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.