his acts and in his opinions, when the finer, and therefore more statesmanlike, sympathies were in question. Thus, in the delicate position of ambassador of a victorious Power and counsellor of a restored dynasty, he bitterly offended the French country-population by behaving like a grand seigneur before 1789, and hunting with a pack of hounds over their young corn. The matter was so serious that the Government of Louis XVIII. had to insist on Wellington stopping his hunts. (Talleyrand et Louis XVIII., p. 141.) This want of insight into popular feeling, necessarily resulted in some portentous blunders: e.g., all that Wellington could make of Napoleon's return from Elba was the following:-"He has acted upon false or no information, and the King will destroy him without difficulty and in a short time." Despatches, xii. 268.

[211]

A good English account of Vienna during the Congress will be found in "Travels in Hungary," by Dr. R. Bright, the eminent physician. His visit to Napoleon's son, then a child five years old, is described in a passage of singular beauty and pathos.

[212]

British and Foreign State Papers, 1814-15, p. 554, seq. Talleyrand et Louis XVIII., p. 13. Kluber, ix. 167. Seeley's Stein, iii. 248. Gentz, Dépêches Inédites, i. 107. Records: Continent, vol. 7, Oct. 2.

[213]

Bernhardi, i. 2; ii. 2, 661.

[214]

Wellington, S.D., ix. 335.

[215]

Wellington, S.D., ix. 340. Records: Continent, vol. 7, Oct. 9, 14.

[216]

Talleyrand, p. 74. Records, id., Oct. 24, 25.

[217]

Wellington, S.D., ix. 331. Talleyrand, pp. 59, 82, 85, 109. Klüber, vii. 21.

[218]

British and Foreign State Papers, 1814-15, p. 814. Klüber, vii. 61.

[219]

Talleyrand, p. 281.

[220]

B. and F. State Papers, 1814-15, ii. 1001.

[221]

Castlereagh did not contradict them. Records: Cont., vol. 10, Jan. 8.

[222]

British and Foreign State Papers, 1814-15, p. 642. Seeley's Stein, iii. 303. Talleyrand, Preface, p. 18.

[223]

Chiefly, but not altogether, because Napoleon's war with England had ruined the trade of the ports. See the report of Marshal Brune, in Daudet, La Terreur Blanche, p. 173, and the striking picture of Marseilles in Thiers, xviii. 340, drawn from his own early recollections. Bordeaux was Royalist for the same reason.

[224]

Berriat-St. Prix, Napoléon à Grenoble, p. 10.

[225]

Béranger, Biographie, p. 373, ed. duod.

[226]

See their contemptible addresses, as well as those of the army, in the Moniteur, from the 10th to the 19th of March to Louis XVIII., from the 27th onwards to Napoleon.

[227]

i.e., Because he had abused his liberty. On Ney's trial two courtiers alleged that Ney said he "would bring back Napoleon in an iron cage." Ney contradicted, them. Procès de Ney, ii. 105, 113.

[228]

British and Foreign State Papers, 1814-15, ii. 443.

[229]

Correspondance de Napoleon, xxviii. 171, 267, etc.

[230]

British and Foreign State Papers, 1814-15, ii. 275. Castlereagh, ix. 512, Wellington, S.D., ix. 244. Records: Continent, vol. 12, Feb. 26.

[231]

Correspondance de Napoléon, xxviii. 111, 127. The order forbidding him to come to Paris is wrongly dated April 19; probably for May 29. The English documents relating to Ferdinand's return to Naples, with the originals of many proclamations, etc., are in Records: Sicily, vols. 103, 104. They are interesting chiefly as showing the deep impression made on England by Ferdinand's cruelties in 1799.

[232]

Benjamin Constant, Mémoire sur les Cent Jours.

[233]

Lafayette, Mémoires, v. 414.

[234]

Miot de Melito, iii. 434.

[235]

Napoleon to Ney; Correspondance, xxviii. 334.

[236]

"I have got an infamous army, very weak and ill-equipped, and a very inexperienced staff." (Despatches, xii. 358.) So, even after his victory, he writes:-"I really believe that, with the exception of my old Spanish infantry, I have got not only the worst troops but the worst-equipped army, with the worst staff that was ever brought together." (Despatches, xii. 509.)

[237]

Therefore he kept his forces more westwards, and further from Blücher, than if he had known Napoleon's actual plan. But the severance of the English from the sea required to be guarded against as much as a defeat of Blücher. The Duke never ceased to regard it as an open question whether Napoleon ought not to have thrown his whole force between Brussels and the sea. (Vide Memoir written in 1842 Wellington, S.D., ix. 530.)

[238]

Metternich, i., p. 155.

[239]

Wellington Despatches, xii. 649.

[240]

Wellington, S.D., xi. 24, 32. Maps of projected frontiers, Records: Cont., vol 23.

[241]

Despatches, xii. 596. Seeley's Stein, iii. 332.

[242]

B. and F. State Papers, 1815-16, iii. 211. The second article is the most characteristic:-"Les trois Princes ... confessant que la nation Chrétienne dont eux et leurs peuples font partie n'a réellement d'autre Souverain que celui à qui seul appartient en propriété la puissance ... c'est-à-dire Dieu notre Divin Sauveur Jésus Christ, le Verbe du Très Haut, la parole de vie: leurs Majestés recommandent ... à leurs peuples ... de se fortifier chaque jour davantage dans les principes et l'exercice des devoirs que le Divin Sauveur a enseignés aux hommes."

[243]

Wellington, S.D., xi. 175. The account which Castlereagh gives of the Czar's longing for universal peace appears to refute the theory that Alexander had some idea of an attack upon Turkey in thus uniting Christendom. According to Castlereagh, Metternich also thought that "it was quite clear that the Czar's mind was affected," but for the singular reason that "peace and goodwill engrossed all his thoughts, and that he had found him of late friendly and reasonable on all points" (Id.) There was, however, a strong popular impression at this time that Alexander was on the point of invading Turkey. (Gentz, D.I., i. 197.)

[244]

B. and F. State Papers, 1815-16, iii. 273. Records; Continent, vol. 30.

[245]

Klüber, ii. 598.

[246]

Klüber, vi. 12. It covers, with its appendices, 205 pages.

[247]

In the first draft of the secret clauses of the Treaty of June 14, 1800, between England and Austria (see p. 150), Austria was to have had Genoa. But the fear arising that Russia would not permit Austria's extension to the Mediterranean, an alteration was made, whereby Austria was promised half of Piedmont, Genoa to go to the King of Sardinia in compensation.

[248]

Pertz, Leben Steins, iv 524.

[249]

Talleyrand, p. 277.

[250]

B. and F. State Papers, 1815-16, p. 928.

[251]

Bernhardi, iii. 2, 10, 666.

[252]

"We are now inundated with Russian agents of various descriptions, some public and some secret, but all holding the same language, all preaching 'Constitution and liberal principles,' and all endeavouring to direct the eyes of the independents towards the North.... A copy of the instructions sent to the Russian Minister here has fallen into the hands of the Austrians." A'Court (Ambassador at Naples) to Castlereagh, Dec. 7, 1815, Records: Sicily, 104.

[253]

A profound reason has been ascribed to Metternich's conservatism by some of his English apologists in high place, namely the fear that if ideas of nationality should spring up, the non-German components of the Austrian monarchy, viz., Bohemia, Hungary, Croatia, etc., would break off and become independent States. But there is not a word in Metternich's writings which shows that this apprehension had at this time entered his mind. To generalise his Italian policy of 1815 into a great prophetic statesmanship, is to interpret the ideas of one age by the history of the next.

[254]

In Moravia. For the system of espionage, see the book called "Carte segrete della polizia Austriaca," consisting of police-reports which fell into the hands of the Italians at Milan in 1848.

[255]

Bianchi, Storia Documentata, i. 208. The substance of this secret clause was communicated to A'Court, the English Ambassador at Naples. "I had no hesitation in saying that anything which contributed to the good understanding now prevailing between Austria and Naples, could not but prove extremely satisfactory to the British Government." A'Court to Castlereagh, July 18, 1815. Records: Sicily, vol. 104.

[256]

Letters in Reuchlin, Geschichte Italiens, i. 71. The Holy Alliance was turned to better account by the Sardinian statesmen than by the Neapolitans. "Apres s'être allié," wrote the Sardinian Ambassador at St. Petersburg, "en Jesus-Christ notre Sauveur parole de vie, pourquoi et à quel propos s'allier en Metternich?"

[257]

See the passages from Grenville's letters quoted in pp. 125, 126 of this work.

[258]

Castlereagh, x. 18. "The danger is that the transition" (to liberty) "may be too sudden to ripen into anything likely to make the world better or happier.... I am sure it is better to retard than accelerate the operation of this most hazardous principle which is abroad."

[259]

B. and F. State Papers, 1816-17, p. 553. Metternich, iii. 80. Castlereagh had at first desired that the Constitution should be modified under the influence of the English Ambassador. Instructions to A'Court, March 14, 1814, marked "Most Secret"; Records: Sicily, vol. 99. A'Court himself detested the Constitution. "I conceive the Sicilian people to be totally and radically unfit to be entrusted with political power." July 23, 1814, id.

[260]

Castlereagh, x. 25.

[261]

"If his Majesty announces his determination to give effect to the main principles of a constitutional régime, it is possible that he may extinguish the existing arrangement with impunity, and re-establish one more consistent with the efficiency of the executive power, and which may restore the great landed proprietors and the clergy to a due share of authority." Castlereagh, id.

