Chapter IX
Austria preparing for war--The war to be one on behalf of the German Nation--Patriotic Movement in Prussia--Expected Insurrection in North Germany--Plans of Campaign--Austrian Manifesto to the Germans--Rising of the Tyrolese--Defeats of the Archduke Charles in Bavaria--French in Vienna--Attempts of Dörnberg and Schill--Battle of Aspern--Second Passage of the Danube--Battle of Wagram--Armistice of Znaim--Austria waiting for events--Wellesley in Spain--He gains the Battle of Talavera, but retreats--Expedition against Antwerp fails--Austria makes Peace--Treaty of Vienna--Real Effects of the War of 1809--Austria after 1809--Metternich-- Marriage of Napoleon with Marie Louise--Severance of Napoleon and Alexander--Napoleon annexes the Papal States, Holland, La Valais, and the North German Coast--The Napoleonic Empire: Its Benefits and Wrongs--The Czar withdraws from Napoleon's Commercial System--War with Russia imminent--Wellington in Portugal: Lines of Torres Vedras; Massena's Campaign of 1810, and retreat--Soult in Andalusia--Wellington's Campaign of 1810--Capture of Ciudad Rodrigo and Badajoz--Salamanca.
[Austria preparing for war, 1808-9.]
Napoleon, quitting Spain in the third week of January, 1809, travelled to Paris with the utmost haste. He believed Austria to be on the point of declaring war; and on the very day of his arrival at the capital he called out the contingents of the Rhenish Federation. In the course of the next few weeks, however, he formed the opinion that Austria would either decline hostilities altogether, or at least find it impossible to declare war before the middle of May. For once the efforts of Austria outstripped the calculations of her enemy. Count Stadion, the earnest and enlightened statesman who had held power in Austria since the Peace of Presburg, had steadily prepared for a renewal of the struggle with France. He was convinced that Napoleon would soon enter upon new enterprises of conquest, and still farther extend his empire at the expense of Austria, unless attacked before Spain had fallen under his dominion. Metternich, now Austrian Ambassador at Paris, reported that Napoleon was intending to divide Turkey as soon as he had conquered Spain; and, although he advised delay, he agreed with the Cabinet at Vienna that Austria must sooner or later strike in self-defence. [154] Stadion, more sanguine, was only prevented from declaring war in 1808 by the counsels of the Archduke Charles and of other generals who were engaged in bringing the immense mass of new levies into military formation. Charles himself attached little value to the patriotic enthusiasm which, since the outbreak of the Spanish insurrection, had sprung up in the German provinces of Austria. He saw the approach of war with more apprehension than pleasure; but, however faint his own hopes, he laboured earnestly in creating for Austria a force far superior to anything that she had possessed before, and infused into the mass of the army that confident and patriotic spirit which he saw in others rather than felt in himself. By the beginning of March, 1809, Austria had 260,000 men ready to take the field.
[The war of 1809 to be a war for Germany.]
The war now breaking out was to be a war for the German nation, as the struggle of the Spaniards had been a struggle for Spain. The animated appeals of the Emperor's generals formed a singular contrast to the silence with which the Austrian Cabinet had hitherto entered into its wars. The Hapsburg sovereign now stood before the world less as the inheritor of an ancient empire and the representative of the Balance of Power than as the disinterested champion of the German race. On the part of the Emperor himself the language of devotion for Germany was scarcely more than ironical. Francis belonged to an age and to a system in which the idea of nationality had no existence; and, like other sovereigns, he regarded his possessions as a sort of superior property which ought to be defended by obedient domestic dogs against marauding foreign wolves. The same personal view of public affairs had hitherto satisfied the Austrians. It had been enough for them to be addressed as the dutiful children of a wise and affectionate father. The Emperor spoke the familiar Viennese dialect; he was as homely in his notions and his prejudices as any beerseller in his dominions; his subjects might see him at almost any hour of the day or night; and out of the somewhat tough material of his character popular imagination had no difficulty in framing an idol of parental geniality and wisdom. Fifteen years of failure and mismanagement had, however, impaired the beauty of the domestic fiction; and although old-fashioned Austrians, like Haydn, the composer of the Austrian Hymn, were ready to go down to the grave invoking a blessing on their gracious master, the Emperor himself and his confidants were shrewd enough to see that the newly-excited sense of German patriotism would put them in possession of a force which they could hardly evoke by the old methods.
[Austrian Parties.]
One element of reality lay in the professions which were not for the most part meant very seriously. There was probably now no statesman in Austria who any longer felt a jealousy of the power of Prussia. With Count Stadion and his few real supporters the restoration of Germany was a genuine and deeply-cherished desire; with the majority of Austrian politicians the interests of Austria herself seemed at least for the present to require the liberation of North Germany. Thus the impassioned appeals of the Archduke Charles to all men of German race to rise against their foreign oppressor, and against their native princes who betrayed the interests of the Fatherland, gained the sanction of a Court hitherto very little inclined to form an alliance with popular agitation. If the chaotic disorder of the Austrian Government had been better understood in Europe, less importance would have been attached to this sudden change in its tone. No one in the higher ranks at Vienna was bound by the action of his colleagues. The Emperor, though industrious, had not the capacity to enforce any coherent system of government. His brothers caballed one against another, and against the persons who figured as responsible ministers. State-papers were brought by soldiers to the Emperor for his signature without the knowledge of his advisers. The very manifestos which seemed to herald a new era for Germany owed most of their vigour to the literary men who were entrusted with their composition. [155]
[Patriotic movement in Prussia.]
[Governing classes in South Germany on the side of Napoleon.]
The answer likely to be rendered by Germany to the appeal of Austria was uncertain. In the Rhenish Federation there were undoubted signs of discontent with French rule among the common people; but the official classes were universally on the side of Napoleon, who had given them their posts and their salaries; while the troops, and especially the officers, who remembered the time when they had been mocked by the Austrians as "harlequins" and "nose-bags," were won by the kindness of the great conqueror, who organised them under the hands of his own generals, and gave them the companionship of his own victorious legions. Little could be expected from districts where to the mass of the population the old régime of German independence had meant nothing more than attendance at the manor-court of a knight, or the occasional spectacle of a ducal wedding, or a deferred interest in the droning jobbery of some hereditary town-councillor. In Northern Germany there was far more prospect of a national insurrection. There the spirit of Stein and of those who had worked with him was making itself felt, in spite of the fall of the Minister. Scharnhorst's reforms had made the Prussian army a school of patriotism, and the work of statesmen and soldiers was promoted by men who spoke to the feelings and the intelligence of the nation. Literature lost its indifference to nationality and to home. The philosopher Fichte, the poet Arndt, the theologian Schleiermacher pressed the claims of Germany and of the manlier virtues upon a middle class singularly open to literary influences, singularly wanting in the experience and the impulses of active public life. [156] In the Kingdom of Westphalia preparations for an insurrection against the French were made by officers who had served in the Prussian and the Hessian armies. In Prussia itself, by the side of many nobler agencies, the newly-founded Masonic society of the Tugendbund, or League of Virtue, made the cause of the Fatherland popular among thousands to whom it was an agreeable novelty to belong to any society at all. No spontaneous, irresistible uprising, like that which Europe had seen in the Spanish Peninsula, was to be expected among the unimpulsive population of the North German plains; but the military circles of Prussia were generally in favour of war, and an insurrection of the population west of the Elbe was not improbable in the event of Napoleon's army being defeated by Austria in the field. King Frederick William, too timid to resolve upon war himself, too timid even to look with satisfaction upon the bold attitude of Austria, had every reason for striking, if once the balance should incline against Napoleon: even against his own inclination it was possible that the ardour of his soldiers might force him into war.
[Plans of campaign.]
So strong were the hopes of a general rising in Northern Germany, that the Austrian Government to some extent based its plans for the campaign on this event. In the ordinary course of hostilities between France and Austria the line of operations in Germany is the valley of the Danube; but in preparing for the war of 1809 the Austrian Government massed its forces in the north-west of Bohemia, with the object of throwing them directly upon Central Germany. The French troops which were now evacuating Prussia were still on their way westwards at the time when Austria was ready to open the campaign. Davoust, with about 60,000 men, was in Northern Bavaria, separated by a great distance from the nearest French divisions in Baden and on the Rhine. By a sudden incursion of the main army of Austria across the Bohemian mountains, followed by an uprising in Northern Germany, Davoust and his scattered detachments could hardly escape destruction. Such was the original plan of the campaign, and it was probably a wise one in the present exceptional superiority of the Austrian preparations over those of France. For the first time since the creation of the Consulate it appeared as if the opening advantages of the war must inevitably be upon the side of the enemies of France. Napoleon had underrated both the energy and the resources of his adversary. By the middle of March, when the Austrians were ready to descend upon Davoust from Bohemia, Napoleon's first troops had hardly crossed the Rhine. Fortunately for the French commander, the Austrian Government, at the moment of delivering its well-planned blow, was seized with fear at its own boldness. Recollections of Hohenlinden and Ulm filled anxious minds with the thought that the valley of the Danube was insufficiently defended; and on the 20th of March, when the army was on the point of breaking into Northern Bavaria, orders were given to divert the line of march to the south, and to enter the Rhenish Confederacy by the roads of the Danube and the Inn. Thus the fruit of so much energy, and of the enemy's rare neglectfulness, was sacrificed at the last moment. It was not until the 9th of April that the Austrian movement southward was completed, and that the army lay upon the line of the Inn, ready to attack Napoleon in the territory of his principal German ally.
[Austrian manifesto to the Germans.]
The proclamations now published by the Emperor and the Archduke bore striking testimony to the influence of the Spanish insurrection in exciting the sense of national right, and awakening the Governments of Europe to the force which this placed in their hands. For the first time in history a manifesto was addressed "to the German nation." The contrast drawn in the Archduke's address to his army between the Spanish patriots dying in the defence of their country, and the German vassal-contingents dragged by Napoleon into Spain to deprive a gallant nation of its freedom, was one of the most just and the most telling that tyranny has ever given to the leaders of a righteous cause. [157] The Emperor's address "to the German nation" breathed the same spirit. It was not difficult for the politicians of the Rhenish Federation to ridicule the sudden enthusiasm for liberty and nationality shown by a Government which up to the present time had dreaded nothing so much as the excitement of popular movements; but, however unconcernedly the Emperor and the old school of Austrian statesmen might adopt patriotic phrases which they had no intention to remember when the struggle was over, such language was a reality in the effect which it produced upon the thousands who, both in Austria and other parts of Germany, now for the first time heard the summons to unite in defence of a common Fatherland.
[Austrians invade Bavaria, April 9, 1809.]
[Rising of the Tyrol, April, 1809.]
[Its causes religious.]
The leading divisions of the Archduke's army crossed the Inn on the 9th of April. Besides the forces intended for the invasion of Bavaria, which numbered 170,000 men, the Austrian Government had formed two smaller armies, with which the Princes Ferdinand and John were to take up the offensive in the Grand Duchy of Warsaw and in Northern Italy. On every side Austria was first in the field; but even before its regular forces could encounter the enemy, a popular outbreak of the kind that the Government had invoked wrested from the French the whole of an important province. While the army crossed the Inn, the Tyrolese people rose, and overpowered the French and Bavarian detachments stationed in their country. The Tyrol had been taken from Austria at the Peace of Presburg, and attached to Napoleon's vassal kingdom of Bavaria. In geographical position and in relationship of blood the Tyrolese were as closely connected with the Bavarians as with the Austrians; and the annexation would probably have caused no lasting discontent if the Bavarian Government had condescended to take some account of the character of its new subjects. Under the rule of Austria the Tyrolese had enjoyed many privileges. They were exempt from military service, except in their own militia; they paid few taxes; they possessed forms of self-government which were at least popular enough to be regretted after they had been lost. The people adored their bishops and clergy. Nowhere could the Church exhibit a more winning example of unbroken accord between a simple people and a Catholic Crown. Protestantism and the unholy activities of reason had never brought trouble into the land. The people believed exactly what the priests told them, and delighted in the innumerable holidays provided by the Church. They had so little cupidity that no bribe could induce a Tyrolese peasant to inform the French of any movement; they had so little intelligence that, when their own courage and stout-heartedness had won their first battle, they persuaded one another that they had been led by a Saint on a white horse. Grievances of a substantial character were not wanting under the new Bavarian rule; but it was less the increased taxation and the enforcement of military service that exasperated the people than the attacks made by the Government upon the property and rights of the Church. Montgelas, the reforming Bavarian minister, treated the Tyrolese bishops with as little ceremony as the Swabian knights. The State laid claim to all advowsons; and upon the refusal of the bishops to give up their patronage, the bishops themselves were banished and their revenues sequestrated. A passion for uniformity and common sense prompted the Government to revive the Emperor Joseph's edicts against pilgrimages and Church holidays. It became a police-offence to shut up a shop on a saint's day, or to wear a gay dress at a festival. Bavarian soldiers closed the churches at the end of a prescribed number of masses. At a sale of Church property, ordered by the Government, some of the sacred vessels were permitted to fall into the hands of the Jews.
These were the wrongs that fired the simple Tyrolese. They could have borne the visits of the tax-gatherer and the lists of conscription; they could not bear that their priests should be overruled, or that their observances should be limited to those sufficient for ordinary Catholics. Yet, with all its aspect of unreason, the question in the Tyrol was also part of that larger question whether Napoleon's pleasure should be the rule of European life, or nations should have some voice in the disposal of their own affairs. The Tyrolese were not more superstitious, and they were certainty much less cruel, than the Spaniards. They fought for ecclesiastical absurdities; but their cause was also the cause of national right, and the admiration which their courage excited in Europe was well deserved.
[Tyrolese expel Bavarians and French, April 1809.]