[262]

Daudet, La Terreur Blanche, p. 186. The loss of the troops was a hundred. The stories of wholesale massacres at Marseilles and other places are fictions.

[263]

See the Address, in Journal des Débats, 15 Octobre: "Nous oserons solliciter humblement la rétribution nécessaire," etc. For the general history of the Session, see Duvergier de Hauranne, iii. 257; Viel-Castal, iv. 139; Castlereagh's severe judgment of Artois. Records: Cont., 28, Sept. 21.

[264]

Journal des Débats, 29 October.

[265]

Wellington, S.D., xi. 95. This self-confident folly is repeated in many of Lord Liverpool's letters.

[266]

Procès du Maréchal Ney, i. 212.

[267]

Ney was not, however, a mere fighting general. The Military Studies published in English in 1833 from his manuscripts prove this. They abound in acute remarks, and his estimate of the quality of the German soldier, at a time when the Germans were habitually beaten and despised, is very striking. He urges that when French infantry fight in three ranks, the charge should be made after the two front ranks have fired, without waiting for the third to fire. "The German soldier, formed by the severest discipline, is cooler than any other. He would in the end obtain the advantage in this kind of firing if it lasted long." (P. 100.) Ney's parents appear to have been Würtemberg people who had settled in Alsace. The name was really Neu (New).

[268]

See the extracts from La Bourdonnaye's printed speech in Journal des Débats, 19 Novembre: "Pour arrêter leurs trames criminelles, il faut des fers, des bourreaux, des supplices. La mort, la mort seule peut effrayer leurs complices et mettre fin à leurs complots," etc. The journals abound with similar speeches.

[269]

General Mouton-Duvernet. Several were sentenced to death in their absence; some were acquitted on the singular plea that they had become subjects of the Empire of Elba, and so could not be guilty of treason to the King of France.

[270]

The sentence was commuted by the King to twelve years' imprisonment. General Chartran was actually shot. It is stated, though it appears not to be clear, that his prosecution began at the same late date. Duvergier de Hauranne, iii. 335.

[271]

The highest number admitted by the Government to have been imprisoned at any one time under the Law of Public Security was 319, in addition to 750 banished from their homes or placed under surveillance. No one has collected statistics of the imprisonments by legal sentence. The old story that there were 70,000 persons in prison is undoubtedly an absurd exaggeration; but the numbers given by the Government, even if true at any one moment, afford no clue to the whole number of imprisonments, for as fast as one person gets out of prison in France in a time of political excitement, another is put in. The writer speaks from personal experience, having been imprisoned in 1871. Any one who has seen how these affairs are conducted will know how ridiculous it would be to suppose that the central government has information of every case.

[272]

See, e.g., the Pétition aux Deux Chambres, 1816, at the beginning of P.L. Courier's works.

[273]

Journal des Débats, 19 Decembre, 1815.

[274]

Wellington, S.D., xi 309.

[275]

Despatch in Duvergier de Hauranne, iii. 441.

[276]

Pertz, Leben Steins, iv. 428.

[277]

Schmalz, Berichtigung, etc., p. 14.

[278]

Pertz, Leben Steins, v. 23.

[279]

A curious account of the festival remains, written by Kieser, one of the Professors who took part in it (Kieser, Das Wartburgfest, 1818). It is so silly that it is hard to believe it to have been written by a grown-up man. He says of the procession to the Wartburg, "There have indeed been processions that surpassed this in outward glory and show; but in inner significant value it cannot yield to any." But making allowance for the author's personal weakness of head, his book is a singular and instructive picture of the mental condition of "Young Germany" and its teachers at that time-a subject that caused such extravagant anxiety to Governments, and so seriously affected the course of political history. It requires some effort to get behind the ridiculous side of the students' Teutonism; but there were elements of reality there. Persons familiar with Wales will be struck by the resemblance, both in language and spirit, between the scenes of 1818 and the religious meetings or the Eisleddfodau of the Welsh, a resemblance not accidental, but resulting from similarity of conditions, viz., a real susceptibility to religious, patriotic, and literary ideas among a people unacquainted with public or practical life on a large scale. But the vigorous political action of the Welsh in 1880, when the landed interest throughout the Principality lost seats which it had held for centuries, surprised only those who had seen nothing but extravagance in the chapel and the field-meeting. Welsh ardour, hitherto in great part undirected, then had a practical effect because English organisation afforded it a model: German ardour in 1817 proved sterile because it had no such example at hand.

[280]

See the speech in Bernhardi, iii. 669.

[281]

Gentz, D.I., ii. 87, iii. 72.

[282]

Castlereagh, xii. 55, 62.

[283]

Wellington, S.D., xii. 835.

[284]

B. and F. State Papers, 1818-19, vi. 14.

[285]

Gentz, D.I., i. 400. Gentz, the confidant and adviser of Metternich, was secretary to the Conference at Aix-la-Chapelle. His account of it in this despatch is of the greatest value, bringing out in a way in which no official documents do the conservative and repressive tone of the Conference. The prevalent fear had been that Alexander would break with his old Allies and make a separate league with France and Spain. See also Castlereagh, xii. 47.

[286]

"I could write you a long letter about the honour which the Prussians pay to everything Austrian, our whole position, our measures, our language. Metternich has fairly enchanted them." Gentz, Nachlasse (Osten), i. 51.

[287]

Metternich, iii. 171.

[288]

See his remarks in Metternich, iii. 269: an oasis of sense in this desert of Commonplace.

[289]

Stourdza, Denkschrift, etc., p. 31. The French original is not in the British Museum.

[290]

The extracts from Sand's diaries, published in a little book in 1821 (Tagebücher, etc.), form a very interesting religious study. The last, written on Dec. 31, 1818, is as follows:-"I meet the last day of this year in an earnest festal spirit, knowing well that the Christmas which I have celebrated will be my last. If our strivings are to result in anything, if the cause of mankind is to succeed in our Fatherland, if all is not to be forgotten, all our enthusiasm spent in vain, the evildoer, the traitor, the corrupter of youth must die. Until I have executed this, I have no peace; and what can comfort me until I know that I have with upright will set my life at stake? O God, I pray only for the right clearness and courage of soul, that in that last supreme hour I may not be false to myself" (p. 174). The reference to the Greeks is in a letter in the English memoir, p. 40.

[291]

The papers of the poet Arndt were seized. Among them was a copy of certain short notes made by the King of Prussia, about 1808, on the uselessness of a levée en masse. One of these notes was as follows:-"As soon as a single clergyman is shot" (i.e. by the French) "the thing would come to an end." These words were published in the Prussian official paper as an indication that Arndt, worse than Sand, advocated murdering clergymen! Welcker, Urkunden, p. 89.

[292]

Metternich, iii. 217, 258.

[293]

Metternich, iii. 268.

[294]

The minutes of the Conference are in Welcker, Urkunden, p. 104, seq. See also Weech, Correspondenzen.

[295]

Protokolle der Bundesversammlung, 8, 266. Nauwerck, Thätigkeit, etc., 2, 287.

[296]

Ægidi, Der Schluss-Acte, ii. 362, 446.

[297]

Article 57. The intention being that no assembly in any German State might claim sovereign power as representing the people. If, for instance, the Bavarian Lower House had asserted that it represented the sovereignty of the people, and that the King was simply the first magistrate in the State, this would have been an offence against Federal law, and have entitled the Diet-i.e. Metternich-to armed interference. The German State-papers of this time teem with the constitutional distinction between a Representative Assembly (i.e. assembly representing popular sovereignty) and an Assembly of Estates (i.e., of particular orders with limited, definite rights, such as the granting of a tax). In technical language, the question at issue was the true interpretation of the phrase Landständische Verfassungen, used in the 13th article of the original Act of Federation.

[298]

See, in Welcker, Urkunden, p. 356, the celebrated paper called "Memorandum of a Prussian Statesman, 1822," which at the same time recommends a systematic underhand rivalry with Austria, in preparation for an ultimate breach. Few State-papers exhibit more candid and cynical cunning.

[299]

Ilse, Politische Verfolgungen, p. 31.

[300]

The comparison is the Germans' own, not mine. "'How savoury a thin roast veal is!' said one Hamburg beggar to another. 'Where did you eat it?' said his friend, admiringly. 'I never ate it at all, but I smelt it as I passed a great man's house while the dog was being fed.'" (Ilse, p. 57.)

[301]

The Commission at Mainz went on working until 1827. It seems to have begun to discover real revolutionary societies about 1824. There is a long list of persons remanded for trial in their several States, in Ilse, p. 595, with the verdicts and the sentences passed upon them, which vary from a few months' to nineteen years' imprisonment.

[302]

Metternich, iii. 168; and see Wellington, S.D., xii. 878.

[303]

Grégoire, Mémoires, i. 411. Had the Constitutional Church of France succeeded, Grégoire would have left a great name in religious history. Napoleon, by one of the most fatal acts of despotism, extinguished a society likely, from its democratic basis and its association with a great movement of reform, to become the most liberal and enlightened of all Churches, and left France to be long divided between Ultramontane dogma and a coarse kind of secularism. The life of Grégoire ought to be written in English. From the enormous number of improvements for which he laboured, his biography would give a characteristic picture of the finer side of the generation of 1789.

[304]

The late Count of Chambord, or Henry V., son of the Duke of Barry, was born some months after his father's death.