Early in the year 1809 the Archduke John had met the leaders of the Tyrolese peasantry, and planned the first movements of a national insurrection. As soon as the Austrian army crossed the Inn, the peasants thronged to their appointed meeting-places. Scattered detachments of the Bavarians were surrounded, and on the 12th of April the main body of the Tyrolese, numbering about 15,000 men, advanced upon Innsbruck. The town was invested; the Bavarian garrison, consisting of 3,000 regular troops, found itself forced to surrender after a severe engagement. On the next morning a French column, on the march from Italy to the Danube, approached Innsbruck, totally unaware of the events of the preceding day. The Tyrolese closed behind it as it advanced. It was not until the column was close to the town that its commander, General Brisson, discovered that Innsbruck had fallen into an enemy's hands. Retreat was impossible; ammunition was wanting for a battle; and Brisson had no choice but to surrender to the peasants, who had already proved more than a match for the Bavarian regular troops. The Tyrolese had done their work without the help of a single Austrian regiment. In five days the weak fabric of Bavarian rule had been thrown to the ground. The French only maintained themselves in the lower valley of the Adige: and before the end of April their last positions at Trent and Roveredo were evacuated, and no foreign soldier remained on Tyrolese soil.
[Campaign of Archduke Charles in Bavaria.]
The operations of the Austrian commanders upon the Inn formed a melancholy contrast to the activity of the mountaineers. In spite of the delay of three weeks in opening the campaign, Davoust had still not effected his junction with the French troops in Southern Bavaria, and a rapid movement of the Austrians might even now have overwhelmed his isolated divisions at Ratisbon. Napoleon himself had remained in Paris till the last moment, instructing Berthier, the chief of the staff, to concentrate the vanguard at Ratisbon, if by the 15th of April the enemy had not crossed the Inn, but to draw back to the line of the Lech if the enemy crossed the Inn before that day. [158] The Archduke entered Bavaria on the 9th; but, instead of retiring to the Lech, Berthier allowed the army to be scattered over an area sixty miles broad, from Ratisbon to points above Augsburg. Davoust lay at Ratisbon, a certain prey if the Archduke pushed forwards with vigour and thrust his army between the northern and the southern positions of the French. But nothing could change the sluggishness of the Austrian march. The Archduke was six days in moving from the Inn to the Isar; and before the order was given for an advance upon Ratisbon, Napoleon himself had arrived at Donauwörth, and taken the command out of the hands of his feeble lieutenant.
[Napoleon restores superiority of French, April 18, 19.]
It needed all the Emperor's energy to snatch victory from the enemy's grasp. Davoust was bidden to fall back from Ratisbon to Neustadt; the most pressing orders were sent to Massena, who commanded the right at Augsburg, to push forward to the north-east in the direction of his colleague, before the Austrians could throw the mass of their forces upon Davoust's weak corps. Both generals understood the urgency of the command. Davoust set out from Ratisbon on the morning of the 19th. He was attacked by the Archduke, but so feebly and irresolutely that, with all their superiority in numbers, the Austrians failed to overpower the enemy at any one point. Massena, immediately after receiving his orders, hurried from Augsburg north-eastwards, while Napoleon himself advanced into the mid-space between the two generals, and brought the right and left wings of the French army into communication with one another. In two days after the Emperor's arrival all the advantages of the Austrians were gone: the French, so lately exposed to destruction, formed a concentrated mass in the presence of a scattered enemy. The issue of the campaign was decided by the movements of these two days. Napoleon was again at the head of 150,000 men; the Archduke, already baulked in his first attack upon Davoust, was seized with unworthy terror when he found that Napoleon himself was before him, and resigned himself to anticipations of ruin.
[Austrian defeats at Landshut and Eggmühl, April 22.]
[French enter Vienna, May 13.]
A series of manoeuvres and engagements in the finest style of Napoleonic warfare filled the next three days with French victories and Austrian disasters. On April the 20th the long line of the Archduke's army was cut in halves by an attack at Abensberg. The left was driven across the Isar at Landshut; the right, commanded by the Archduke himself, was overpowered at Eggmühl on the 22nd, and forced northwards. The unbroken mass of the French army now thrust itself between the two defeated wings of the enemy. The only road remaining open to the Archduke was that through Ratisbon to the north of the Danube. In five days, although no engagement of the first order had taken place between the French and Austrian armies, Charles had lost 60,000 men; the mass of his army was retreating into Bohemia, and the road to Vienna lay scarcely less open than after Mack's capitulation at Ulm four years before. A desperate battle fought against the advancing French at Edelsberg by the weak divisions that had remained on the south of the Danube, proved that the disasters of the campaign were due to the faults of the general, not to the men whom he commanded. But whatever hopes of ultimate success might still be based on the gallant temper of the army, it was impossible to prevent the fall of the capital. The French, leaving the Archduke on the north of the Danube, pressed forwards along the direct route from the Inn to Vienna. The capital was bombarded and occupied. On the 13th of May Napoleon again took up his quarters in the palace of the Austrian monarchs where he had signed the Peace of 1806. The divisions which had fallen back before him along the southern road crossed the Danube at Vienna, and joined the Archduke on the bank of the river opposite the capital.
[Attempts of Dörnberg and Schill in Northern Germany, April, 1809.]
The disasters of the Bavarian campaign involved the sacrifice of all that had resulted from Austrian victories elsewhere, and of all that might have been won by a general insurrection in Northern Germany. In Poland and in Italy the war had opened favourably for Austria. Warsaw had been seized; Eugene Beauharnais, the Viceroy of Italy, had been defeated by the Archduke John at Sacile, in Venetia; but it was impossible to pursue these advantages when the capital itself was on the point of falling into the hands of the enemy. The invading armies halted, and ere long the Archduke John commenced his retreat into the mountains. In Northern Germany no popular uprising could be expected when once Austria had been defeated. The only movements that took place were undertaken by soldiers, and undertaken before the disasters in Bavaria became known. The leaders in this military conspiracy were Dörnberg, an officer in the service of King Jerome of Westphalia, and Schill, the Prussian cavalry leader who had so brilliantly distinguished himself in the defence of Colberg. Dörnberg had taken service under Jerome with the design of raising Jerome's own army against him. It had been agreed by the conspirators that at the same moment Dörnberg should raise the Hessian standard in Westphalia, and Schill, marching from Berlin with any part of the Prussian army that would follow him, should proclaim war against the French in defiance of the Prussian Government. Dörnberg had made sure of the support of his own regiment; but at the last moment the plot was discovered, and he was transferred to the command of a body of men upon whom he could not rely. He placed himself at the head of a band of peasants, and raised the standard of insurrection. King Jerome's troops met the solicitations of their countrymen with a volley of bullets. Dörnberg fled for his life; and the revolt ended on the day after it had begun (April 23). Schill, unconscious of Dörnberg's ruin, and deceived by reports of Austrian victories upon the Danube, led out his regiment from Berlin as if for a day's manoeuvring, and then summoned his men to follow him in raising a national insurrection against Napoleon. The soldiers answered Schill's eloquent words with shouts of applause; the march was continued westwards, and Schill crossed the Elbe, intending to fall upon the communications of Napoleon's army, already, as he believed, staggering under the blows delivered by the Archduke in the valley of the Danube.
[Schill at Stralsund, May 23.]
On reaching Halle, Schill learnt of the overthrow of the Archduke and of Dörnberg's ruin in Westphalia. All hope of success in the enterprise on which he had quitted Berlin was dashed to the ground. The possibility of raising a popular insurrection vanished. Schill, however, had gone too far to recede; and even now it was not too late to join the armies of Napoleon's enemies. Schill might move into Bohemia, or to some point on the northern coast where he would be within reach of English vessels. But in any case quick and steady decision was necessary; and this Schill could not attain. Though brave even to recklessness, and gifted with qualities which made him the idol of the public, Schill lacked the disinterestedness and self-mastery which calm the judgment in time of trial. The sudden ruin of his hopes left him without a plan. He wasted day after day in purposeless marches, while the enemy collected a force to overwhelm him. His influence over his men became impaired; the denunciations of the Prussian Government prevented other soldiers from joining him. At length Schill determined to recross the Elbe, and to throw himself into the coast town of Stralsund, in Swedish Pomerania. He marched through Mecklenburg, and suddenly appeared before Stralsund at moment when the French cannoneers in garrison were firing a salvo in honour of Napoleon's entry into Vienna. A hand-to-hand fight gave Schill possession of the town, with all its stores. For a moment it seemed as if Stralsund might become a second Saragossa; but the French were at hand before it was possible to create works of defence. Schill had but eighteen hundred men, half of whom were cavalry; he understood nothing of military science, and would listen to no counsels. A week after his entry into Stralsund the town was stormed by a force four times more numerous than its defenders. Capitulation was no word for the man who had dared to make a private war upon Napoleon; Schill could only set the example of an heroic death. [159] The officers who were not so fortunate as to fall with their leader were shot in cold blood, after trial by a French court-martial. Six hundred common soldiers who surrendered were sent to the galleys of Toulon to sicken among French thieves and murderers. The cruelty of the conqueror, the heroism of the conquered, gave to Schill's ill-planned venture the importance of a great act of patriotic martyrdom. Another example had been given of self-sacrifice in the just cause. Schill's faults were forgotten; his memory deepened the passion with which all the braver spirits of Germany now looked for the day of reckoning with their oppressor. [160]
[Napoleon crosses the Danube, May 20.]
[Battle of Aspern, May 21, 22.]
Napoleon had finished the first act of the war of 1809 by the occupation of Vienna; but no peace was possible until the Austrian army, which lay upon the opposite bank of the river, had been attacked and beaten. Four miles below Vienna the Danube is divided into two streams by the island of Lobau: the southern stream is the main channel of the river, the northern is only a hundred and fifty yards broad. It was here that Napoleon determined to make the passage. The broad arm of the Danube, sheltered by the island from the enemy's fire, was easily bridged by boats; the passage from the island to the northern bank, though liable to be disputed by the Austrians, was facilitated by the narrowing of the stream. On the 18th of May, Napoleon, supposing himself to have made good the connection between the island and the southern bank, began to bridge the northern arm of the river. His movements were observed by the enemy, but no opposition was offered. On the 20th a body of 40,000 French crossed to the northern bank, and occupied the villages of Aspern and Essling. This was the movement for which the Archduke Charles, who had now 80,000 men under arms, had been waiting. Early on the 21st a mass of heavily-laden barges was let loose by the Austrians above the island. The waters of the Danube were swollen by the melting of the snows, and at midday the bridges of the French over the broad arm of the river were swept away. A little later, dense Austrian columns were seen advancing upon the villages of Aspern and Essling, where the French, cut off from their supports, had to meet an overpowering enemy in front, with an impassable river in their rear. The attack began at four in the afternoon; when night fell the French had been driven out of Aspern, though they still held the Austrians at bay in their other position at Essling. During the night the long bridges were repaired; forty thousand additional troops moved across the island to the northern bank of the Danube; and the engagement was renewed, now between equal numbers, on the following morning. Five times the village of Aspern was lost and won. In the midst of the struggle the long bridges were again carried away. Unable to break the enemy, unable to bring up any new forces from Vienna, Napoleon ordered a retreat. The army was slowly withdrawn into the island of Lobau. There for the next two days it lay without food and without ammunition, severed from Vienna, and exposed to certain destruction if the Archduke could have thrown his army across the narrow arm of the river and renewed the engagement. But the Austrians were in no condition to follow up their victory. Their losses were enormous; their stores were exhausted. The moments in which a single stroke might have overthrown the whole fabric of Napoleon's power were spent in forced inaction. By the third day after the battle of Aspern the communications between the island and the mainland were restored, and Napoleon's energy had brought the army out of immediate danger.
[Effect on Europe.]
[Brunswick invades Saxony.]
Nevertheless, although the worst was averted, and the French now lay secure in their island fortress, the defeat of Aspern changed the position of Napoleon in the eyes of all Europe. The belief in his invincibility was destroyed; he had suffered a defeat in person, at the head of his finest troops, from an enemy little superior in strength to himself. The disasters of the Austrians in the opening of the campaign were forgotten; everywhere the hopes of resistance woke into new life. Prussian statesmen urged their King to promise his support if Austria should gain one more victory. Other enemies were ready to fall upon Napoleon without waiting for this condition. England collected an immense armament destined for an attack upon some point of the northern coast. Germany, lately mute and nerveless, gave threatening signs. The Duke of Brunswick, driven from his inheritance after his father's death at Jena, invaded the dominions of Napoleon's vassal, the King of Saxony, and expelled him from his capital. Popular insurrections broke out in Würtemberg and in Westphalia, and proved the rising force of national feeling even in districts where the cause of Germany lately seemed so hopelessly lost.
[Napoleon's preparations for the second passage of the Danube, June.]
[French cross the Danube, July 4.]
But Napoleon concerned himself little with these remoter enemies. Every energy of his mind was bent to the one great issue on which victory depended, the passage of the Danube. His chances of success were still good, if the French troops watching the enemy between Vienna and the Adriatic could be brought up in time for the final struggle. The Archduke Charles was in no hurry for a battle, believing that every hour increased the probability of an attack upon Napoleon by England or Prussia, or insurgent Germany. Never was the difference between Napoleon and his ablest adversaries more strikingly displayed than in the work which was accomplished by him during this same interval. He had determined that in the next battle his army should march across the Danube as safely and as rapidly as it could march along the streets of Vienna. Two solid bridges were built on piles across the broad arm of the river; no less than six bridges of rafts were made ready to be thrown across the narrow arm when the moment arrived for the attack. By the end of June all the outlying divisions of the French army had gathered to the great rallying-point; a hundred and eighty thousand men were in the island, or ready to enter it; every movement, every position to be occupied by each member of this vast mass in its passage and advance, was fixed down to the minutest details. Napoleon had decided to cross from the eastern, not from the northern side of the island, and thus to pass outside the fortifications which the Archduke had erected on the former battle-field. Towards midnight on the 4th of July, in the midst of a violent storm, the six bridges were successively swung across the river. The artillery opened fire. One army corps after another, each drawn up opposite to its own bridge, marched to the northern shore, and by sunrise nearly the whole of Napoleon's force deployed on the left bank of the Danube. The river had been converted into a great highway; the fortifications which had been erected by the Archduke were turned by the eastward direction of the passage. All that remained for the Austrian commander was to fight a pitched battle on ground that was now at least thoroughly familiar to him. Charles had taken up a good position on the hills that look over the village of Wagram. Here, with 130,000 men, he awaited the attack of the French. The first attack was made in the afternoon after the crossing of the river. It failed; and the French army lay stretched during the night between the river and the hills, while the Archduke prepared to descend upon their left on the morrow, and to force himself between the enemy and the bridges behind them.
[Battle of Wagram, July 5, 6.]
[Armistice of Znaim, July 12.]
Early on the morning of the 6th the two largest armies that had ever been brought face to face in Europe began their onslaught. Spectators from the steeples of Vienna saw the fire of the French little by little receding on their left, and dense masses of the Austrians pressing on towards the bridges, on whose safety the existence of the French army depended. But ere long the forward movement stopped. Napoleon had thrown an overpowering force against the Austrian centre, and the Archduke found himself compelled to recall his victorious divisions and defend his own threatened line. Gradually the superior numbers of the French forced the enemy back. The Archduke John, who had been ordered up from Presburg, failed to appear on the field; and at two o'clock Charles ordered a retreat. The order of the Austrians was unbroken; they had captured more prisoners than they had lost; their retreat was covered by so powerful an artillery that the French could make no pursuit. The victory was no doubt Napoleon's, but it was a victory that had nothing in common with Jena and Austerlitz. Nothing was lost by the Austrians at Wagram but their positions and the reputation of their general. The army was still in fighting-order, with the fortresses of Bohemia behind it. Whether Austria would continue the war depended on the action of the other European Powers. If Great Britain successfully landed an armament in Northern Germany or dealt any overwhelming blow in Spain, if Prussia declared war on Napoleon, Austria might fight on. If the other Powers failed, Austria, must make peace. The armistice of Znaim, concluded on the 12th of July, was recognised on all sides as a mere device to gain time. There was a pause in the great struggle in the central Continent. Its renewal or its termination depended upon the issue of events at a distance.
[Wellesley invades Spain, June, 1809.]
[Talavera, July 27.]
[Wellesley retreats to Portugal.]
For the moment the eyes of all Europe were fixed upon the British army in Spain. Sir Arthur Wellesley, who took command at Lisbon in the spring, had driven Soult out of Oporto, and was advancing by the valley of the Tagus upon the Spanish capital. Some appearance of additional strength was given to him by the support of a Spanish army under the command of General Cuesta. Wellesley's march had, however, been delayed by the neglect and bad faith of the Spanish Government, and time had been given to Soult to collect a large force in the neighbourhood of Salamanca, ready either to fall upon Wellesley from the north, or to unite with another French army which lay at Talavera, if its commander, Victor, had the wisdom to postpone an engagement. The English general knew nothing of Soult's presence on his flank: he continued his march towards Madrid along the valley of the Tagus, and finally drew up for battle at Talavera, when Victor, after retreating before Cuesta to some distance, hunted back his Spanish pursuer to the point from which he had started. [161] The first attack was made by Victor upon the English positions at evening on the 27th of July. Next morning the assault was renewed, and the battle became general. Wellesley gained a complete victory, but the English themselves suffered heavily, and the army remained in its position. Within the next few days Soult was discovered to be descending from the mountains between Salamanca and the Tagus. A force superior to Wellesley's own threatened to close upon him from the rear, and to hem him in between two fires. The sacrifices of Talavera proved to have been made in vain. Wellesley had no choice but to abandon his advance upon the Spanish capital, and to fall back upon Portugal by the roads south of the Tagus. In spite of the defeat of Victor, the French were the winners of the campaign. Madrid was still secure; the fabric of French rule in the Spanish Peninsula was still unshaken. The tidings of Wellesley's retreat reached Napoleon and the Austrian negotiators, damping the hopes of Austria, and easing Napoleon's fears. Austria's continuance of the war now depended upon the success or failure of the long-expected descent of an English army upon the northern coast of Europe.
Three months before the Austrian Government declared war upon Napoleon, it had acquainted Great Britain with its own plans, and urged the Cabinet to dispatch an English force to Northern Germany. Such a force, landing at the time of the battle of Aspern, would certainly have aroused both Prussia and the country between the Elbe and the Maine. But the difference between a movement executed in time and one executed weeks and months too late was still unknown at the English War Office. The Ministry did not even begin their preparations till the middle of June, and then they determined, in pursuance of a plan made some years earlier, to attack the French fleet and docks at Antwerp, and to ignore that patriotic movement in Northern Germany from which they had so much to hope.
[British Expedition against Antwerp, July, 1809.]
[Total failure.]
On the 28th of July, two months after the battle of Aspern and three weeks after the battle of Wagram, a fleet of thirty-seven ships of the line, with innumerable transports and gunboats, set sail from Dover for the Schelde. Forty thousand troops were on board; the commander of the expedition was the Earl of Chatham, a court-favourite in whom Nature avenged herself upon Great Britain for what she had given to this country in his father and his younger brother. The troops were landed on the island of Walcheren. Instead of pushing forward to Antwerp with all possible haste, and surprising it before any preparations could be made for its defence, Lord Chatham placed half his army on the banks of various canals, and with the other half proceeded to invest Flushing. On the 16th of August this unfortunate town surrendered, after a bombardment that had reduced it to a mass of ruins. During the next ten days the English commander advanced about as many miles, and then discovered that for all prospect of taking Antwerp he might as well have remained in England. Whilst Chatham was groping about in Walcheren, the fortifications of Antwerp were restored, the fleet carried up the river, and a mass of troops collected sufficient to defend the town against a regular siege. Defeat stared the English in the face. At the end of August the general recommended the Government to recall the expedition, only leaving a force of 15,000 soldiers to occupy the marshes of Walcheren. Chatham's recommendations were accepted; and on a spot so notoriously pestiferous that Napoleon had refused to permit a single French soldier to serve there on garrison duty, [162] an English army-corps, which might at least have earned the same honour as Schill and Brunswick in Northern Germany, was left to perish of fever and ague. When two thousand soldiers were in their graves, the rest were recalled to England.
[Austria makes peace.]
Great Britain had failed to weaken or to alarm Napoleon; the King of Prussia made no movement on behalf of the losing cause; and the Austrian Government unwillingly found itself compelled to accept conditions of peace. It was not so much a deficiency in its forces as the universal distrust of its generals that made it impossible for Austria to continue the war. The soldiers had fought as bravely as the French, but in vain. "If we had a million soldiers," it was said, "we must make peace; for we have no one to command them." Count Stadion, who was for carrying on the war to the bitter end, despaired of throwing his own energetic courage into the men who surrounded the Emperor, and withdrew from public affairs. For week after week the Emperor fluctuated between the acceptance of Napoleon's hard conditions and the renewal of a struggle which was likely to involve his own dethronement as well as the total conquest of the Austrian State. At length Napoleon's demands were presented in the form of an ultimatum. In his distress the Emperor's thoughts turned towards the Minister who, eight years before, had been so strong, so resolute, when all around him wavered. Thugut, now seventy-six years old, was living in retirement. The Emperor sent one of his generals to ask his opinion on peace or war. "I thought to find him," reported the general, "broken in mind and body; but the fire of his spirit is in its full force." Thugut's reply did honour to his foresight: "Make peace at any price. The existence of the Austrian monarchy is at stake: the dissolution of the French Empire is not far off." On the 14th of October the Emperor Francis accepted his conqueror's terms, and signed conditions of peace. [163]
[Peace of Vienna, Oct. 14, 1809.]
[Real effects of the war of 1809.]
The Treaty of Vienna, the last which Napoleon signed as a conqueror, took from the Austrian Empire 50,000 square miles of territory and more than 4,000,000 inhabitants. Salzburg, with part of Upper Austria, was ceded to Bavaria; Western Galicia, the territory gained by Austria in the final partition of Poland, was transferred to the Grand-Duchy of Warsaw; part of Carinthia, with the whole of the country lying between the Adriatic and the Save as far as the frontier of Bosnia, was annexed to Napoleon's own Empire, under the title of the Illyrian Provinces. Austria was cut off from the sea, and the dominion of Napoleon extended without a break to the borders of Turkey. Bavaria and Saxony, the outposts of French sovereignty in Central Europe, were enriched at the expense of the Power which had called Germany to arms; Austria, which at the beginning of the Revolutionary War had owned territory upon the Rhine and exercised a predominating influence over all Italy, seemed now to be finally excluded both from Germany and the Mediterranean. Yet, however striking the change of frontier which gave to Napoleon continuous dominion from the Straits of Calais to the border of Bosnia, the victories of France in 1809 brought in their train none of those great moral changes which had hitherto made each French conquest a stage in European progress. The campaign of 1796 had aroused the hope of national independence in Italy; the settlements of 1801 and 1806 had put an end to Feudalism in Western Germany; the victories of 1809 originated nothing but a change of frontier such as the next war might obliterate and undo. All that was permanent in the effects of the year 1809 was due, not to any new creations of Napoleon, but to the spirit of resistance which France had at length excited in Europe. The revolt of the Tyrol, the exploits of Brunswick and Schill, gave a stimulus to German patriotism which survived the defeat of Austria. Austria itself, though overpowered, had inflicted a deadly injury upon Napoleon, by withdrawing him from Spain at the moment when he might have completed its conquest, and by enabling Wellesley to gain a footing in the Peninsula. Napoleon appeared to have gathered a richer spoil from the victories of 1809 than from any of his previous wars; in reality he had never surrounded himself with so many dangers. Russia was alienated by the annexation of West Galicia to the Polish Grand Duchy of Warsaw; Northern Germany had profited by the examples of courage and patriotism shown so largely in 1809 on behalf of the Fatherland; Spain, supported by Wellesley's army, was still far from submission. The old indifference which had smoothed the way for the earlier French conquests was no longer the characteristic of Europe. The estrangement of Russia, the growth of national spirit in Germany and in Spain, involved a danger to Napoleon's power which far outweighed the visible results of his victory.
[Austria and the Tyrol.]
Austria itself could only acquiesce in defeat: nor perhaps would the permanent interests of Europe have been promoted by its success. The championship of Germany which it assumed at the beginning of the war would no doubt have resulted in the temporary establishment of some form of German union under Austrian leadership, if the event of the war had been different; but the sovereign of Hungary and Croatia could never be the true head of the German people; and the conduct of the Austrian Government after the peace of 1809 gave little reason to regret its failure to revive a Teutonic Empire. No portion of the Emperor's subjects had fought for him with such determined loyalty as the Tyrolese. After having been the first to throw off the yoke of the stranger, they had again and again freed their country when Napoleon's generals supposed all resistance overcome; and in return for their efforts the Emperor had solemnly assured them that he would never accept a peace which did not restore them to his Empire. If fair dealing was due anywhere it was due from the Court of Austria to the Tyrolese. Yet the only reward of the simple courage of these mountaineers was that the war-party at head-quarters recklessly employed them as a means of prolonging, hostilities after the armistice of Znaim, and that up to the moment when peace was signed they were left in the belief that the Emperor meant to keep his promise, Austria, however, could not ruin herself to please the Tyrolese. Circumstances were changed; and the phrases of patriotism which had excited so much rejoicing at the beginning of the war were now fallen out of fashion at Vienna. Nothing more was heard about the rights of nations and the deliverance of Germany. Austria had made a great venture and failed; and the Government rather resumed than abandoned its normal attitude in turning its back upon the professions of 1809.
[Austrian policy after 1809.]
[Metternich.]
Henceforward the policy of Austria was one of calculation, untinged by national sympathies. France had been a cruel enemy; yet if there was a prospect of winning something for Austria by a French alliance, considerations of sentiment could not be allowed to stand in the way. A statesman who, like Count Stadion, had identified the interests of Austria with the liberation of Germany, was no fitting helmsman for the State in the shifting course that now lay before it. A diplomatist was called to power who had hitherto by Napoleon's own desire represented the Austrian State at Paris. Count Metternich, the new Chief Minister, was the son of a Rhenish nobleman who had held high office under the Austrian crown. His youth had been passed at Coblentz, and his character and tastes were those which in the eighteenth century had marked the court-circles of the little Rhenish Principalities, French in their outer life, unconscious of the instinct of nationality, polished and seductive in that personal management which passed for the highest type of statesmanship. Metternich had been ambassador at Dresden and at Berlin before he went to Paris. Napoleon had requested that he might be transferred to the Court of the Tuileries, on account of the marked personal courtesy shown by Metternich to the French ambassador at Berlin during the war between France and Austria in 1805. Metternich carried with him all the friendliness of personal intercourse which Napoleon expected in him, but he also carried with him a calm and penetrating self-possession, and the conviction that Napoleon would give Europe no rest until his power was greatly diminished. He served Austria well at Paris, and in the negotiations for peace which followed the battle of Wagram he took a leading part. After the disasters of 1809, when war was impossible and isolation ruin, no statesman could so well serve Austria as one who had never confessed himself the enemy of any Power; and, with the full approval of Napoleon, the late Ambassador at Paris was placed at the head of the Austrian State.
[Marriage of Napoleon with Marie Louise, 1810.]
[Severance of Napoleon and Alexander.]