[305]

Castlereagh, xii. 162, 259. "The monster Radicalism still lives," Castlereagh sorrowfully admits to Metternich.

[306]

Metternich, iii. 369. "A man must be like me, born and brought up amid the storm of politics, to know what is the precise meaning of a shout of triumph like those which now burst from Burdett and Co. He may have read of it, but I have seen it with my eyes. I was living at the time of the Federation of 1789. I was fifteen, and already a man."

[307]

Baumgarten, Geschichte Spaniens, ii. 175.

[308]

See the note of Fernan Nuñez, in Wellington, S. D., xii. 582. "Les efforts unanimes de ces mêmes Puissances ont détruit le système dévastateur, d'où naquit la rébellion Américaine; mais il leur restait encore à le détruire dans l'Amérique Espagnole."

[309]

Wellington, S.D., xii. 807.

[310]

Jullian, Précis Historique, p. 78.

[311]

Historia de la vida de Fernando VII., ii. 158.

[312]

Carrascosa, Mémoires, p. 25; Colletta, ii. 155.

[313]

Carrascosa p. 44.

[314]

Gentz. D.I., ii. 108, 122. It was rather too much even for the Austrians. "La conduite de ce malheureux souverain n'a été, dès le commencement des troubles, qu'un tissu de faiblesse et de duplicité," etc. "Voilà l'allié que le ciel a mis entre nos mains, et dont nous avons à rétablir les intérêts!" Ferdinand was guilty of such monstrous perjuries and cruelties that the reader ought to be warned not to think of him as a saturnine and Machiavellian Italian. He was a son of the Bourbon Charles III. of Spain. His character was that of a jovial, rather stupid farmer, whom a freak of fortune had made a king from infancy. A sort of grotesque comic element runs through his life, and through every picture drawn by persons in actual intercourse with him. The following, from one of Bentinck's despatches of 1814 (when Ferdinand had just heard that Austria had promised to keep Murat in Naples), is very characteristic: "I found his Majesty very much afflicted and very much roused. He expressed his determination never to renounce the rights which God had given him.... He said he might be poor, but he would die honest, and his children should not have to reproach him for having given up their rights. He was the son of the honest Charles III. ... he was his unworthy offspring, but he would never disgrace his family.... On my going away he took me by the hand, and said he hoped I should esteem him as he did me, and begged me to take a Pheasant pye to a gentleman who had been his constant shooting companion." Records, Sicily, vol. 97. Ferdinand was the last sovereign who habitually kept a professional fool, or jester, in attendance upon him.

[315]

British and Foreign State Papers, vii. 361, 995.

[316]

Except in Sicily, where, however, the course of events had not the same publicity as on the mainland.

[317]

Verbatim from the Russian Note of April 18. B. and F. State Papers, vii. 943.

[318]

Parliamentary Debates, N.S., viii. 1136.

[319]

Gentz, D.I., ii. 70. "M. le Prince Metternich s'est rendu chez l'Empereur pour le mettre au fait de ces tristes circonstances. Depuis que je le connais, je ne l'ai jamais vu aussi frappé d'aucun événement qu'il l'était hier avant son départ."

[320]

Castlereagh, xii. 311.

[321]

Gentz, D.I., ii. 76. Metternich, iii. 395. "Our fire-engines were not full in July, otherwise we should have set to work immediately."

[322]

Gentz, ii. 85. Gentz was secretary at the Congress of Troppau, as he had been at Vienna and Aix-la-Chapelle. His letters exhibit the Austrian and absolutist view of all European politics with striking clearness. He speaks of the change in Richelieu's action as disagreeable but not fatal. "Ces pruderies politiques sont sans doute lâcheuses.... La Russie, l'Autriche, et la Prusse, heureusement libres encore dans leurs mouvements, et assez puissantes pour soutenir ce qu'elles arrêtent, pourraient adopter sans le concours de l'Angleterre et de la France un système tel que les besoins du moment le demandent." The description of the three despotisms as "happily free in their movements" is very characteristic of the time.

[323]

This is the system conveniently but incorrectly named Holy Alliance, from its supposed origination in he unmeaning Treaty of Holy Alliance in 1815. The reader will have seen that it took five years of reaction to create a definitive agreement among the monarchs to intervene against popular changes in other States, and that the principles of any operative league planned by Alexander in 1815 would have been largely different from those which he actually accepted in 1820. The Alexander who designed the Holy Alliance was the Alexander who had forced Louis XVIII. to grant the Charta.

[324]

Castlereagh, xii. 330.

[325]

Metternich, iii. 394. B. and F. State Papers, viii. 1160. Gentz, D.I., ii. 112. The best narrative of the Congress of Troppau is in Duvergier de Hauranne, vi. 93. The Life of Canning by his secretary, Stapleton, though it is a work of some authority on this period, is full of misstatements about Castlereagh. Stapleton says that Castlereagh took no notice of the Troppau circular of December 8 until it had been for more than a month in his possession, and suggests that he would never have protested at all but for the unexpected disclosure of the circular in a German newspaper. As a matter of fact, the first English protest against the Troppau doctrine, expressed in a memorandum, "très long, très positif, assez dur même, et assez tranchant dans son langage," was handed in to the Congress on December 16 or 19, along with a very unwelcome note to Metternich. There is some gossip of another of Canning's secretaries in Greville's Memoirs, i. 105, to the effect that Castlereagh's private despatches to Troppau differed in tone from his official ones, which were only written "to throw dust in the eyes of Parliament." It is sufficient to read the Austrian documents of the time, teeming as they do with vexation and disappointment at England's action, to see that this is a fiction.

[326]

Had Ferdinand's first proposals been accepted by the Neapolitan Parliament, France and England, it was thought, might have insisted on a compromise at Laibach. "Les Gouvernements de France et d'Angleterre auraient fortement insisté sur l'introduction d'un régime constitutionnel et représentatif, régime que la Cour de Vienne croit absolument incompatible avec la position des États de l'Italie, et avec la sûreté de ses propres États." Gentz, D.I., ii. 110.

[327]

Gentz, Nachlasse (P. Osten), i. 67. Lest the reader should take a prejudice against Capodistrias for his cunning, I ought to mention here that he was a man of austere disinterestedness in private life, and one of the few statesmen of the time who did not try to make money by politics. His ambition, which was very great, rose above all the meaner objects which tempt most men. The contrast between his personal goodness and his unscrupulousness in diplomacy will become more clear later on.

[328]

Colletta, ii. 230. Bianchi, Diplomazia, ii. 47.

[329]

Gualterio, Ultimi Rivolgimenti, iii. 46. Silvio Pellico, Le mie prigioni, ch. 57.

[330]

B. and F. State Papers, viii. 1203.

[331]

Baumgarten, ii. 325.

[332]

Wellington Despatches, N.S., i. 284.

[333]

Talleyrand et Louis XVIII., p. 333.

[334]

Wellington, i. 343.

[335]

Duvergier de Hauranne, vii. 140.

[336]

Canning denied that it was offered, but the despatches in Wellington prove it. These papers, supplemented by the narrative of Duvergier de Hauranne, drawn from the French documents which he specifies, are the authority for the history of the Congress. Canning's celebrated speech of April, 1823, is an effective ex parte composition rather than a historical summary. The reader who goes to the originals will be struck by the immense superiority of Wellington's statements over those of all the Continental statesmen at Verona, in point, in force, and in good sense, as well as in truthfulness. The Duke, nowhere appears to greater advantage.

[337]

Report of Angoulême, Duvergier d'Hauranne, vii. "Là où sont nos troupes, nous maintenons la paix avec beaucoup de peine; mais là où nous ne sommes pas, on massacre, on brûle, on pille, on vole. Les corps Espagnols, se disant royalistes, ne cherchent qu'à voler et à piller."

[338]

Decretos del Rey Fernando, vii. 35, 50, 75. This process, which was afterwards extended even to common soldiers, was called Purificacion. Committees were appointed to which all persons coming under the law had to send in detailed evidence of correct conduct in and since 1820, signed by some well-known royalists. But the committees also accepted any letters of denunciation that might be sent to them, and were bound by law to keep them secret, so that in practice the Purificacion became a vast system of anonymous persecution.

[339]

Historia de la vida de Fernando VII., 1842, iii. 152.

[340]

Decretos del Rey Fernando, vii. 45.

[341]

Decretos, vii. 154. The preamble to this law is perhaps the most astonishing of all Ferdinand's devout utterances. "My soul is confounded with the horrible spectacle of the sacrilegious crimes which impiety has dared to commit against the Supreme Maker of the universe. The ministers of Christ have been persecuted and sacrificed; the venerable successor of St. Peter has been outraged; the temples of the Lord have been profaned and destroyed; the Holy Gospel depreciated; in fine, the inestimable legacy which Jesus Christ gave in his last supper to secure our eternal felicity, the Sacred Host, has been trodden under foot. My soul shudders, and will not be able to return to tranquillity until, in union with my children, my faithful subjects, I offer to God holocausts of piety," etc. But for some specimens of Ferdinand's command of the vernacular, of a very different character, see Wellington, N.S., ii. 37.