Metternich's first undertaking gave singular evidence of the flexibility of system which was henceforward to guard Austria's interests. Before the grass had grown over the graves at Wagram, the Emperor Francis was persuaded to give his daughter in marriage to Napoleon. For some time past Napoleon had determined on divorcing Josephine and allying himself to one of the reigning houses of the Continent. His first advances were made at St. Petersburg; but the Czar hesitated to form a connection which his subjects would view as a dishonour; and the opportunity was seized by the less fastidious Austrians as soon as the fancies of the imperial suitor turned towards Vienna. The Emperor Francis, who had been bullied by Napoleon upon the field of Austerlitz, ridiculed and insulted in every proclamation issued during the late campaign, gave up his daughter for what was called the good of his people, and reconciled himself to a son-in-law who had taken so many provinces for his dowry. Peace had not been proclaimed four months when the treaty was signed which united the House of Bonaparte to the family of Marie Antoinette. The Archduke Charles represented Napoleon in the espousals; the Archbishop of Vienna anointed the bride with the same sacred oil with which he had consecrated the banners of 1809; the servile press which narrated the wedding festivities found no space to mention that the Emperor's bravest subject, the Tyrolese leader Hofer, was executed by Napoleon as a brigand in the interval between the contract and the celebration of the marriage. Old Austrian families, members of the only aristocracy upon the Continent that still possessed political weight and a political tradition, lamented the Emperor's consent to a union which their prejudices called a mis-alliance, and their consciences an adultery; but the object of Metternich was attained. The friendship between France and Russia, which had inflicted so much evil on the Continent since the Peace of Tilsit, was dissolved; the sword of Napoleon was turned away from Austria for at least some years; the restoration of the lost provinces of the Hapsburg seemed not impossible, now that Napoleon and Alexander were left face to face in Europe, and the alliance of Austria had become so important to the power which had hitherto enriched itself at Austria's expense.
[Napoleon annexes Papal States, May, 1809.]
Napoleon crowned his new bride, and felt himself at length the equal of the Hapsburgs and the Bourbons. Except in Spain, his arms were no longer resisted upon the Continent, and the period immediately succeeding the Peace of Vienna was that which brought the Napoleonic Empire to its widest bounds. Already, in the pride of the first victories of 1809, Napoleon had completed his aggressions upon the Papal sovereignty by declaring the Ecclesiastical States to be united to the French Empire (May 17, 1809). The Pope retorted upon his despoiler with a Bull of Excommunication; but the spiritual terrors were among the least formidable of those then active in Europe, and the sanctity of the Pontiff did not prevent Napoleon's soldiers from arresting him in the Quirinal, and carrying him as a prisoner to Savona. Here Pius VII., was detained for the next three years. The Roman States received the laws and the civil organisation of France. [164] Bishops and clergy who refused the oath of fidelity to Napoleon were imprisoned or exiled; the monasteries and convents were dissolved; the cardinals and great officers, along with the archives and the whole apparatus of ecclesiastical rule, were carried to Paris. In relation to the future of European Catholicism, the breach between Napoleon and Pius VII., was a more important event than was understood at the time; its immediate and visible result was that there was one sovereign the fewer in Europe, and one more province opened to the French conscription.
[Napoleon annexes, Holland, July, 1810.]
The next of Napoleon's vassals who lost his throne was the King of Holland. Like Joseph in Spain, and like Murat in Naples, Louis Bonaparte had made an honest effort to govern for the benefit of his subjects. He had endeavoured to lighten the burdens which Napoleon laid upon the Dutch nation, already deprived of its colonies, its commerce, and its independence; and every plea which Louis had made for his subjects had been treated by Napoleon as a breach of duty towards himself. The offence of the unfortunate King of Holland became unpardonable when he neglected to enforce the orders of Napoleon against the admission of English goods. Louis was summoned to Paris, and compelled to sign a treaty, ceding part of his dominions and placing his custom-houses in the hands of French officers. He returned to Holland, but affairs grew worse and worse. French troops overran the country; Napoleon's letters were each more menacing than the last; and at length Louis fled from his dominions (July 1, 1810), and delivered himself from a royalty which had proved the most intolerable kind of servitude. A week later Holland was incorporated with the French Empire.
[Annexation of Le Valais, and of the North German coast.]
Two more annexations followed before the end of the year. The Republic of the Valais was declared to have neglected the duty imposed upon it of repairing the road over the Simplon, and forfeited its independence. The North German coast district, comprising the Hanse towns, Oldenburg, and part of the Kingdom of Westphalia, was annexed to the French Empire, with the alleged object of more effectually shutting out British goods from the ports of the Elbe and the Weser. Hamburg, however, and most of the territory now incorporated with France, had been occupied by French troops ever since the war of 1806, and the legal change in its position scarcely made its subjection more complete. Had the history of this annexation been written by men of the peasant-class, it would probably have been described in terms of unmixed thankfulness and praise. In the Decree introducing the French principle of the free tenure of land, thirty-six distinct forms of feudal service are enumerated, as abolished without compensation. [165]
[Extent of Napoleon's Empire and Dependencies, 1810.]
Napoleon's dominion had now reached its widest bounds. The frontier of the Empire began at Lübeck on the Baltic, touched the Rhine at Wesel, and followed the river and the Jura mountains to the foot of the Lake of Geneva; then, crossing the Alps above the source of the Rhone, it ran with the rivers Sesia and Po to a point nearly opposite Mantua, mounted to the watershed of the Apennines, and descended to the Mediterranean at Terracina. The late Ecclesiastical States were formed into the two Departments of the Tiber and of Trasimene; Tuscany, also divided into French Departments, and represented in the French Legislative Body, gave the title of Archduchess and the ceremonial of a Court to Napoleon's sister Eliza; the Kingdom of Italy, formed by Lombardy, Venice, and the country east of the Apennines as far south as Ascoli, belonged to Napoleon himself, but was not constitutionally united with the French Empire. On the east of the Adriatic the Illyrian Provinces extended Napoleon's rule to the borders of Bosnia and Montenegro. Outside the frontier of this great Empire an order of feudatories ruled in Italy, in Germany, and in Poland. Murat, King of Naples, and the client-princes of the Confederation of the Rhine, holding all Germany up to the frontiers of Prussia and Austria, as well as the Grand-Duchy of Warsaw, were nominally sovereigns within their own dominions; but they held their dignities at Napoleon's pleasure, and the population and revenues of their States were at his service.
[Benefits of Napoleon's rule.]
[Wrongs of Napoleon's rule.]
[Commercial blockade.]
The close of the year 1810 saw the last changes effected which Europe was destined to receive at the hands of Napoleon. The fabric of his sovereignty was raised upon the ruins of all that was obsolete and forceless upon the western Continent; the benefits as well as the wrongs or his supremacy were now seen in their widest operation. All Italy, the northern districts of Germany which were incorporated with the Empire, and a great part of the Confederate Territory of the Rhine, received in the Code Napoleon a law which, to an extent hitherto unknown in Europe, brought social justice into the daily affairs of life. The privileges of the noble, the feudal burdens of the peasant, the monopolies of the guilds, passed away, in most instances for ever. The comfort and improvement of mankind were vindicated as the true aim of property by the abolition of the devices which convert the soil into an instrument of family pride, and by the enforcement of a fair division of inheritances among the children of the possessor. Legal process, both civil and criminal, was brought within the comprehension of ordinary citizens, and submitted to the test of publicity. These were among the fruits of an earlier enlightenment which Napoleon's supremacy bestowed upon a great part of Europe. The price which was paid for them was the suppression of every vestige of liberty, the conscription, and the Continental blockade. On the whole, the yoke was patiently borne. The Italians and the Germans of the Rhenish Confederacy cared little what Government they obeyed; their recruits who were sent to be killed by the Austrians or the Spaniards felt it no especial hardship to fight Napoleon's battles. More galling was the pressure of Napoleon's commercial system and of the agencies by which he attempted to enforce it. In the hope of ruining the trade of Great Britain, Napoleon spared no severity against the owners of anything that had touched British hands, and deprived the Continent of its entire supply of colonial produce, with the exception of such as was imported at enormous charges by traders licensed by himself. The possession of English goods became a capital offence. In the great trading towns a system of permanent terrorism was put in force against the merchants. Soldiers ransacked their houses; their letters were opened; spies dogged their steps. It was in Hamburg, where Davoust exercised a sort of independent sovereignty, that the violence and injustice of the Napoleonic commercial system was seen in its most repulsive form; in the greater part of the Empire it was felt more in the general decline of trade and in a multitude of annoying privations than in acts of obtrusive cruelty. [166] The French were themselves compelled to extract sugar from beetroot, and to substitute chicory for coffee; the Germans, less favoured by nature, and less rapid in adaptation, thirsted and sulked. Even in such torpid communities as Saxony political discontent was at length engendered by bodily discomfort. Men who were proof against all the patriotic exaltation of Stein and Fichte felt that there must be something wrong in a system which sent up the price of coffee to five shillings a pound, and reduced the tobacconist to exclusive dependence upon the market-gardener.
[The Czar withdraws from Napoleon's commercial system, Dec., 1810.]
[France and Russia preparing for war, 1811.]
It was not, however, by its effects upon Napoleon's German vassals that the Continental system contributed to the fall of its author. Whatever the discontent of these communities, they obeyed Napoleon as long as he was victorious, and abandoned him only when his cause was lost. Its real political importance lay in the hostility which it excited between France and Russia. The Czar, who had attached himself to Napoleon's commercial system at the Peace of Tilsit, withdrew from it in the year succeeding the Peace of Vienna. The trade of the Russian Empire had been ruined by the closure of its ports to British vessels and British goods. Napoleon had broken his promise to Russia by adding West Galicia to the Polish Duchy of Warsaw; and the Czar refused to sacrifice the wealth of his subjects any longer in the interest of an insincere ally. At the end of the year 1810 an order was published at St. Petersburg, opening the harbours of Russia to all ships bearing a neutral flag, and imposing a duty upon many of the products of France. This edict was scarcely less than a direct challenge to the French Emperor. Napoleon exaggerated the effect of his Continental prohibitions upon English traffic. He imagined that the command of the European coast-line, and nothing short of this, would enable him to exhaust his enemy; and he was prepared to risk a war with Russia rather than permit it to frustrate his long-cherished hopes. Already in the Austrian marriage Napoleon had marked the severance of his interests from those of Alexander. An attempted compromise upon the affairs of Poland produced only new alienation and distrust; an open affront was offered to Alexander in the annexation of the Duchy of Oldenburg, whose sovereign was a member of his own family. The last event was immediately followed by the publication of the new Russian tariff. In the spring of 1811 Napoleon had determined upon war. With Spain still unsubdued, he had no motive to hurry on hostilities; Alexander on his part was still less ready for action; and the forms of diplomatic intercourse were in consequence maintained for some time longer at Paris and St. Petersburg. But the true nature of the situation was shown by the immense levies that were ordered both in France and Russia; and the rest of the year was spent in preparations for the campaign which was destined to decide the fate of Europe.
[Affairs in Spain and Portugal, 1809-1812.]
[Lines of Torres Vedras, 1809-1810.]
We have seen that during the period of more than two years that elapsed between the Peace of Vienna and the outbreak of war with Russia, Napoleon had no enemy in arms upon the Continent except in the Spanish Peninsula. Had the Emperor himself taken up the command in Spain, he would probably within a few months have crushed both the Spanish armies and their English ally. A fatal error in judgment made him willing to look on from a distance whilst his generals engaged with this last foe. The disputes with the Pope and the King of Holland might well have been adjourned for another year; but Napoleon felt no suspicions that the conquest of the Spanish Peninsula was too difficult a task for his marshals; nor perhaps would it have been so if Wellington had been like any of the generals whom Napoleon had himself encountered. The French forces in the Peninsula numbered over 300,000 men: in spite of the victory of Talavera, the English had been forced to retreat into Portugal. But the warfare of Wellington was a different thing from that even of the best Austrian or Russian commanders. From the time of the retreat from Talavera he had foreseen that Portugal would be invaded by an army far outnumbering his own; and he planned a scheme of defence as original, as strongly marked with true military insight, as Napoleon's own most daring schemes of attack. Behind Lisbon a rugged mountainous tract stretches from the Tagus to the sea: here, while the English army wintered in the neighbourhood of Almeida, Wellington employed thousands of Portuguese labourers in turning the promontory into one vast fortress. No rumour of the operation was allowed to reach the enemy. A double series of fortifications, known as the Lines of Torres Vedras, followed the mountain-bastion on the north of Lisbon, and left no single point open between the Tagus and the sea. This was the barrier to which Wellington meant in the last resort to draw his assailants, whilst the country was swept of everything that might sustain an invading army, and the irregular troops of Portugal closed in upon its rear. [167]
[Retreat of Massena, 1810-11.]
[Massena's campaign against Wellington, 1810.]
In June, 1810, Marshal Massena, who had won the highest distinction at Aspern and Wagram, arrived in Spain, and took up the command of the army destined for the conquest of Portugal. Ciudad Rodrigo was invested: Wellington, too weak to effect its relief, too wise to jeopardise his army for the sake of Spanish praise, lay motionless while this great fortress fell into the hands of the invader. In September, the French, 70,000 strong, entered Portugal. Wellington retreated down the valley of the Mondego, devastating the country. At length he halted at Busaco and gave battle (September 27). The French were defeated; the victory gave the Portuguese full confidence in the English leader; but other roads were open to the invader, and Wellington continued his retreat. Massena followed, and heard for the first time of the fortifications of Torres Vedras when he was within five days' march of them. On nearing the mountain-barrier, Massena searched in vain for an unprotected point. Fifty thousand English and Portuguese regular troops, besides a multitude of Portuguese militia, were collected behind the lines; with the present number of the French an assault was hopeless. Massena waited for reinforcements. It was with the utmost difficulty that he could keep his army from starving; at length, when the country was utterly exhausted, he commenced his retreat (Nov. 14). Wellington descended from the heights, but his marching force was still too weak to risk a pitched battle. Massena halted and took post at Santarem, on the Tagus. Here, and in the neighbouring valley of the Zezere, he maintained himself during the winter. But in March, 1811, reinforcements arrived from England: Wellington moved forward against his enemy, and the retreat of the French began in real earnest. Massena made his way northwards, hard pressed by the English, and devastating the country with merciless severity in order to retard pursuit. Fire and ruin marked the track of the retreating army; but such were the sufferings of the French themselves, both during the invasion and the retreat, that when Massena re-entered Spain, after a campaign in which only one pitched battle had been fought, his loss exceeded 30,000 men.
[Soult conquers Spain as far as Cadiz.]
[Wellington's campaign of 1811.]
Other French armies, in spite of a most destructive guerilla warfare, were in the meantime completing the conquest of the south and the east of Spain. Soult captured Seville, and began to lay siege to Cadiz. Here, at the end of 1810, an order reached him from Napoleon to move to the support of Massena. Leaving Victor in command at Cadiz, Soult marched northwards, routed the Spaniards, and conquered the fortress of Badajoz, commanding the southern road into Portugal. Massena, however, was already in retreat, and Soult's own advance was cut short by intelligence that Graham, the English general in Cadiz, had broken out upon the besiegers and inflicted a heavy defeat. Soult returned to Cadiz and resumed the blockade. Wellington, thus freed from danger of attack from the south, and believing Massena to be thoroughly disabled, considered that the time had come for a forward movement into Spain. It was necessary for him to capture the fortresses of Almeida and Ciudad Rodrigo on the northern road, and to secure his own communications with Portugal by wresting back Badajoz from the French. He left a small force to besiege Almeida, and moved to Elvas to make arrangements with Beresford for the siege of Badajoz. But before the English commander had deemed it possible, the energy of Massena had restored his troops to efficiency; and the two armies of Massena and Soult were now ready to assail the English on the north and the south. Massena marched against the corps investing Almeida. Wellington hastened back to meet him, and fought a battle at Fuentes d'Onoro. The French were defeated; Almeida passed into the hands of the English. In the south, Soult advanced to the relief of Badajoz. He was overthrown by Beresford in the bloody engagement of Albuera (May 16th); but his junction with the army of the north, which was now transferred from Massena to Marmont, forced the English to raise the siege; and Wellington, after audaciously offering battle to the combined French armies, retired within the Portuguese frontier, and marched northwards with the design of laying siege to Ciudad Rodrigo. Again outnumbered by the French, he was compelled to retire to cantonments on the Coa.
[Capture of Ciudad Rodrigo, Jan. 19, 1812.]
[Capture of Badajoz, April 6.]
Throughout the autumn months, which were spent in forced inaction, Wellington held patiently to his belief that the French would be unable to keep their armies long united, on account of the scarcity of food. His calculations were correct, and at the close of the year 1811 the English were again superior in the field. Wellington moved against Ciudad Rodrigo, and took it by storm on the 19th of January, 1812. The road into Spain was opened; it only remained to secure Portugal itself by the capture of Badajoz. Wellington crossed the Tagus on the 8th of March, and completed the investment of Badajoz ten days later. It was necessary to gain possession of the city, at whatever cost, before Soult could advance to its relief. On the night of the 6th of April Wellington gave orders for the assault. The fury of the attack, the ferocity of the English soldiers in the moment of their victory, have made the storm of Badajoz conspicuous amongst the most terrible events of war. But the purpose of Wellington was effected; the base of the English army in Portugal was secured from all possibility of attack; and at the moment when Napoleon was summoning his veteran regiments from beyond the Pyrenees for the invasion of Russia, the English commander, master of the frontier fortresses of Spain, was preparing to overwhelm the weakened armies in the Peninsula, and to drive the French from Madrid.
[Wellington invades Spain, June 1812.]
[Salamanca, July 22.]
[Wellington retires to Portugal.]
It was in the summer of 1812, when Napoleon was now upon the point of opening the Russian campaign, that Wellington advanced against Marmont's positions in the north of Spain and the French lines of communication with the capital. Marmont fell back and allowed Wellington to pass Salamanca; but on reaching the Douro he turned upon his adversary, and by a succession of swift and skilful marches brought the English into some danger of losing their communications with Portugal. Wellington himself now retreated as far as Salamanca, and there gave battle (July 22). A decisive victory freed the English army from its peril, and annihilated all the advantages gained by Marmont's strategy and speed. The French were so heavily defeated that they had to fall back on Burgos. Wellington marched upon Madrid. At his approach King Joseph fled from the capital, and ordered Soult to evacuate Andalusia, and to meet him at Valencia, on the eastern coast. Wellington entered Madrid amidst the wild rejoicing of the Spaniards, and then turned northwards to complete the destruction of the army which he had beaten at Salamanca. But the hour of his final success was not yet come. His advance upon Madrid, though wise as a political measure, had given the French northern army time to rally. He was checked by the obstinate defence of Burgos; and finding the French strengthened by the very abandonment of territory which his victory had forced upon them, he retired to Portugal, giving to King Joseph a few months' more precarious enjoyment of his vassal-sovereignty before his final and irrevocable overthrow.
[The war excites a constitutional movement in Spain.]
In Spain itself the struggle of the nation for its independence had produced a political revolution as little foreseen by the Spaniards as by Napoleon himself when the conflict began. When, in 1808, the people had taken up arms for its native dynasty, the voices of those who demanded a reform in the abuses of the Bourbon government had scarcely been heard amid the tumult of loyal enthusiasm for Ferdinand. There existed, however, a group of liberally-minded men in Spain; and as soon as the invasion of the French and the subsequent successes of the Spaniards had overthrown both the old repressive system of the Bourbons and that which Napoleon attempted to put in its place, the opinions of these men, hitherto scarcely known outside the circle of their own acquaintances, suddenly became a power in the country through the liberation of the press. Jovellanos, an upright and large-minded statesman, who had suffered a long imprisonment in the last reign in consequence of his labours in the cause of progress, now represented in the Central Junta the party of constitutional reform. The Junta itself acted with but little insight or sincerity. A majority of its members neither desired nor understood the great changes in government which Jovellanos advocated; yet the Junta itself was an irregular and revolutionary body, and was forced to appeal to the nation in order to hold its ground against the old legal Councils of the monarchy, which possessed not only a better formal right, but all the habits of authority. The victories of Napoleon at the end of 1808, and the threatening attitude both of the old official bodies and of the new provincial governments which had sprung up in every part of the kingdom, extorted from the Junta in the spring of 1809 a declaration in favour of the assembling of the Cortes, or National Parliament, in the following year. Once made, the declaration could not be nullified or withdrawn. It was in vain that the Junta, alarmed at the progress of popular opinions, restored the censorship of the press, and attempted to suppress the liberal journals. The current of political agitation swept steadily on; and before the end of the year 1809 the conflict of parties, which Spain was henceforward to experience in common with the other Mediterranean States, had fairly begun. [168]
[Spanish Liberals in 1809 and 1810.]
The Spanish Liberals of 1809 made the same attack upon despotic power, and upheld the same theories of popular right, as the leaders of the French nation twenty years before. Against them was ranged the whole force of Spanish officialism, soon to be supported by the overwhelming power of the clergy. In the outset, however, the Liberals carefully avoided infringing on the prerogatives of the Church. Thus accommodating its policy to the Catholic spirit of the nation, the party of reform gathered strength throughout the year 1809, as disaster after disaster excited the wrath of the people against both the past and the present holders of power. It was determined by the Junta that the Cortes should assemble on the 1st of March, 1810. According to the ancient usage of Spain, each of the Three Estates, the Clergy, the Nobles, and the Commons, would have been represented in the Cortes by a separate assembly. The opponents of reform pressed for the maintenance of this mediæval order, the Liberals declared for a single Chamber; the Junta, guided by Jovellanos, adopted a middle course, and decided that the higher clergy and nobles should be jointly represented by one Chamber, the Commons by a second. Writs of election had already been issued, when the Junta, driven to Cadiz by the advance of the French armies, and assailed alike by Liberals, by reactionists, and by city mobs, ended its ineffective career, and resigned its powers into the hands of a Regency composed of five persons (Jan. 30, 1810). Had the Regency immediately taken steps to assemble the Cortes, Spain would probably have been content with the moderate reforms which two Chambers, formed according to the plans of Jovellanos, would have been likely to sanction. The Regency, however, preferred to keep power in its own hands and ignored the promise which the Junta had given to the nation. Its policy of obstruction, which was continued for months after the time when the Cortes ought to have assembled, threw the Liberal party into the hands of men of extremes, and prepared the way for revolution instead of reform. It was only when the report reached Spain that Ferdinand was about to marry the daughter of King Joseph, and to accept the succession to the Spanish crown from the usurper himself, that the Regency consented to convoke the Cortes. But it was now no longer possible to create an Upper House to serve as a check upon the popular Assembly. A single Chamber was elected, and elected in great part within the walls of Cadiz itself; for the representatives of districts where the presence of French soldiery rendered election impossible were chosen by refugees from those districts within Cadiz, amid the tumults of political passion which stir a great city in time of war and revolution.
[Constitution made by the Cortes, 1812.]
On the 24th of September, 1810, the Cortes opened. Its first act was to declare the sovereignty of the people, its next act to declare the freedom of the Press. In every debate a spirit of bitter hatred towards the old system of government and of deep distrust towards Ferdinand himself revealed itself in the speeches of the Liberal deputies, although no one in the Assembly dared to avow the least want of loyalty towards the exiled House. The Liberals knew how passionate was the love of the Spanish people for their Prince; but they resolved that, if Ferdinand returned to his throne, he should return without the power to revive the old abuses of Bourbon rule. In this spirit the Assembly proceeded to frame a Constitution for Spain. The Crown was treated as the antagonist and corrupter of the people; its administrative powers were jealously reduced; it was confronted by an Assembly to be elected every two years, and the members of this Assembly were prohibited both from holding office under the Crown, and from presenting themselves for re-election at the end of their two years' service. To a Representative Body thus excluded from all possibility of gaining any practical acquaintance with public affairs was entrusted not only the right of making laws, but the control of every branch of government. The executive was reduced to a mere cypher.
[The Clergy against the Constitution.]
Such was the Constitution which, under the fire of the French artillery now encompassing Cadiz, the Cortes of Spain proclaimed in the spring of the year 1812. Its principles had excited the most vehement opposition within the Assembly itself; by the nation, or at least that part of it which was in communication with Cadiz, it appeared to be received with enthusiasm. The Liberals, who had triumphed over their opponents in the debates in the Assembly, believed that their own victory was the victory of the Spanish people over the forces of despotism. But before the first rejoicings were over, ominous signs appeared of the strength of the opposite party, and of the incapacity of the Liberals themselves to form any effective Government. The fanaticism of the clergy was excited by a law partly ratifying the suppression of monasteries begun by Joseph Bonaparte; the enactments of the Cortes regarding the censorship of religious writings threw the Church into open revolt. In declaring the freedom of the Press, the Cortes had expressly guarded themselves against extending this freedom to religious discussion; the clergy now demanded the restoration of the powers of the Inquisition, which had been in abeyance since the beginning of the war. The Cortes were willing to grant to the Bishops the right of condemning any writing as heretical, and they were willing to enforce by means of the ordinary tribunals the law which declared the Catholic religion to be the only one permitted in Spain; but they declined to restore the jurisdiction of the Holy Office (Feb., 1813). Without this engine for the suppression of all mental independence the priesthood of Spain conceived its cause to be lost. The anathema of the Church went out against the new order. Uniting with the partisans of absolutism, whom Wellington, provoked by the extravagances of the Liberals, now took under his protection, the clergy excited an ignorant people against its own emancipators, and awaited the time when the return of Ferdinand, and a combination of all the interests hostile to reform, should overthrow the Constitution which the Liberals fondly imagined to have given freedom to Spain.
Chapter X
War approaching between France and Russia--Policy of Prussia--Hardenberg's Ministry--Prussia forced into Alliance with Napoleon--Austrian Alliance-- Napoleon's Preparations--He enters Russia--Alexander and Bernadotte--Plan of the Russians to fight a Battle at Drissa frustrated--They retreat on Witepsk--Sufferings of the French--French enter Smolensko--Battle of Borodino--Evacuation of Moscow--Moscow fired--The Retreat from Moscow--The French at Smolensko--Advance of Russian Armies from North and South-- Battle of Krasnoi--Passage of the Beresina--The French reach the Niemen-- York's Convention with the Russians--The Czar and Stein--Russian Army enters Prussia--Stein raises East Prussia--Treaty of Kalisch--Prussia declares War--Enthusiasm of the Nation--Idea of German Unity--The Landwehr.
[Austria and Prussia in 1811.]
[Hardenberg's Ministry.]
War between France and Russia was known to be imminent as early as the spring of 1811. The approach of the conflict was watched with the deepest anxiety by the two States of central Europe which still retained some degree of independence. The Governments of Berlin and Vienna had been drawn together by misfortune. The same ultimate deliverance formed the secret hope of both; but their danger was too great to permit them to combine in open resistance to Napoleon's will. In spite of a tacit understanding between the two powers, each was compelled for the present to accept the conditions necessary to secure its own existence. The situation of Prussia in especial was one of the utmost danger. Its territory lay directly between the French Empire and Russia; its fortresses were in the hands of Napoleon, its resources were certain to be seized by one or other of the hostile armies. Neutrality was impossible, however much desired by Prussia itself; and the only question to be decided by the Government was whether Prussia should enter the war as the ally of France or of Russia. Had the party of Stein been in power, Prussia would have taken arms against Napoleon at every risk. Stein, however, was in exile his friends, though strong in the army, were not masters of the Government; the foreign policy of the country was directed by a statesman who trusted more to time and prudent management than to desperate resolves. Hardenberg had been recalled to office in 1810, and permitted to resume the great measures of civil reform which had been broken off two years before. The machinery of Government was reconstructed upon principles that had been laid down by Stein; agrarian reform was carried still farther by the abolition of peasant's service, and the partition of peasant's land between the occupant and his lord; an experiment, though a very ill-managed one, was made in the forms of constitutional Government by the convocation of three successive assemblies of the Notables. On the part of the privileged orders Hardenberg encountered the most bitter opposition; his own love of absolute power prevented him from winning popular confidence by any real approach towards a Representative System. Nor was the foreign policy of the Minister of a character to excite enthusiasm. A true patriot at heart, he seemed at times to be destitute of patriotism, when he was in fact only destitute of the power to reveal his real motives.