[342]

Revolution d'Espagne, examen critique (Paris, 1836), p. 151, from the lists in the Gaceta de Madrid. The Gaceta for these years is wanting from the copy in the British Museum, and in the large collection in that library of historical and periodical literature relating to Spain I can find no first hand authorities for the judicial murders of these years. Nothing relating to the subject was permitted to be printed in Spain for many years afterwards The work cited in this note, though bearing a French title, and published at Paris in 1836, was in fact a Spanish book written in 1824. The critical inquiry which has substantiated many of the worst traditions of the French Reign of Terror from local records still remains to be undertaken for this period of Spanish history.

[343]

See e.g., Stapleton, Canning and his Times p. 378. Wellington often suggested the use of less peremptory language. Despatches, i. 134, 188. Metternich wrote as follows on hearing at Vienna of Castlereagh's death: "Castlereagh was the only man in his country who had gained any experience in foreign affairs. He had learned to understand me. He was devoted to me in heart and spirit, not only from personal inclination, but from conviction. I awaited him here as my second self." iii. 391. Metternich, however, was apt to exaggerate his influence over the English Minister. It was a great surprise to him that Castlereagh, after gaining decisive majorities in the House of Commons on domestic questions in 1820, in no wise changed the foreign policy expressed in the protest against the Declaration of Troppau.

[344]

Stapleton, Political Life of Canning, ii. 18.

[345]

Wellington, i. 188.

[346]

Parl Hist., 12th Dec., 1826.

[347]

Stapleton, Life of Canning, i. 134. Martineau, p. 144.

[348]

Gentz, Nachlasse (Osten), ii. 165.

[349]

About the year 1830 the theory was started by Fallmerayer, a Tyrolese writer, that the modern Greeks were the descendants of Slavonic invaders, with scarcely a drop of Greek blood in their veins. Fallmerayer was believed by some good scholars to have proved that the old Greek race had utterly perished. More recent inquiries have discredited both Fallmerayer and his authorities, and tend to establish the conclusion that, except in certain limited districts, the Greeks left were always numerous enough to absorb the foreign incomers. (Hopf, Griechenland; in Etsch and Gruber's Encyklopädie, vol. 85, p. 100.) The Albanian population of Greece in 1820 is reckoned at about one-sixth.

[350]

Maurer, Das Griechische Volk, i. 64.

[351]

The Greek songs illustrate the conversion of the Armatole into the Klepht in the age preceding the Greek revolution. Thus, in the fine ballad called "The Tomb of Demos," which Goethe has translated, the dying man says-

[Transcriber's Note: The following has been transliterated from the Greek]

Kai pherte ton pneumatikon na m' exomologaisae
na tun eipo ta krimata osa cho kamomena
trianta chroni armatolos, c'eicosi echo klephtaes.

"Bring the priest that he may shrive me; that I may tell him the sins that I have committed, thirty years an Armatole and twenty years a Klepht." -Fauriel, Chants Populaires, i. 56.

[352]

Finlay, Greece under Ottoman Domination, p. 284.

[353]

Kanitz, Donau-Bulgarien, i. 123.

[354]

Literally, Interpreter; the old theory of the Turks being that in their dealings with foreign nations they had only to receive petitions, which required to be translated into Turkish.

[355]

Zallonos, (Transliterated Greek) Pragmateia peri ton phanarioton, p. 71. Kagalnitchau, La Walachie, i. 371.

[356]

A French translation of the Autobiography of Koraes, along with his portrait, will be found in the Lettres Inédites de Coray, Paris, 1877. The vehicle of expression usually chosen by Koraes for addressing his countrymen was the Preface (written in modern Greek) to the edition of an ancient author. The second half of the Preface to the Politics of Aristotle, 1822, is a good specimen of his political spirit and manner. It was separately edited by the Swiss scholar, Orelh, with a translation, for the benefit of the German Philhellenes. Among the principal linguistic prefaces are those to Heliodorus 1804, and the Prodromos, or introduction, to the series of editions called Bibliotheca Græca, begun in 1805, and published at the expense of the brothers Zosimas of Odessa Most of the editions published by Koraes bear on their title page a statement of the patriotic purpose of the work, and indicate the persons who bore the expense. The edition of the Ethics, published immediately after the massacre of Chios, bears the affecting words 'At the expense of those who have so cruelly suffered in Chios.' The costly form of these editions, some of which contain fine engravings, seems somewhat inappropriate for works intended for national instruction. Koraes, however, was not in a hurry. He thought, at least towards the close of his life, that the Greeks ought to have gone through thirty years more of commercial and intellectual development before they drew the sword. They would in that case, he believed, have crushed Turkey by themselves and have prevented the Greek kingdom from becoming the sport of European diplomacy. Much miscellaneous information on Greek affairs before 1820 (rather from the Phanariot point of view) will be found, combined with literary history in the Cours de Littérature Grecque of Rhizos Neroulos, 1827. The more recent treatise of R Rhankabes on the same subject (also in French, Paris, 1877) exhibits what appears to be characteristic of the modern Greeks, the inability to distinguish between mere passable performances and really great work.

[357]

Zinkeisen, Geschichte des Osmanischen Reiches, v. 959.

[358]

Koraes, Mémoire sur l'état actual de la civilization de la Grèce: republished in the Lettres Inédites, p. 464. This memoir, read by Koraes to a learned society in Paris, in January, 1803, is one of the most luminous and interesting historical sketches ever penned.

[359]

(Greek text: Didaskalia Patrikæ), by, or professing to be by, Anthimos, Patriarch of Jerusalem, and printed "at the expense of the Holy Sepulchre," p. 13. This curious work, in which the Patriarch at last breaks out into doggrel, has found its way to the British Museum. It was answered by Koraes. For the effect of Rhegas' songs on the people, see Fauriel, ii. 18. Mr. Finlay seems to be mistaken in calling Anthimos' book an answer to the tract of Eugenios Bulgaris on religious toleration. That was written about thirty years before.

[360]

Leake, Travels in Northern Greece, ch, v. 36, 37.

[361]

Mendelssohn Bartholdy, Geschichte Griechenlands, i. 145, from the papers of Hypsilanti's brother. Otherwise in Prokesch-Osten, Abfall der Griechen, i. 13.

[362]

Cordon, Greek Revolution, i. 96.

[363]

B. and F, State Papers, viii. 1203.

[364]

Finlay, i. 187; Gordon, i. 203; K. Mendelssohn, Geschichte Griechenlands, i. 191; Prokesch-Osten, Abfall der Griechen, i. 20.

[365]

Metternich, iii. 622, 717; Prokewh-Ostett, i. 231, 303. B. and F. State Papers, viii. 1247.

[366]

Records, Continent, iii.

[367]

Castlereagh, viii. 16; Metternich, iii. 504.

[368]

Kolokotrones, (Transliterated Greek) Aiaegaesis Symbanton, p. 82; Tricoupis, (Transliterated Greek) Historia, i. 61, 92.

[369]

Gordon, i. 388; Finlay, i. 330; Mendelssohn, i. 269.

[370]

Gordon ii. 138. The news of this catastrophe reached Metternich at Ischl on July 30th. "Prince Metternich was taking an excursion, in which, unfortunately I could not accompany him. I at once sent Francis after him with this important letter, which he received at a spot where the name of the Capitan Pasha had probably never been heard before. The prince soon came back to me; and (pianissimo in order that the friends of Greece might not hear it) we congratulate one another on the event, which may very well prove le commencement de la fin for the Greek insurrection." (Gentz.)

[371]

Prokesch-Osten, i. 253, iv. 63. B. and F. State Papers, xii. 902. Stapleton, Canning, p. 496 Metternich, 127. Wellington, N.S. ii. 372-396.

[372]

Korff, Accession of Nicholas, p. 253; Herzen, Russische Verschwörung, p. 106; Mendelssohn, i. 396. Schnitzler, Histoire Intime, i. 195.

[373]

B. and F. State Papers, xiv. 630; Metternich, iv. 161, 212, 320, 372; Wellington, N.S., ii. 85, 148, 244; Gentz, D.I., iii. 315.

[374]

B. and F. State Papers, xiv. 632; xvii. 20; Wellington, N.S., iv. 57.

[375]

Parl. Deb., May 11, 1877. Nothing can be more misleading than to say that Canning never contemplated the possibility of armed action because a clause in the Treaty of 1827 made the formal stipulation that the contracting Powers would not "take part in the hostilities between the contending parties." How, except by armed force, could the Allies "prevent, in so far as might be in their power, all collision between the contending parties," which, in the very same clause, they undertook to do? And what was the meaning of the stipulation that they should "transmit instructions to their Admirals conformable to these provisions"? Wellington himself, before the battle of Navarino, condemned the Treaty of London on the very ground that it "specified means of compulsion which were neither more nor less than measures of war;" and he protested against the statement that the treaty arose directly out of the Protocol of St. Petersburg, which was his own work. Wellington, N.S., iv. 137, 221.

[376]

Bourchier's Codrington, ii. 62. Admiralty Despatches, Nov. 10, 1827, Parl. Deb., Feb. 14, 1828.

[377]

Rosen, Geschichte der Türkei, i. 57.

[378]

Moltke, Russisch-Turkische Feldzug, p. 226. Rosen, i. 67.

[379]

Viel-Castel, xx. 16. Russia was to have had the Danubian Provinces; Austria was to have had Bosnia and Servia; Prussia was to have had Saxony and Holland; the King of Holland was to have reigned at Constantinople.

[380]

Hertslet, Map of Europe by Treaty, ii. 813. Rosen, i. 108.

[381]

Wellington, N. S, iv. 297.

[382]

Mendelssohn, Graf Capodistrias, p. 64.

[383]

B. and F. State Papers, xvii. p. 132. Prokesch-Osten, v. 136.

[384]

Stockmar, i. 80; Mendelssohn; Capodistrias, p. 272. B. and F. State Papers, xvii. 453.

[385]

Viel-Castel, xix. 574. Duvergier de Hauranne, x. 85.

[386]

Procès des ex-Ministres, i. 189.

[387]

Lafayette, vi. 383. Marmont, viii. 238. Dupin, Révolution de Juillet, p. 7. Odilon Barrot, i. 105. Sarrans, Lafayette, i. 217. Berard, Révolution de 1830, p. 60. Hillebrand, Die Juli-Revolution, p. 87.

[388]

Juste, Révolution Belge, i. 85. Congrès National, i. 134.

[389]

Wellington, N.S. vii. 309. B. and F. State Papers, xviii. 761. Metternich, v. 44. Hillebrand, Geschichte Frankreichs, i. 171. Stockmar, i. 143. Bulwer's Palmerston, ii. 5. Hertslet, Map of Europe, iii. 81.

[390]

Smitt, Geschichte des Polnischen Aufstandes, i. 112. Spazier, Geschichte des Aufstandes, i. 177. Leiewel, Histoire de Pologne, i. 300.

[391]

Leroy-Beaulieu, Milutine, p. 199; L'Empire des Tsars, i. 380. Leiewel, Considérations, p. 317.

[392]

Bianchi, Ducati Estensi, i. 54. La Farina, v. 241. Farini, i. 34.

[393]

Bianchi, Diplomazia, iii. 48. Metternich, iv. 121. Hillebrand, Geschichte Frankreichs, i. 206. Haussonville, i. 32. B. and F. State Papers, xix. 1429. Guizot, Mémoires, ii. 290.

[394]

Ilse, Untersuchungen, p. 262. Metternich, v. 347. Biedermann, Dreissig Jahre, i. 6.

[395]

Mazzini, Scritti, iii. 310. Simoni, Conspirations Mazziniennes, p. 53. Metternich, v. 526. B. and F. State Papers, xxiv. 979.

[396]

B. and F. State Papers, xviii. 196. Palmerston, i. 300.

[397]

"La Reine Isabelle est la Révolution incarnée dans sa forme la plus dangereuse; Don Carlos représente le principe Monarchique aux prises avec la Révolution pure." Metternich, v. 615. B. and F. State Papers, xviii. 1365; xxii. 1394. Baumgarten, iii. 65.

[398]

Hertslet, Map of Europe, ii. 941. Miraflores, Memorias, i. 39. Guizot, iv. 86. Palmerston ii. 180.

[399]

Essai historique sur les Provinces Basques, p. 58. W. Humboldt, Werke iii. 213.

[400]

Henningsen, Campaign with Zumalacarregui, i. 93. Burgos, Anales, ii. 110. Baumgarten, iii. 257.

[401]

Rosen, i. 158. Prokesch von Osten, Kleine Schriften, vii. 56. Mehmed Ali, p. 17. Hillebrand, i. 514 Metternich, v. 481. B. and F. State Papers, xx. 1176; xxii. 140.

[402]

Palmerston understood little about the real condition of the Ottoman Empire, and thought that with ten years of peace it might again become a respectable Power. "All that we hear about the decay of the Turkish Empire and its being a dead body or a sapless trunk, and so forth, is pure and unadulterated nonsense." Bulwer's Palmerston, ii. 299.

[403]

Hertslet, Map of Europe, ii. 1008. Rosen, ii. 3. Guizot, v. 188. Prokesch-Osten, Mehmed Ali, p. 89. Palmerston, ii. 356. Hillebrand, ii. 357. Greville Memoirs, 2nd part, vol. i. 297.

[404]

"Sie sollen ihn nicht haben
Den freien Deutschen Rhein."

By Becker; answered by De Musset's "Nous avons eu votre Rhin Allemand." The words of the much finer song "Die Wacht am Rhein" were also written at this time-by Schneckenburger, a Würtemberg man; but the music by which they are known was not composed till 1854.

[405]

Farini, i. 153. Azeglio, Corresp. Politique, p. 24; Casi di Romagna, p. 47.

[406]

Down to 1827 not only was all land inherited by nobles free from taxation, but any taxable land purchased by a noble thereupon became tax-free. The attempt of the Government to abolish this latter injustice evoked a storm of anger in the Diet of 1825, and still more in the country assemblies, some of the latter even resolving that such law, if passed, fey the Diet, would be null and void.

[407]

Horváth, Fünfundzwanzig Jahre, i. 408. Springer, i. 466. Gerando, Esprit Public, 173. Kossuth, Gessammelte Werke, i. 29. Beschwerden und Klagen der Slaven in Ungarn, 39.

[408]

Das Polen-Attentat, 1846, p. 203. Verhältnisse in Galizien, p. 57. Briefe eines Polnischen Edelmannes, p. 31. Metternich, vii. 196. Cracow, which had been made an independent Republic by the Congress of Vienna, was now annexed by Austria with the consent of Russia and Prussia, and against the protests of England and France.

[409]

Reden des Koenigs Friedrich Wilhelm IV., p. 17. Ranke's F. W, IV. in Allg. Deutsche Biog. Biedermann, Dreissig Jahre, i. 186.

[410]

Guizot, viii. 101, Palmerston, iii. 194. Parl. Papers, 1847. Martin's Prince Consort, i. 341.

[411]

Metternich, vii. 538, 603; Vitzthum, Berlin und Wien, 1845-62, p. 78; Kossuth Werke (1850), ii. 78; Pillersdorff, Rückblicke, p. 22; Reschauer, Das Jahr 1848, i. 191; Springer, Geschichte Oesterreichs, ii. 185; Irányi et Chassin, Révolution de Hongrie, i. 128.

[412]

Metternich, viii. 181. The animation of his remarks on all sorts of points in English life is wonderful. After a halt at Brussels and at his Johannisburg estate Metternich returned to Vienna in 1852, and, though not restored to office, resumed his great position in society. He lived through the Crimean War, on which he wrote numerous memoranda, for whose use it does not appear. Even on the outbreak of war with France in 1859 he was still busy with his pen. He survived long enough to hear of the battle of Magenta, but was spared the sorrow of witnessing the creation of the Kingdom of Italy. He died on the 11th of June, 1859, in his eighty-seventh year. Metternich was not the only statesman present at the Congress of Vienna who lived to see the second Napoleonic Empire. Nesselrode, the Russian Chancellor, lived till 1862; Czartoryski, who was Foreign Minister of Russia at the time of the battle of Austerlitz, till 1861.

[413]

Adlerstein, Archiv des Ungarischen Ministeriums, i. 27; Irányi et Chassin, i. 184; Springer, ii. 219.

[414]

Casati Nuove Rivelazioni, ii. 72. Schönhals, Campagnes d'Italie de 1848 et 1849, p. 72. Cattaneo, Insurrezione di Milano, p. 29. Parl. Pap. 1849, lvii. (2) 210, 333. Schneidawind, Feldzug in 1848, i. 30.

[415]

Manin, Documents laissés, i. 106. Perlbach, Manin, p. 14. Contarini, Memoriale Veneto, p. 10. Rovani, Manin, p. 25. Parliamentary Papers, 1849, lvii. (a) 267.

[416]

Bianchi, Diplomazia Europea, v. 183. Farini, Stato Romano, ii. 16. Parl. Papers, 1849, lvii. 285, 297, 319. Pasolini, Memorie, p. 91.

[417]

Die Berliner März-Revolution, p. 55. Ausführliche Beschreibung, p. 3. Amtliche Berichte, p. 16. Stahr, Preussische Revolution, i. 91. S. Stern, Geschichte des Deutschen Volkes, p. 58. Stern was an eye-witness at Berlin, though not generally a good authority.

[418]

"Preussen geht fortan in Deutschland auf." Reden Friedrich Wilhelms, p. 9. In conversation with Bassermann Frederick William at a later time described his ride through Berlin as "a comedy which he had been made to play." The bombast at any rate was all his own.

[419]

Droysen und Samwer, Schleswig-Holstein, p. 220. Bunsen, Memoir on Schleswig-Holstein, p. 25. Schleswig-Holstein, Uebersichtliche Darstellung, p 51. On the other side, Noten zur Beleuchtung, p. 12.

[420]

Verhandlungen der National-versammlung, i. 25. Biedermann Dreissig Jahre, i. 278. Radowitz, Werke, ii. 36.

[421]

Actes du Gouvernement Provisoire, p. 12. Louis Blanc, Révélations Historiques, i. 135. Gamier Pagès, Révolution de 1848, vi 108, viii. 148. Émile Thomas, Histoire des Ateliers Nationaux, p. 93.

[422]

Barrot, Mémoires, ii. 103. Caussidière, Mémoires, p. 117. Garnier Pagès, x. 419. Normanby, Year of Revolution, i. 389. Granier de Cassagnac, Chute de Louis Philippe, i. 359. De la Gorce, Seconde République, i. 273. Falloux, Mémoires, i. 328.

[423]

Œuvres de Napoleon III., iii. 13, 24. Granier de Cassagnac, ii. 16. Jerrold, Napoleon III., ii. 393.

[424]

Vitzthum, Wien, p. 108. Springer, ii. 293. Pillersdorff, Rückblicke, p. 68; Nachlass, p. 118. Reschauer, ii. 176. Dunder, October Revolution, p. 5. Ficquelmont, Aufklärungen, p. 65.