[Hardenberg's foreign policy, 1811.]
Convinced that Prussia could not remain neutral in the coming war, and believing some relief from its present burdens to be absolutely necessary, Hardenberg determined in the first instance to offer Prussia's support to Napoleon, demanding in return for it a reduction of the payments still due to France, and the removal of the limits imposed upon the Prussian army. [169] The offer of the Prussian alliance reached Napoleon in the spring of 1811: he maintained an obstinate silence. While the Prussian envoy at Paris vainly waited for an audience, masses of troops advanced from the Rhine towards the Prussian frontier, and the French garrisons on the Oder were raised far beyond their stipulated strength. In July the envoy returned from Paris, announcing that Napoleon declined even to enter upon a discussion of the terms proposed by Hardenberg. King Frederick William now wrote to the Czar, proposing an alliance between Prussia and Russia. It was not long before the report of Hardenberg's military preparations reached Paris. Napoleon announced that if they were not immediately suspended he should order Davoust to march on Berlin; and he presented a counter-proposition for a Prussian alliance, which was in fact one of unqualified submission. The Government had to decide between accepting a treaty which placed Prussia among Napoleon's vassals, or certain war. Hardenberg, expecting favourable news from St. Petersburg, pronounced in favour of war; but the Czar, though anxious for the support of Prussia, had determined on a defensive plan of operations, and declared that he could send no troops beyond the Russian frontier.
[Prussia accepts alliance with Napoleon Feb, 1812.]
Prussia was thus left to face Napoleon alone. Hardenberg shrank from the responsibility of proclaiming a war for life or death, and a treaty was signed which added the people of Frederick the Great to that inglorious crowd which fought at Napoleon's orders against whatever remained of independence and nationality in Europe. [170] (Feb. 24th, 1812.) Prussia undertook to supply Napoleon with 20,000 men for the impending campaign, and to raise no levies and to give no orders to its troops without Napoleon's consent. Such was the bitter termination of all those patriotic hopes and efforts which had carried Prussia through its darkest days. Hardenberg himself might make a merit of bending before the storm, and of preserving for Prussia the means of striking when the time should come; but the simpler instincts of the patriotic party felt his submission to be the very surrender of national existence. Stein in his exile denounced the Minister with unsparing bitterness. Scharnhorst resigned his post; many of the best officers in the Prussian army quitted the service of King Frederick William in order to join the Russians in the last struggle for European liberty.
[Alliance of Austria with Napoleon.]
The alliance which Napoleon pressed upon Austria was not of the same humiliating character as that which Prussia was forced to accept. Both Metternich and the Emperor Francis would have preferred to remain neutral, for the country was suffering from a fearful State-bankruptcy, and the Government had been compelled to reduce its paper money, in which all debts and salaries were payable, to a fifth of its nominal value. Napoleon, however, insisted on Austria's co-operation. The family-relations of the two Emperors pointed to a close alliance, and the reward which Napoleon held out to Austria, the restoration of the Illyrian provinces, was one of the utmost value. Nor was the Austrian contingent to be treated, like the Prussian, as a mere French army-corps. Its operations were to be separate from those of the French, and its command was to be held by an Austrian general, subordinate only to Napoleon himself. On these terms Metternich was not unwilling to enter the campaign. He satisfied his scruples by inventing a strange diplomatic form in which Austria was still described as a neutral, although she took part in the war, [171] and felt as little compunction in uniting with France as in explaining to the Courts of St. Petersburg and Berlin that the union was a hypocritical one. The Sovereign who was about to be attacked by Napoleon, and the Sovereigns who sent their troops to Napoleon's support, perfectly well understood one another's position. The Prussian corps, watched and outnumbered by the French, might have to fight the Russians because they could not help it; the Austrians, directed by their own commander, would do no serious harm to the Russians so long as the Russians did no harm to them. Should the Czar succeed in giving a good account of his adversary, he would have no difficulty in coming to a settlement with his adversary's forced allies.
[Preparations of Napoleon for invasion of Russia.]
The Treaties which gave to Napoleon the hollow support of Austria and Prussia were signed early in the year 1812. During the next three months all Northern Germany was covered with enormous masses of troops and waggon-trains, on their way from the Rhine to the Vistula. No expedition had ever been organised on anything approaching to the scale of the invasion of Russia. In all the wars of the French since 1793 the enemy's country had furnished their armies with supplies, and the generals had trusted to their own exertions for everything but guns and ammunition. Such a method could not, however, be followed in an invasion of Russia. The country beyond the Niemen was no well-stocked garden, like Lombardy or Bavaria. Provisions for a mass of 450,000 men, with all the means of transport for carrying them far into Russia, had to be collected at Dantzig and the fortresses of the Vistula. No mercy was shown to the unfortunate countries whose position now made them Napoleon's harvest-field and storehouse. Prussia was forced to supplement its military assistance with colossal grants of supplies. The whole of Napoleon's troops upon the march through Germany lived at the expense of the towns and villages through which they passed; in Westphalia such was the ruin caused by military requisitions that King Jerome wrote to Napoleon, warning him to fear the despair of men who had nothing more to lose. [172]
[Napoleon crosses Russian frontier, June, 1812.]
[Alexander and Bernadotte.]
At length the vast stores were collected, and the invading army reached the Vistula. Napoleon himself quitted Paris on the 9th of May, and received the homage of the Austrian and Prussian Sovereigns at Dresden. The eastward movement of the army continued. The Polish and East Prussian districts which had been the scene of the combats of 1807 were again traversed by French columns. On the 23rd of June the order was given to cross the Niemen and enter Russian territory. Out of 600,000 troops whom Napoleon had organised for this campaign, 450,000 were actually upon the frontier. Of these, 380,000 formed the central army, under Napoleon's own command, at Kowno, on the Niemen; to the north, at Tilsit, there was formed a corps of 32,000, which included the contingent furnished by Prussia; the Austrians, under Schwarzenburg, with a small French division, lay to the south, on the borders of Galicia. Against the main army of Napoleon, the real invading force, the Russians could only bring up 150,000 men. These were formed into the First and Second Armies of the West. The First, or Northern Army, with which the Czar himself was present, numbered about 100,000, under the command of Barclay de Tolly; the Second Army, half that strength, was led by Prince Bagration. In Southern Poland and on the Lower Niemen the French auxiliary corps were faced by weak divisions. In all, the Russians had only 220,000 men to oppose to more than double that number of the enemy. The principal reinforcements which they had to expect were from the armies hitherto engaged with the Turks upon the Danube. Alexander found it necessary to make peace with the Porte at the cost of a part of the spoils of Tilsit. The Danubian provinces, with the exception of Bessarabia, were restored to the Sultan, in order that Russia might withdraw its forces from the south. Bernadotte, Crown Prince of Sweden, who was threatened with the loss of his own dominions in the event of Napoleon's victory, concluded an alliance with the Czar. In return for the co-operation of a Swedish army, Alexander undertook, with an indifference to national right worthy of Napoleon himself, to wrest Norway from Denmark, and to annex it to the Swedish crown.
[Russians intend to fight at Drissa.]
[Russian armies severed, and retreat on Witepsk.]
The head-quarters of the Russian army were at Wilna when Napoleon crossed the Niemen. It was unknown whether the French intended to advance upon Moscow or upon St. Petersburg; nor had any systematic plan of the campaign been adopted by the Czar. The idea of falling back before the enemy was indeed familiar in Russia since the war between Peter the Great and Charles XII. of Sweden, and there was no want of good counsel in favour of a defensive warfare; [173] but neither the Czar nor any one of his generals understood the simple theory of a retreat in which no battles at all should be fought. The most that was understood by a defensive system was the occupation of an entrenched position for battle, and a retreat to a second line of entrenchments before the engagement was repeated. The actual course of the campaign was no result of a profound design; it resulted from the disagreements of the general's plans, and the frustration of them all. It was intended in the first instance to fight a battle at Drissa, on the river Dwina. In this position, which was supposed to cover the roads both to Moscow and St. Petersburg, a great entrenched camp had been formed, and here the Russian army was to make its first stand against Napoleon. Accordingly, as soon as the French crossed the Niemen, both Barclay and Bagration were ordered by the Czar to fall back upon Drissa. But the movements of the French army were too rapid for the Russian commanders to effect their junction. Bagration, who lay at some distance to the south, was cut off from his colleague, and forced to retreat along the eastern road towards Witepsk. Barclay reached Drissa in safety, but he knew himself to be unable to hold it alone against 300,000 men. He evacuated the lines without waiting for the approach of the French, and fell back in the direction taken by the second army. The first movement of defence had thus failed, and the Czar now quitted the camp, leaving to Barclay the command of the whole Russian forces.
[Collapse of the French transport.]
[Barclay and Bagration unite at Smolensko, Aug. 3.]
Napoleon entered Wilna, the capital of Russian Poland, on the 28th of June. The last Russian detachments had only left it a few hours before; but the French were in no condition for immediate pursuit. Before the army reached the Niemen the unparalleled difficulties of the campaign had become only too clear. The vast waggon-trains broke down on the highways. The stores were abundant, but the animals which had to transport them died of exhaustion. No human genius, no perfection of foresight and care, could have achieved the enormous task which Napoleon had undertaken. In spite of a year's preparations the French suffered from hunger and thirst from the moment that they set foot on Russian soil. Thirty thousand stragglers had left the army before it reached Wilna; twenty-five thousand sick were in the hospitals; the transports were at an unknown distance in the rear. At the end of six days' march from the Niemen, Napoleon found himself compelled to halt for nearly three weeks. The army did not leave Wilna till the 16th of July, when Barclay had already evacuated the camp at Drissa. When at length a march became possible, Napoleon moved upon the Upper Dwina, hoping to intercept Barclay upon the road to Witepsk; but difficulties of transport again brought him to a halt, and the Russian commander reached Witepsk before his adversary. Here Barclay drew up for battle, supposing Bagration's army to be but a short distance to the south. In the course of the night intelligence arrived that Bagration's army was nowhere near the rallying-point, but had been driven back towards Smolensko. Barclay immediately gave up the thought of fighting a battle, and took the road to Smolensko himself, leaving his watch-fires burning. His movement was unperceived by the French; the retreat was made in good order; and the two severed Russian armies at length effected their junction at a point three hundred miles distant from the frontier.
[The French waste away.]
[French enter Smolensko, Aug. 18.]
[Barclay superseded by Kutusoff.]
Napoleon, disappointed of battle, entered Witepsk on the evening after the Russians had abandoned it (July 28). Barclay's escape was, for the French, a disaster of the first magnitude, since it extinguished all hope of crushing the larger of the two Russian armies by overwhelming numbers in one great and decisive engagement. The march of the French during the last twelve days showed at what cost every further step must be made. Since quitting Wilna the 50,000 sick and stragglers had risen to 100,000. Fever and disease struck down whole regiments. The provisioning of the army was beyond all human power. Of the 200,000 men who still remained, it might almost be calculated in how many weeks the last would perish. So fearful was the prospect that Napoleon himself thought of abandoning any further advance until the next year, and of permitting the army to enter into winter-quarters upon the Dwina. But the conviction that all Russian resistance would end with the capture of Moscow hurried him on. The army left Witepsk on the 13th of August, and followed the Russians to Smolensko. Here the entire Russian army clamoured for battle. Barclay stood alone in perceiving the necessity for retreat. The generals caballed against him; the soldiers were on the point of mutiny; the Czar himself wrote to express his impatience for an attack upon the French. Barclay nevertheless persisted in his resolution to abandon Smolensko. He so far yielded to the army as to permit the rearguard to engage in a bloody struggle with the French when they assaulted the town; but the evacuation was completed under cover of night; and when the French made their entrance into Smolensko on the next morning they found it deserted and in rums. The surrender of Smolensko was the last sacrifice that Barclay could extort from Russian pride. He no longer opposed the universal cry for battle, and the retreat was continued only with the intention of halting at the first strong position. Barclay himself was surveying a battleground when he heard that the command had been taken out of his hands. The Czar had been forced by national indignation at the loss of Smolensko to remove this able soldier, who was a Livonian by birth, and to transfer the command to Kutusoff, a thorough Russian, whom a life-time spent in victories over the Turk had made, in spite of his defeat at Austerlitz, the idol of the nation.
[The French advance from Smolensko.]
When Kutusoff reached the camp, the prolonged miseries of the French advance had already reduced the invaders to the number of the army opposed to them. As far as Smolensko the French had at least not suffered from the hostility of the population, who were Poles, not Russians; but on reaching Smolensko they entered a country where every peasant was a fanatical enemy. The villages were burnt down by their inhabitants, the corn destroyed, and the cattle driven into the woods. Every day's march onward from Smolensko cost the French three thousand men. On reaching the river Moskwa in the first week of September, a hundred and seventy-five thousand out of Napoleon's three hundred and eighty thousand soldiers were in the hospitals, or missing, or dead. About sixty thousand guarded the line of march. The Russians, on the other hand, had received reinforcements which covered their losses at Smolensko; and although detachments had been sent to support the army of Riga, Kutusoff was still able to place over one hundred thousand men in the field.
[Battle of Borodino, Sept. 7.]
[Evacuation of Moscow. French enter Moscow, Sept. 14.]