[425]

Schönhals, p. 117. Farini, ii. 9. Parl. Pap., 1849, lvii. 352.

[426]

Ficquelmont p. 6. Pillersdorff, Nachlass, 93. Helfert, iv. 142. Schönhais, p. 177. Parliamentary Papers, id. 332, 472, 597. Contarini, p. 67. Azeglio, Operazioni del Durando, p. 6. Manin, Documents, i. 289. Bianchi, Diplomazia, v. 257. Pasolini, p. 100.

[427]

Parliamentary Papers, 1849 lviii p. 128. Venice refused to acknowledge the armistice, and detached itself from Sardinia, restoring Manin to power.

[428]

Slavonia itself was attached to Croatia; Dalmatia also was claimed as a member of this triple Kingdom under the Hungarian Crown in virtue of ancient rights, though since its annexation in 1797 it had been governed directly from Vienna, and in 1848 was represented in the Reichstag of Vienna, not in that of Pesth.

[429]

The real meaning of the Charters is, however, contested. Springer, ii. 281. Adlerstein, Archiv, i. 166. Helfert, ii. 255. Irányi et Chassin, i. 236. Die Serbische Wolwodschaftsfrage, p. 7.

[430]

But see Kossuth, Schriften (1880, ii. 215), for a conversation between Jellacic and Batthyány, said to have been narrated to Kossuth by the latter. If authentic, this certainly proves Jellacic to have used the Slavic agitation from the first solely for Austrian ends. See also Vitzthuin, p. 207.

[431]

Adlerstein, Archiv, i. 146, 156. Klapka, Erinnerungen, p. 30. Irányi et Chassin, i. 344. Serbische Bewegung, p. 106.

[432]

Irányi et Chassin, ii. 56. Codex der neuen Gesetze (Pesth), i. 7.

[433]

Adlerstein, ii. 296. Helfert, Geschichte Oesterreichs, i. 79, ii. 192. Dunder, p. 77. Springer, ii. 520. Vitzthum, p. 143. Kossuth, Schriften (1881), ii. 284. Reschauer, ii. 563. Pillersdorff, Nachlass, p. 163. Irányi et Chassin, ii. 98.

[434]

Codex der neuen Gesetze, i. 37. Helfert, iv. (3) 321.

[435]

Revolutionskrieg in Siebenburgen i. 30. Helfert, ii. 207. Bratiano et Irányi, Lettres Hongro-Roumaines, Adlerstein, ii. 105.

[436]

Klapka, Erinnerungen, p. 56. Helfert, iv. 199; Görgei, Leben und Wirken, i. 145. Adlerstein, iii. 576, 648.

[437]

Helfert, iv. (2) 326. Klapka, War in Hungary, i. 23. Irányi et Chassin, ii. 534. Görgei, ii. 54.

[438]

Klapka, War, ii. 106. Erinnerungen, 58. Görgei, ii. 378. Kossuth, Schriften (1880), ii. 291. Codex der neuen Gesetze, i. 75, 105.

[439]

Farini, ii. 404. Parl. Pap., 1849. lvii. 607; lviii. (2) 117. Bianchi, Diplomazia, vi. 67. Gennarelli, Sventure, p. 29. Pasolini, p. 139.

[440]

Schönhals, p. 332. Parl. Pap., 1849, lviii. (2) 216. Bianchi, Politica Austriaca, p. 134. Lamarmora, Un Episodie, p. 175. Portafogli ci Ramorino, p. 41. Ramorino was condemned to death, and executed.

[441]

Garibaldi, Epistolario, i. 33. Del Vecchio, L'assedio di Roma, p. 30. Vaillant, Siége de Rome, p. 12. Bianchi, Diplomazia, vi. 213. Guerzoni, Garibaldi, i. 266. Granier de Cassagnac, ii. 59. Lesseps, Mémoire, p. 61. Barrot, iii 191. Discours de Napoleon 3rd, p. 38.

[442]

Manin, Documents, ii. 340. Perlbach, Manin, p. 37. Gennarelli, Governo Pontificio, i. 32. Contarini, p. 224.

[443]

Verhandlungen der National Versammlung. i. 576 Radowitz, Werke, iii. 369. Briefwechsel Friedrich Wilhelms, p. 205. Biedermann, Dreissig Jahre, i. 295.

[444]

Verhandlungen der National Versammlung, ii. 1877, 2185. Herzog Ernst II., Aus meinem Leben, i. 313. Biedermann, i. 306. Beseler, Erlebtes, p. 68. Waitz, Friede mit Dänemark. Radowitz, iii. 406.

[445]

Briefwechsel Friedrich Wilhelms, p. 184. Wagener, Erlebtes, p. 28. Stahr, Preussische Revolution, i. 453.

[446]

Seine Bundespflichten: an ambiguous expression that might mean either its duties as an ally or its duties as a member of the German Federation. The obscurity was probably intentional.

[447]

Verhandlungen der National Versammlung, vi. 4225. Haym, Deutsche National Versammlung, ii. 112. Radowitz, iii. 459. Helfert, iv. 62.

[448]

Verhandlungen, viii. 6093. Beseler, p. 82. Helfert, iv. (3) 390, Haym, ii. 317, Radowitz, v. 477.

[449]

Briefwechsel Friedrich Wilhelms, pp. 233, 269. Beseler, 87. Biedermann, i. 389. Wagener, Politik Friedrich Wilhelm IV., p. 56. Ernst II., i. 329.

[450]

Verhandlungen, etc., ix. 6695, 6886. Haym, in. 185. Barnberger, Erlebnisse, p. 6.

[451]

Verhandlungen zu Erfurt, i. 114; ii. 143. Biedermann, i. 469. Radowitz, ii. 138.

[452]

Der Fürsten Kongress, p. 13. Reden Friedrich Wilhelms, iv pp. 55, 69. Konferenz der Verbundeten, 1850, pp. 26, 53. Beust, Erinnerungen, i. 115, Ernst II., i. 525. Duncker, Vier Monate, p. 41.

[453]

Ernst II., i. 377. Hertslet, Map of Europe, ii. 1106, 1129, 1151. Parl. Papers, 1864, lxiii., p. 29; 1804, lxv., pp. 30, 187.

[454]

Maupas, Mémoires, i. 176. Œuvres de Napoleon III., iii. 271. Barrot, iv. 21. Granier de Cassagnac, Chute de Louis Philippe, ii. 128; Récit complet, p. 1. Jerrold, Napoleon III., iii. 203. Tocqueville, Corresp. ii. 176.

[455]

Stockmar, 396. Eastern Papers (i.e., Parliamentary Papers, 1854, vol. 71), part 6. Malmesbury, Memoirs of an ex-Minister, i. 402; the last probably inaccurate. Diplomatic Study of the Crimean War, i. 11. This work is a Russian official publication, and, though loose and untrustworthy, is valuable as showing the Russian official view.

[456]

Ashley's Palmerston, ii. 142. Lane Poole, Stratford de Redcliffe, ii. 191.

[457]

Eastern Papers, i. 55. Diplomatic Study, i. 121.

[458]

Eastern Papers, v. 2, 19.

[459]

Eastern Papers, i. 102. Admitted in Diplomatic Study, i. 163.

[460]

He writes thus, April 5, 1851:-"The great game of improvement is altogether up for the present. It is impossible for me to conceal that the main object of my stay here is almost hopeless." Even Palmerston, in the rare moments when he allowed his judgment to master his prepossessions on this subject, expressed the same view. He wrote on November 24, 1850, warning Reschid Pasha "the Turkish Empire is doomed to fall by the timidity and irresolution of its Sovereign and of its Ministers; and it is evident we shall ere long have to consider what other arrangements may be set up in its place." Stratford left Constantinople on leave in June, 1852, but resigned his Embassy altogether in January, 1853. (Lane Poole, Life of Stratford de Redcliffe, ii. 112, 215.)

[461]

Eastern Papers, i. 253, 339. Lane Poole, Stratford, ii. 248.

[462]

Palmerston had accepted the office of Home Secretary, but naturally exercised great influence in foreign affairs. The Foreign Secretary was Lord Clarendon.

[463]

Eastern Papers, i. 210, ii. 116. Ashley's Palmerston, ii. 23.

[464]

Eastern Papers, ii. 23.

[465]

Eastern Papers, ii. 86, 91, 103.

[466]

Eastern Papers, ii. 203, 227, 299.

[467]

Treaty of April 20, 1854, and Additional Article, Eastern Papers, ix. 61. The Treaty between Austria and Prussia was one of general defensive alliance, covering also the case of Austria incurring attack through an advance into the Principalities. In the event of Russia annexing the Principalities or sending its troops beyond the Balkans the alliance was to be offensive.

[468]

Briefwechsel F. Wilhelms mit Bunsen, p. 310. Martin's Prince Consort, iii. 39. On November 20, after the Turks had begun war, the King of Prussia wrote thus to Bunsen (the italics, capitals, and exclamations are his own): "All direct help which England in unchristian folly!!!!!! gives TO ISLAM AGAINST CHRISTIANS! will have (besides God's avenging judgment {hear! hear!}) no other effect than to bring what is now Turkish territory at a somewhat later period under Russian dominion" (Briefwechsel, p. 317). The reader may think that the insanity to which Frederick William succumbed was already mastering him; but the above is no rare specimen of his epistolary style.

[469]

The Treaty of alliance between France and England, to which Prussia was asked to accede, contained, however, a clause pledging the contracting parties "under no circumstance to seek to obtain from the war any advantage to themselves."

[470]

Eastern Papers, viii. I.

[471]

Eastern Papers, xi. 3. Ashley's Palmerston, ii. 60. For the navigation of the mouths of the Danube, see Diplomatic Study, ii. 39. Russia, which had been in possession of the mouths of the Danube since the Treaty of Adrianople, and had undertaken to keep the mouths clear, had allowed the passage to become blocked and had otherwise prevented traffic descending, in order to keep the Black Sea trade in its own hands.

[472]

See, however, Burgoyne's Letter to the Times, August 4, 1868, in Kinglake, iv. 465. Rousset, Guerre de Crimée, i. 280.

[473]

Statements of Raglan, Lucan, Cardigan; Kinglake, v. 108, 402.

[474]

On the death of Nicholas, the King of Prussia addressed the following lecture to the unfortunate Bunsen:-"You little thought that, at the very moment when you were writing to me, one of the noblest of men, one of the grandest forms in history, one of the truest hearts, and at the same time one of the greatest rulers of this narrow world, was called from faith to sight. I thank God on my knees that He deemed me worthy to be, in the best sense of the word, his (Nicholas') friend, and to remain true to him. You, dear Bunsen, thought differently of him, and you will now painfully confess this before your conscience, most painfully of all the truth (which all your letters in these late bad times have unfortunately shown me but too plainly), that you hated him. You hated him, not as a man, but as the representative of a principle, that of violence. If ever, redeemed like him through simple faith in Christ's blood, you see him in eternal peace, then remember what I now write to you: 'You will beg his pardon. Even here, my dear friend, may the blessing of repentance be granted to you."-Briefwechsel, p. 325. Frederick William seems to have forgotten to send the same pious wishes to the Poles in Siberia.

[475]

Parliamentary Papers, 1854-5, vol. 55, p. 1, Dec. 2, 1854. Ashley's Palmerston, ii. 84.

[476]

Eastern Papers, Part 13, 1.

[477]

Kinglake, vii. 21. Rousset, ii. 35, 148.

[478]

Diplomatic Study, ii. 361. Martin, Prince Consort, iii. 394.

[479]

Prussia was admitted when the first Articles had been settled, and it became necessary to revise the Treaty of July, 1841, of which Prussia had been one of the signatories.

[480]

"In the course of the deliberation, whenever our (Russian) plenipotentiaries found themselves in the presence of insurmountable difficulties, they appealed to the personal intervention of this sovereign (Napoleon), and had only to congratulate themselves on the result."-Diplomatic Study, ii. 377.

[481]

Three pages of promises. Eastern Papers, xvii. One was kept faithfully. "To accomplish these objects, means shall be sought to profit by the science, the art, and the funds of Europe." One of the drollest of the prophecies of that time is the congratulatory address of the Missionaries to Lord Stratford de Redcliffe, id. 1882.-"The Imperial Hatti-sheriff has convinced us that our fond expectations are likely to be realised. The light will shine upon those who have long sat in darkness; and blest by social prosperity and religious freedom, the millions of Turkey will, we trust, be seen ere long sitting peacefully under their own vine and fig-tree." So they were, and with poor Lord Stratford's fortune, among others, in their pockets.

[482]

All verbatim from the Treaty. Parl. Papers, 1856, vol 61, p. 1.

[483]

Martin, Prince Consort, iii. 452. Poole, Stratford, ii. 356.

[484]

Berti, Cavour avanti 1848, p. 110. La Rive, Cavour, p. 58. Cavour, Lettere (ed. Chiala), introd. p. 73.

[485]

Cavour, Lettere (Chiala), ii. introd. p. 187. Guerzoni, Garibaldi, i. 412. Manin, the Ex-President of Venice, now in exile, declared from this time for the House of Savoy. Garibaldi did the same.

[486]

Cavour, Lettere (Chiala), ii. introd. pp. 289, 324; iii. introd. p. i. Bianchi, Diplomazia, vii. 1, Mazade, Cavour, p. 187, Massari, La Marmora, p. 204.

[487]

"In mezzo alle piu angosciose crisi politiche, esclamava nelle solitudine delle sue stanze; 'Perisca il mio nome, perisca la mia fama, purche l'Italia sia,'" Artom (Cavour's secretary), Cavour in Parlamento: introd. p. 46.

[488]

La Farina Epistolario, ii. 56, 81, 137, 426. The interview with Garibaldi; Cavour, Lettere, id. introd. p. 297. Garibaldi, Epistolario, i. 55.

[489]

Cavour, Lettere (Chiala), iii. introd. p. 32. Bianchi, Diplomazia, viii. II. The statement of Napoleon III. to Lord Cowley, in Martin Prince Consort, v. 31, that there was no Treaty, is untrue.

[490]

Bianchi, Politique de Cavour, p. 328, where is Cavour's indignant letter to Napoleon. The last paragraph of this seems to convey a veiled threat to publish the secret negotiations.

[491]

Cavour, Lettere, iii. introd. p. 115; iii. 29. Bianchi, Politique de Cavour, p. 333. Bianchi, Diplomazia, vii. 61. Massari, Cavour, p. 314. Parliamentary Papers, 1859, xxxii. 204, 262. Mérimée, Lettres à Panizzi, i. 21. Martin, Prince Consort, iv. 427.

[492]

La Farina, Epistolario, ii. 172. Parliamentary Papers, 1859, xxxiii. 391, 470.

[493]

Cavour, Lettere, iii. introd. 212, iii. 107. Bianchi, Politique de Cavour, p. 319. Bianchi, Diplomazia, viii. 145, 198. Massari, Vittorio Emanuele, ii. 32. Kossuth, Memories p. 394. Parl. Pap. 1859, xxxii. 63, 1860, lxviii. 7. La Farina Epist, ii. 190. Ollivier, L'Église et l'État, ii. 452.

[494]

Arrivabene, Italy under Victor Emmanuel, i. 268.

[495]

Cavour, Lettere, iii. introd. 301. Bianchi, viii. 180. Garibaldi, Epist., i. 79. Guerzoni, i. 491. Reuchlin, iv. 410.

[496]

Cavour, Lettere, iv. introd. 20. Bianchi, Politique, p. 354. Bianchi, Diplomazia, viii. 256. Parliamentary Papers, 1860, lxvii. 203; lxviii. 53.

[497]

Cavour in Parlamento, p. 536.

[498]

Garibaldi, Epist., i. 97. Persano, Diario, i. 14. Le Farina, Epist., ii. 324. Guerzoni, ii. 23. Parliamentary Papers, 1860, lxviii. 2. Mundy, H.M.S. Hannibal at Palermo, p. 133.

[499]

Cavour, Lettere, iii. introd. 269. La Farina, Epist., ii. 336. Bianchi, Politique, p. 366. Persano, Diario, i. 50, 72, 96.

[500]

Bianchi, Politique, p. 377. Persano, ii. p. 1-102. Persano sent his Diary in MS. to Azeglio, and asked his advice on publishing it. Azeglio referred to Cavour's saying, "If we did for ourselves what we are doing for Italy, we should be sad blackguards," and begged Persano to let his secrets be secrets, saying that since the partition of Poland no confession of such "colossal blackguardism" had been published by any public man.

[501]

Bianchi, Politique, p. 383. Persano, iii. 61. Bianchi, Diplomazia, viii. 337, Garibaldi, Epist., i. 127.

[502]

"Le Roi répondit tout court: 'C'est impossible.'" Cavour to his ambassador at London, Nov. 16, in Bianchi, Politique, p. 386. La Farina, Epist., ii. 438. Persano, iv. 44, Guerzoni, ii. 212.

[503]

Cavour in Parlamento, p. 630. Azeglio, Correspondance Politique, p. 180. La Rive, p. 313. Berti, Cavour avanti 1848, p. 302.

[504]

"Le comte le reconnu, lui serra la main et dit: 'Frate, frate, libera chiesa in libero stato.' Ce furent ses dernières paroles." Account of the death of Cavour by his niece, Countess Alfieri, in La Rive, Cavour, p. 319.

[505]

Berichte über der Militair etat, p. 669. Schulthess, Europaischer Geschichts Kalender, 1862, p. 122.

[506]

Poschinger, Preussen im Bundestag ii. 69, 97; iv. 178. Hahn, Bismarck, i. 608.

[507]

Hahn, Fürst Bismarck, i. 66. This work is a collection of documents, speeches, and letters not only by Bismarck himself but on all the principal matters in which Bismarck was concerned. It is perhaps, from the German point of view, the most important repertory of authorities for the period 1862-1885.

[508]

Sammlung der Staatsacten Oesterreichs (1861), pp. 2, 33. Drei Jahre Verfassungstreit, p. 107.

[509]

Sammlung der Staatsacten, p. 89. Der Ungarische Reichstag 1861, pp. 3, 194, 238. Arnold Forster, Life of Deák, p. 141.

[510]

Celestin, Russland, p. 3. Leroy-Beaulieu, L'Empire des Tsars, i. 400. Homme d'État Russe, p. 73. Wallace, Russia, p. 485.

[511]

Raczynski, Mémoires sur la Pologne, p. 14. B. and F. State Papers, 1862-63, p. 769.