On the 5th of September the Russian army drew up for battle at Borodino, on the Moskwa, seventy miles west of the capital. At early morning on the 7th the French advanced to the attack. The battle was, in proportion to its numbers, the most sanguinary of modern times. Forty thousand French, thirty thousand Russians were struck down. At the close of the day the French were in possession of the enemy's ground, but the Russians, unbroken in their order, had only retreated to a second line of defence. Both sides claimed the victory; neither had won it. It was no catastrophe such as Napoleon required for the decision of the war, it was no triumph sufficient to save Russia from the necessity of abandoning its capital. Kutusoff had sustained too heavy a loss to face the French beneath the walls of Moscow. Peace was no nearer for the 70,000 men who had been killed or wounded in the fight. The French steadily advanced; the Russians retreated to Moscow, and evacuated the capital when their generals decided that they could not encounter the French assault. The Holy City was left undefended before the invader. But the departure of the army was the smallest part of the evacuation. The inhabitants, partly of their own free will, partly under the compulsion of the Governor, abandoned the city in a mass. No gloomy or excited crowd, as at Vienna and Berlin, thronged the streets to witness the entrance of the great conqueror, when on the 14th of September Napoleon took possession of Moscow. His troops marched through silent and deserted streets. In the solitude of the Kremlin Napoleon received the homage of a few foreigners, who alone could be collected by his servants to tender to him the submission of the city.
[Moscow fired.]
But the worst was yet to come. On the night after Napoleon's entry, fires broke out in different parts of Moscow. They were ascribed at first to accident; but when on the next day the French saw the flames gaining ground in every direction, and found that all the means for extinguishing fire had been removed from the city, they understood the doom to which Moscow had been devoted by its own defenders. Count Rostopchin, the governor, had determined on the destruction of Moscow without the knowledge of the Czar. The doors of the prisons were thrown open. Rostopchin gave the signal by setting fire to his own palace, and let loose his bands of incendiaries over the city. For five days the flames rose and fell; and when, on the evening of the 20th, the last fires ceased, three-fourths of Moscow lay in ruins.
[Napoleon at Moscow, Sept. 14-Oct. 19.]
Such was the prize for which Napoleon had sacrificed 200,000 men, and engulfed the weak remnant of his army six hundred miles deep in an enemy's country. Throughout all the terrors of the advance Napoleon had held fast to the belief that Alexander's resistance would end with the fall of his capital. The events that accompanied the entry of the French into Moscow shook his confidence; yet even now Napoleon could not believe that the Czar remained firm against all thoughts of peace. His experience in all earlier wars had given him confidence in the power of one conspicuous disaster to unhinge the resolution of kings. His trust in the deepening impression made by the fall of Moscow was fostered by negotiations begun by Kutusoff for the very purpose of delaying the French retreat. For five weeks Napoleon remained at Moscow as if spell-bound, unable to convince himself of his powerlessness to break Alexander's determination, unable to face a retreat which would display to all Europe the failure of his arms and the termination of his career of victory. At length the approach of winter forced him to action. It was impossible to provision the army at Moscow during the winter months, even if there had been nothing to fear from the enemy. Even the mocking overtures of Kutusoff had ceased. The frightful reality could no longer be concealed. On the 19th of October the order for retreat was given. It was not the destruction of Moscow, but the departure of its inhabitants, that had brought the conqueror to ruin. Above two thousand houses were still standing; but whether the buildings remained or perished made little difference; the whole value of the capital to Napoleon was lost when the inhabitants, whom he could have forced to procure supplies for his army, disappeared. Vienna and Berlin had been of such incalculable service to Napoleon because the whole native administration placed itself under his orders, and every rich and important citizen became a hostage for the activity of the rest. When the French gained Moscow, they gained nothing beyond the supplies which were at that moment in the city. All was lost to Napoleon when the class who in other capitals had been his instruments fled at his approach. The conflagration of Moscow acted upon all Europe as a signal of inextinguishable national hatred; as a military operation, it neither accelerated the retreat of Napoleon nor added to the miseries which his army had to undergo.
[Napoleon leaves Moscow, Oct. 19.]
[Forced to retreat by the same road.]
The French forces which quitted Moscow in October numbered about 100,000 men. Reinforcements had come in during the occupation of the city, and the health of the soldiers had been in some degree restored by a month's rest. Everything now depended upon gaining a line of retreat where food could be found. Though but a fourth part of the army which entered Russia in the summer, the army which left Moscow was still large enough to protect itself against the enemy, if allowed to retreat through a fresh country; if forced back upon the devastated line of its advance it was impossible for it to escape destruction. Napoleon therefore determined to make for Kaluga, on the south of Moscow, and to endeavour to gain a road to Smolensko far distant from that by which he had come. The army moved from Moscow in a southern direction. But its route had been foreseen by Kutusoff. At the end of four days' march it was met by a Russian corps at Jaroslavitz. A bloody struggle left the French in possession of the road: they continued their advance; but it was only to find that Kutusoff, with his full strength, had occupied a line of heights farther south, and barred the way to Kaluga. The effort of an assault was beyond the powers of the French. Napoleon surveyed the enemy's position, and recognised the fatal necessity of abandoning the march southwards and returning to the wasted road by which he had advanced. The meaning of the backward movement was quickly understood by the army. From the moment of quitting Jaroslavitz, disorder and despair increased with every march. Thirty thousand men were lost upon the road before a pursuer appeared in sight. When, on the 2nd of November, the army reached Wiazma, it numbered no more than 65,000 men.
[Kutusoff follows by parallel road.]
Kutusoff was unadventurous in pursuit. The necessity of moving his army along a parallel road south of the French, in order to avoid starvation, diminished the opportunities for attack; but the general himself disliked risking his forces, and preferred to see the enemy's destruction effected by the elements. At Wiazma, where, on the 3rd of November, the French were for the first time attacked in force, Kutusoff's own delay alone saved them from total ruin. In spite of heavy loss the French kept possession of the road, and secured their retreat to Smolensko, where stores of food had been accumulated, and where other and less exhausted French troops were at hand.
[Frost, Nov. 6.]
[French reach Smolensko, Nov. 9.]
Up to the 6th of November the weather had been sunny and dry. On the 6th the long-delayed terrors of Russian winter broke upon the pursuers and the pursued. Snow darkened the air and hid the last traces of vegetation from the starving cavalry trains. The temperature sank at times to forty degrees of frost. Death came, sometimes in the unfelt release from misery, sometimes in horrible forms of mutilation and disease. Both armies were exposed to the same sufferings; but the Russians had at least such succour as their countrymen could give; where the French sank, they died. The order of war disappeared under conditions which made life itself the accident of a meal or of a place by the camp-fire. Though most of the French soldiery continued to carry their arms, the Guard alone kept its separate formation; the other regiments marched in confused masses. From the 9th to the 13th of November these starving bands arrived one after another at Smolensko, expecting that here their sufferings would end. But the organisation for distributing the stores accumulated in Smolensko no longer existed. The perishing crowds were left to find shelter where they could; sacks of corn were thrown to them for food.
[Russian armies from north and south attempt to cut off French retreat.]
[Krasnoi, Nov. 17.]
It was impossible for Napoleon to give his wearied soldiers rest, for new Russian armies were advancing from the north and the south to cut off their retreat. From the Danube and from the Baltic Sea troops were pressing forward to their meeting-point upon the rear of the invader. Witgenstein, moving southwards at the head of the army of the Dwina, had overpowered the French corps stationed upon that river, and made himself master of Witepsk. The army of Bucharest, which had been toiling northwards ever since the beginning of August, had advanced to within a few days' march of its meeting-point with the army of the Dwina upon the line of Napoleon's communications. Before Napoleon reached Smolensko he sent orders to Victor, who was at Smolensko with some reserves, to march against Witgenstein and drive him back upon the Dwina. Victor set out on his mission. During the short halt of Napoleon in Smolensko, Kutusoff pushed forward to the west of the French, and took post at Krasnoi, thirty miles farther along the road by which Napoleon had to pass. The retreat of the French seemed to be actually cut off. Had the Russian general dared to face Napoleon and his Guards, he might have held the French in check until the arrival of the two auxiliary armies from the north and south enabled him to capture Napoleon and his entire force. Kutusoff, however, preferred a partial and certain victory to a struggle with Napoleon for life or death. He permitted Napoleon and the Guard to pass by unattacked, and then fell upon the hinder divisions of the French army. (Nov. 17.) These unfortunate troops were successively cut to pieces. Twenty-six thousand were made prisoners. Ney, with a part of the rear-guard, only escaped by crossing the Dnieper on the ice. Of the army that had quitted Moscow there now remained but 10,000 combatants and 20,000 followers. Kutusoff himself was brought to such a state of exhaustion that he could carry the pursuit no further, and entered into quarters upon the Dnieper.
[Victor joins Napoleon.]
[Passage of the Beresina, Nov. 28th.]
It was a few days after the battle at Krasnoi that the divisions of Victor, coming from the direction of the Dwina, suddenly encountered the remnant of Napoleon's army. Though aware that Napoleon was in retreat, they knew nothing of the calamities that had befallen him, and were struck with amazement when, in the middle of a forest, they met with what seemed more like a miserable troop of captives than an army upon the march. Victor's soldiers of a mere auxiliary corps found themselves more than double the effective strength of the whole army of Moscow. Their arrival again placed Napoleon at the head of 30,000 disciplined troops, and gave the French a gleam of victory in the last and seemingly most hopeless struggle in the campaign. Admiral Tchitchagoff, in command of the army marching from the Danube, had at length reached the line of Napoleon's retreat, and established himself at Borisov, where the road through Poland crosses the river Beresina. The bridge was destroyed by the Russians, and Tchitchagoff opened communication with Witgenstein's army, which lay only a few miles to the north. It appeared as if the retreat of the French was now finally intercepted, and the surrender of Napoleon inevitable. Yet even in this hopeless situation the military skill and daring of the French worked with something of its ancient power. The army reached the Beresina; Napoleon succeeded in withdrawing the enemy from the real point of passage; bridges were thrown across the river, and after desperate fighting a great part of the army made good its footing upon the western bank (Nov. 28). But the losses even among the effective troops were enormous. The fate of the miserable crowd that followed them, torn by the cannon-fire of the Russians, and precipitated into the river by the breaking of one of the bridges, has made the passage of the Beresina a synonym for the utmost degree of human woe.
[French reach the Niemen, Dec. 13.]
This was the last engagement fought by the army. The Guards still preserved their order: Marshal Ney still found soldiers capable of turning upon the pursuer with his own steady and unflagging courage; but the bulk of the army struggled forward in confused crowds, harassed by the Cossacks, and laying down their arms by thousands before the enemy. The frost, which had broken up on the 19th, returned on the 30th of November with even greater severity. Twenty thousand fresh troops which joined the army between the Beresina and Wilna scarcely arrested the process of dissolution. On the 3rd of December Napoleon quitted the army. Wilna itself was abandoned with all its stores; and when at length the fugitives reached the Niemen, they numbered little more than twenty thousand. Here, six months earlier, three hundred and eighty thousand men had crossed with Napoleon. A hundred thousand more had joined the army in the course of its retreat. Of all this host, not the twentieth part reached the Prussian frontier. A hundred and seventy thousand remained prisoners in the hands of the Russians; a greater number had perished. Of the twenty thousand men who now beheld the Niemen, probably not seven thousand had crossed with Napoleon. In the presence of a catastrophe so overwhelming and so unparalleled the Russian generals might well be content with their own share in the work of destruction. Yet the event proved that Kutusoff had done ill in sparing the extremest effort to capture or annihilate his foe. Not only was Napoleon's own escape the pledge of continued war, but the remnant that escaped with him possessed a military value out of all proportion to its insignificant numbers. The best of the army were the last to succumb. Out of those few thousands who endured to the end, a very large proportion were veteran officers, who immediately took their place at the head of Napoleon's newly-raised armies, and gave to them a military efficiency soon to be bitterly proved by Europe on many a German battle-field.
[York's convention with the Russians, Dec. 30.]
[York and the Prussian contingent at Riga.]
Four hundred thousand men were lost to a conqueror who could still stake the lives of half a million more. The material power of Napoleon, though largely, was not fatally diminished by the Russian campaign; it was through its moral effect, first proved in the action of Prussia, that the retreat from Moscow created a new order of things in Europe. The Prussian contingent, commanded by General von York, lay in front of Riga, where it formed part of the French subsidiary army-corps led by Marshal Macdonald. Early in November the Russian governor of Riga addressed himself to York, assuring him that Napoleon was ruined, and soliciting York himself to take up arms against Macdonald. [174] York had no evidence, beyond the word of the Russian commander, of the extent of Napoleon's losses; and even if the facts were as stated, it was by no means clear that the Czar might not be inclined to take vengeance on Prussia on account of its alliance with Napoleon. York returned a guarded answer to the Russian, and sent an officer to Wilna to ascertain the real state of the French army. On the 8th of December the officer returned, and described what he had himself seen. Soon afterwards the Russian commandant produced a letter from the Czar, declaring his intention to deal with Prussia as a friend, not as an enemy. On these points all doubt was removed; York's decision was thrown upon himself. York was a rigid soldier of the old Prussian type, dominated by the idea of military duty. The act to which the Russian commander invited him, and which the younger officers were ready to hail as the liberation of Prussia, might be branded by his sovereign as desertion and treason. Whatever scruples and perplexity might be felt in such a situation by a loyal and obedient soldier were felt by York. He nevertheless chose the course which seemed to be for his country's good; and having chosen it, he accepted all the consequences which it involved. On the 30th of December a convention was signed at Tauroggen, which, under the guise of a truce, practically withdrew the Prussian army from Napoleon, and gave the Russians possession of Königsberg. The momentous character of the act was recognised by Napoleon as soon as the news reached Paris. York's force was the strongest military body upon the Russian frontier; united with Macdonald, it would have forced the Russian pursuit to stop at the Niemen; abandoning Napoleon, it brought his enemies on to the Vistula, and threatened incalculable danger by its example to all the rest of Germany. For the moment, however, Napoleon could count upon the spiritless obedience of King Frederick William. In the midst of the French regiments that garrisoned Berlin, the King wrote orders pronouncing York's convention null and void, and ordering York himself to be tried by court-martial. The news reached the loyal soldier: he received it with grief, but maintained his resolution to act for his country's good. "With bleeding heart," he wrote, "I burst the bond of obedience, and carry on the war upon my own responsibility. The army desires war with France; the nation desires it; the King himself desires it, but his will is not free. The army must make his will free."