[512]

Leroy-Beaulieu, Homme d'État Russe, p. 259.

[513]

Hahn, i. 112. Verhandl des Preuss, Abgeord. über Polen, p. 45.

[514]

Parliamentary Papers, 1864, vol. lxiv. pp. 28, 263. Hahn, Bismarck, i. 165.

[515]

From Rechberg's despatch of Feb 28, 1863 (in Hahn, i. 84), apparently quoting actual words uttered by Bismarck. Bismarck's account of the conversation (id. 80) tones it down to a demand that Austria should not encroach on Prussia's recognised joint-leadership in Germany.

[516]

B. and F. State Papers, 1863-4, p. 173. Beust, Erinnerungen, i. 136.

[517]

Bismarck's note of July 29th, 1870, in Hahn, i. 506, describing Napoleon's Belgian project, which dated from the time when he was himself ambassador at Paris in 1862, gives this as the explanation of Napoleon's policy in 1864. The Commercial Treaty with Prussia and friendly personal relations with Bismarck also influenced Napoleon's views. See Bismarck's speech of Feb. 21st, 1879, on this subject, in Hahn, iii. 599.

[518]

Hahn, Bismarck, i. 271, 318. Oesterreichs Kämpfe in 1866, i. 8.

[519]

B. and F. State Papers, 1864-65, p. 460.

[520]

La Marmora, Un po più di luce, pp. 109, 146. Jacini, Due Anni, p. 154. Hahn, i. 377. In the first draft of the Treaty Italy was required to declare war not only on Austria but on all German Governments which should join it. King William, who had still some compunction in calling in Italian arms against the Fatherland, struck out these words.

[521]

La Marmora, Un po più di luce, p. 204. Hahn, i. 402.

[522]

Hahn, Bismarck, i. 425. Hahn, Zwei Jahre, p. 60. Oesterreichs Kämpfe, i. 30.

[523]

Discours de Napoleon III., p. 456. On May 11th, Nigra, Italian ambassador at Paris, reported that Napoleon's ideas on the objects to be attained by a Congress were as follows:-Venetia to Italy, Silesia to Austria; the Danish Duchies and other territory in North Germany to Prussia; the establishment of several small States on the Rhine under French protection; the dispossessed German princes to be compensated in Roumania. La Marmora, p. 228. Napoleon III. was pursuing in a somewhat altered form the old German policy of the Republic and the Empire-namely, the balancing of Austria and Prussia against one another, and the establishment of a French protectorate over the group of secondary States.

[524]

Oesterreichs Kämpfe, ii. 341. Prussian Staff, Campaign of 1866 (Hozier), p. 167.

[525]

Hahn, i. 476. Benedetti, Ma Mission en Prusse, p. 186. Reuchlin, v. 457. Massari, La Marmora, p. 350.

[526]

Hahn, i. 501, 505.

[527]

Benedetti, p. 191. Hahn, i. 508; ii. 328, 635. See also La Marmora's Un po più di luce, p. 242, and his Segreti di Stato, p. 274. Govone's despatches strongly confirm the view that Bismarck was more than a mere passive listener to French schemes for the acquisition of Belgium. That he originated the plan is not probable; that he encouraged it seems to me quite certain, unless various French and Italian documents unconnected with one another are forgeries from beginning to end. On the outbreak of the war of 1870 Bismarck published the text of the draft-treaty discussed in 1866 providing for an offensive and defensive alliance between France and Prussia, and the seizure of Belgium by France. The draft was in Benedetti's handwriting, and written on paper of the French Embassy. Benedetti stated in answer that he had made the draft at Bismarck's dictation. This might seem very unlikely were it not known that the draft of the Treaty between Prussia and Italy in 1866 was actually so written down by Barral, the Italian Ambassador, at Bismarck's dictation.

[528]

Regelung der Verhältnisse, p. 4. Ausgleich mit Ungarn, p. 9.

[529]

Hungary retained a Ministry of National Defence for its Reserve Forces, and a Finance Ministry for its own separate finance. Thus the Ministry of Foreign Affairs was the only one of the three common Ministries which covered the entire range of a department.

[530]

They had indeed been discovered by French agents in Germany. Rothan, L'Affaire du Luxembourg, p. 74.

[531]

Hahn, i. 658. Rothan, Luxembourg, p. 246. Correspondenzen des K.K. Minist. des Aüssern, 1868, p. 24. Parl. Pap., 1867, vol. lxxiv., p. 427.

[532]

Sorel, Histoire Diplomatique, i. 38. But see the controversy between Beust and Gramont in Le Temps, Jan. 11-16, 1873.

[533]

Rothan, La France en 1867, ii. 316. Reuchlin, v. 547. Two historical expressions belong to Mentana: the "Never," of M. Rouher, and "The Chassepots have done wonders," of General Failly.

[534]

Sorel, i. 40. Hahn, i. 720. Immediately after Mentana, on Nov. 17, 1867, Mazzini wrote to Bismarck and to the Prussian ambassador at Florence, Count Usedom, stating that Napoleon had resolved to make war on Prussia and had proposed an alliance to Victor Emmanuel, who had accepted it for the price of Rome. Mazzini offered to employ revolutionary means to frustrate this plan, and asked for money and arms. Bismarck showed caution, but did not altogether disregard the communication. Politica Segreta Italiana, p. 339.

[535]

Benedetti, Ma Mission, p. 319, July 7. Gramont, La France et la Prusse, p. 61.

[536]

Sorel, Histoire Diplomatique, i. 197.

[537]

Hahn, ii. 69. Sorel, i. 236.

[538]

Prince Napoleon, in Revue des Deux Mondes, April 1, 1878; Gramont, in Revue de France, April 17, 1878. (Signed Andreas Memor.) Ollivier, L'Église et l'État, ii. 473. Sorel, i. 245.

[539]

Der Deutsch Französische Krieg, 1870-71 (Prussian General Staff), i. 72.

[540]

Bazaine, L'Armée du Rhin, p. 74.

[541]

Papiers Sécrets du Second Empire (1875), pp. 33, 240.

[542]

Diary of the Emperor Frederick, Sept. 3.

[543]

Favre's circular alleged that the King of Prussia had declared that he made war not on France but on the Imperial Dynasty. King William had never stated anything of the kind. His proclamation on entering France, to which Favre appears to have referred, merely said that the war was to be waged against the French army, and not against the inhabitants, who, so long as they kept quiet, would not be molested.

[544]

Deutsch-Französiche Krieg, vol. III., p. 104. Bazaine, p. 166. Procès de Bazaine, vol. ii., p. 219. Regnier, p. 20. Hahn, ii., 171.

[545]

Hahn, ii. 216. Valfrey, Diplomatie du Gouvernement de la Défense Nationale, ii. 51. Hertslet, Map of Europe, iii. 1912, 1954.

[546]

Parl. Pap. 1876, vol. lxxxiv., pp. 74, 96.

[547]

Parl. Pap. 1876, vol. lxxxiv., p. 183.

[548]

Parl. Pap. 1877, vol. xc., p. 143.

[549]

Parl. Deb. July 10, 1876, verbatim.

[550]

See Burke's speech on the Russian armament, March 29, 1791, and the passage on "the barbarous anarchic despotism" of Turkey in his Reflections on the French Revolution, p. 150, Clar. edit. Burke lived and died in Beaconsfield, and his grave is there. There seems, however, to be no evidence for the story that he was about to receive a peerage with the title of Beaconsfield, when the death of his son broke all his hopes.

[551]

Parl. Pap. 1877, vol. xc., p. 642; 1878, vol. lxxxi., p. 679.

[552]

Parl. Pap. 1877, vol. lxxxix., p. 135.

[553]

Parl. Pap. 1878, vol. lxxxi., pp. 661, 725. Parl. Deb., vol. ccxxxvii.

[554]

The Treaty, with Maps, is in Parl. Pap. 1878, vol. lxxxiii. p. 239.

[555]

Parl. Pap. 1878, vl. lxxxii., p. 3. Globe, May 31, 1878. Hahn, iii. 116.

Transcriber's Note:
(1) Footnotes have been numbered and collected at the end of the work.
(2) Sidenotes have been placed in brackets prior to the paragraph in which they occur.
(3) The spelling in the print copy was not always consistent. Irregular words in the original (e.g., "Christain" and "Würtemburg") have been retained whenever possible.

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Table of Contents

- HISTORY

- CONTENTS.

- MODERN EUROPE.

- PREFACE.

- PREFACE TO THE FIRST EDITION.

- PREFACE TO THE SECOND EDITION OF THE FIRST VOLUME. [1]

- PREFACE TO THE SECOND VOLUME.[2]

- CHAPTER I.

- CHAPTER II.

- CHAPTER III.

- CHAPTER IV.

- CHAPTER V.

- CHAPTER VI.

- CHAPTER VII.

- CHAPTER VIII.

- CHAPTER IX.

- CHAPTER X.

- CHAPTER XI.

- CHAPTER XII.

- CHAPTER XIII.

- CHAPTER XIV.

- CHAPTER XV.

- CHAPTER XVI.

- CHAPTER XVII.

- CHAPTER XVIII.

- VOLUME III.

- CHAPTER XIX.

- CHAPTER XX.

- CHAPTER XXI.

- CHAPTER XXII.

- CHAPTER XXIII.

- CHAPTER XXIV.

- CHAPTER XXV.

- THE FULL PROJECT GUTENBERG LICENSE