[The Czar and Stein.]
[Alexander enters Prussia, Jan., 1813.]
York's act was nothing less than the turning-point in Prussian history. Another Prussian, at this great crisis of Europe, played as great, though not so conspicuous, a part. Before the outbreak of the Russian war, the Czar had requested the exile Stein to come to St. Petersburg to aid him with his counsels during the struggle with Napoleon. Stein gladly accepted the call; and throughout the campaign he encouraged the Czar in the resolute resistance which the Russian nation itself required of its Government. So long as French soldiers remained on Russian soil, there was indeed little need for a foreigner to stimulate the Czar's energies; but when the pursuit had gloriously ended on the Niemen, the case became very different. Kutusoff and the generals were disinclined to carry the war into Germany. The Russian army had itself lost three-fourths of its numbers; Russian honour was satisfied; the liberation of Western Europe might be left to Western Europe itself. Among the politicians who surrounded Alexander, there were a considerable number, including the first minister Romanzoff, who still believed in the good policy of a French alliance. These were the influences with which Stein had to contend, when the question arose whether Russia should rest satisfied with its own victories, or summon all Europe to unite in overthrowing Napoleon's tyranny. No record remains of the stages by which Alexander's mind rose to the clear and firm conception of a single European interest against Napoleon; indications exist that it was Stein's personal influence which most largely affected his decision. Even in the darkest moments of the war, when the forces of Russia seemed wholly incapable of checking Napoleon's advance, Stein had never abandoned his scheme for raising the German nation against Napoleon. The confidence with which he had assured Alexander of ultimate victory over the invader had been thoroughly justified; the triumph which he had predicted had come with a rapidity and completeness even surpassing his hopes. For a moment Alexander identified himself with the statesman who, in the midst of Germany's humiliation, had been so resolute, so far-sighted, so aspiring. [175] The minister of the peace-party was dismissed: Alexander ordered his troops to advance into Prussia, and charged Stein himself to assume the government of the Prussian districts occupied by Russian armies. Stein's mission was to arm the Landwehr, and to gather all the resources of the country for war against France; his powers were to continue until some definite arrangement should be made between the King of Prussia and the Czar.
[Stein's commission from Alexander.]
[Province of East Prussia arms, Jan., 1813.]
Armed with this commission from a foreign sovereign, Stein appeared at Königsberg on the 22nd of January, 1813, and published an order requiring the governor of the province of East Prussia to convoke an assembly for the purpose of arming the people. Stein would have desired York to appear as President of the Assembly; but York, like most of the Prussian officials, was alarmed and indignant at Stein's assumption of power in Prussia as the representative of the Russian Czar, and hesitated to connect himself with so revolutionary a measure as the arming of the people. It was only upon condition that Stein himself should not appear in the Assembly that York consented to recognise its powers. The Assembly met. York entered the house, and spoke a few soul-stirring words. His undisguised declaration of war with France was received with enthusiastic cheers. A plan for the formation of a Landwehr, based on Scharnhorst's plans of 1808, was laid before the Assembly, and accepted. Forty thousand men were called to arms in a province which included nothing west of the Vistula. The nation itself had begun the war, and left its Government no choice but to follow. Stein's task was fulfilled; and he retired to the quarters of Alexander, unwilling to mar by the appearance of foreign intervention the work to which the Prussian nation had now committed itself beyond power of recall. It was the fortune of the Prussian State, while its King dissembled before the French in Berlin, to possess a soldier brave enough to emancipate its army, and a citizen bold enough to usurp the government of its provinces. Frederick William forgave York his intrepidity; Stein's action was never forgiven by the timid and jealous sovereign whose subjects he had summoned to arm themselves for their country's deliverance.
[Policy of Hardenberg.]
[Treaty of Kalisch, Feb. 27.]
The Government of Berlin, which since the beginning of the Revolutionary War had neither been able to fight, nor to deceive, nor to be honest, was at length forced by circumstances into a certain effectiveness in all three forms of action. In the interval between the first tidings of Napoleon's disasters and the announcement of York's convention with the Russians, Hardenberg had been assuring Napoleon of his devotion, and collecting troops which he carefully prevented from joining him. [176] The desire of the King was to gain concessions without taking part in the war either against Napoleon or on his side. When, however, the balance turned more decidedly against Napoleon, he grew bolder; and the news of York's defection, though it seriously embarrassed the Cabinet for the moment, practically decided it in favour of war with France. The messenger who was sent to remove York from his command received private instructions to fall into the hands of the Russians, and to inform the Czar that, if his troops advanced as far as the Oder, King Frederick William would be ready to conclude an alliance. Every post that arrived from East Prussia strengthened the warlike resolutions of the Government. At length the King ventured on the decisive step of quitting Berlin and placing himself at Breslau (Jan. 25). At Berlin he was in the power of the French; at Breslau he was within easy reach of Alexander. The significance of the journey could not be mistaken: it was immediately followed by open preparation for war with France. On February 3rd there appeared an edict inviting volunteers to enrol themselves: a week later all exemptions from military service were abolished, and the entire male population of Prussia between the ages of seventeen and twenty-four was declared liable to serve. General Knesebeck was sent to the headquarters of the Czar, which were now between Warsaw and Kalisch, to conclude a treaty of alliance. Knesebeck demanded securities for the restoration to Prussia of all the Polish territory which it had possessed before 1806; the Czar, unwilling either to grant this condition or to lose the Prussian alliance, kept Knesebeck at his quarters, and sent Stein with a Russian plenipotentiary to Breslau to conclude the treaty with Hardenberg himself. Stein and Hardenberg met at Breslau on the 26th of February. Hardenberg accepted the Czar's terms, and the treaty, known as the Treaty of Kalisch, [177] was signed on the following day. By this treaty, without guaranteeing the restoration of Prussian Poland, Russia undertook not to lay down its arms until the Prussian State as a whole was restored to the area and strength which it had possessed before 1806. For this purpose annexations were promised in Northern Germany. With regard to Poland, Russia promised no more than to permit Prussia to retain what it had received in 1772, together with a strip of territory to connect this district with Silesia. The meaning of the agreement was that Prussia should abandon to Russia the greater part of its late Polish provinces, and receive an equivalent German territory in its stead. The Treaty of Kalisch virtually surrendered to the Czar all that Prussia had gained in the partitions of Poland made in 1793 and in 1795. The sacrifice was deemed a most severe one by every Prussian politician, and was accepted only as a less evil than the loss of Russia's friendship, and a renewed submission to Napoleon. No single statesman, not even Stein himself, appears to have understood that in exchanging its Polish conquests for German annexations, in turning to the German west instead of to the alien Slavonic east, Prussia was in fact taking the very step which made it the possible head of a future united Germany.
[French retreat to the Elbe.]
War was still undeclared upon Napoleon by King Frederick William, but throughout the month of February the light cavalry of the Russians pushed forward unhindered through Prussian territory towards the Oder, and crowds of volunteers, marching through Berlin on their way to the camps in Silesia, gave the French clear signs of the storm that was about to burst upon them. [178] The remnant of Napoleon's army, now commanded by Eugene Beauharnais, had fallen back step by step to the Oder. Here, resting on the fortresses, it might probably have checked the Russian advance; but the heart of Eugene failed; the line of the Oder was abandoned, and the retreat continued to Berlin and the Elbe. The Cossacks followed. On the 20th of February they actually entered Berlin and fought with the French in the streets. The French garrison was far superior in force; but the appearance of the Cossacks caused such a ferment that, although the alliance between France and Prussia was still in nominal existence, the French troops expected to be cut to pieces by the people. For some days they continued to bivouac in the streets, and as soon as it became known that a regular Russian force had reached the Oder, Eugene determined to evacuate Berlin. On the 4th of March the last French soldier quitted the Prussian capital. The Cossacks rode through the town as the French left it, and fought with their rear-guard. Some days later Witgenstein appeared with Russian infantry. On March 17th York made his triumphal entry at the head of his corps, himself cold and rigid in the midst of tumultuous outbursts of patriotic joy.
[King of Prussia declares war March 17.]
It was on this same day that King Frederick William issued his proclamation to the Prussian people, declaring that war had begun with France, and summoning the nation to enter upon the struggle as one that must end either in victory or in total destruction. The proclamation was such as became a monarch conscious that his own faint-heartedness had been the principal cause of Prussia's humiliation. It was simple and unboastful, admitting that the King had made every effort to preserve the French alliance, and ascribing the necessity for war to the intolerable wrongs inflicted by Napoleon in spite of Prussia's fulfilment of its treaty-obligations. The appeal to the great memories of Prussia's earlier sovereigns, and to the example of Russia, Spain, and all countries which in present or in earlier times had fought for their independence against a stronger foe, was worthy of the truthful and modest tone in which the King spoke of the misfortunes of Prussia under his own rule.
[Spirit of the Prussian nation.]
[Idea of Germany unity.]
But no exhortations were necessary to fire the spirit of the Prussian people. Seven years of suffering and humiliation had done their work. The old apathy of all classes had vanished under the pressure of a bitter sense of wrong. If among the Court party of Berlin and the Conservative landowners there existed a secret dread of the awakening of popular forces, the suspicion could not be now avowed. A movement as penetrating and as universal as that which France had experienced in 1792 swept through the Prussian State. It had required the experience of years of wretchedness, the intrusion of the French soldier upon the peace of the family, the sight of the homestead swept bare of its stock to supply the invaders of Russia, the memory of Schill's companions shot in cold blood for the cause of the Fatherland, before the Prussian nation caught that flame which had spontaneously burst out in France, in Spain, and in Russia at the first shock of foreign aggression. But the passion of the Prussian people, if it had taken long to kindle, was deep, steadfast, and rational. It was undisgraced by the frenzies of 1792, or by the religious fanaticism of the Spanish war of liberation; where religion entered into the struggle, it heightened the spirit of self-sacrifice rather than that of hatred to the enemy. Nor was it a thing of small moment to the future of Europe that in every leading mind the cause of Prussia was identified with the cause of the whole German race. The actual condition of Germany warranted no such conclusion, for Saxony, Bavaria, and the whole of the Rhenish Federation still followed Napoleon: but the spirit and the ideas which became a living force when at length the contest with Napoleon broke out were those of men like Stein, who in the depths of Germany's humiliation had created the bright and noble image of a common Fatherland. It was no more given to Stein to see his hopes fulfilled than it was given to Mirabeau to establish constitutional liberty in France, or to the Italian patriots of 1797 to create a united Italy. A group of States where kings like Frederick William and Francis, ministers like Hardenberg and Metternich, governed millions of people totally destitute of political instincts and training, was not to be suddenly transformed into a free nation by the genius of an individual or the patriotism of a single epoch. But if the work of German union was one which, even in the barren form of military empire, required the efforts of two more generations, the ideals of 1813 were no transient and ineffective fancy. Time was on the side of those who called the Prussian monarchy the true centre round which Germany could gather. If in the sequel Prussia was slow to recognise its own opportunities, the fault was less with patriots who hoped too much than with kings and ministers who dared too little.
[Formation of the Landwehr.]
For the moment, the measures of the Prussian Government were worthy of the spirit shown by the nation. Scharnhorst's military system had given Prussia 100,000 trained soldiers ready to join the existing army of 45,000. The scheme for the formation of a Landwehr, though not yet carried into effect, needed only to receive the sanction of the King. On the same day that Frederick William issued his proclamation to the people, he decreed the formation of the Landwehr and the Landsturm. The latter force, which was intended in case of necessity to imitate the peasant warfare of Spain and La Vendée, had no occasion to act: the Landwehr, though its arming was delayed by the poverty and exhaustion of the country, gradually became a most formidable reserve, and sent its battalions to fight by the side of the regulars in some of the greatest engagements in the war. It was the want of arms and money, not of willing soldiers, that prevented Prussia from instantly attacking Napoleon with 200,000 men. The conscription was scarcely needed from the immense number of volunteers who joined the ranks. Though the completion of the Prussian armaments required some months more, Prussia did not need to stand upon the defensive. An army of 50,000 men was ready to cross the Elbe immediately on the arrival of the Russians, and to open the next campaign in the territory of Napoleon's allies of the Rhenish Federation.
Chapter XI
The War of Liberation--Blücher crosses the Elbe--Battle of Lützen--The Allies retreat to Silesia--Battle of Bautzen--Armistice--Napoleon intends to intimidate Austria--Mistaken as to the Forces of Austria--Metternich's Policy--Treaty of Reichenbach--Austria offers its Mediation--Congress of Prague--Austria enters the War--Armies and Plans of Napoleon and the Allies--Campaign of August--Battles of Dresden, Grosbeeren, the Katzbach, and Kulm--Effect of these Actions--Battle of Dennewitz--German Policy of Austria favourable to the Princes of the Rhenish Confederacy--Frustrated Hopes of German Unity--Battle of Leipzig--The Allies reach the Rhine-- Offers of Peace at Frankfort--Plan of Invasion of France--Backwardness of Austria--The Allies enter France--Campaign of 1814--Congress of Châtillon-- Napoleon moves to the rear of the Allies--The Allies advance on Paris-- Capitulation of Paris--Entry of the Allies--Dethronement of Napoleon-- Restoration of the Bourbons--The Charta--Treaty of Paris--Territorial Effects of the War, 1792-1814--Every Power except France had gained--France relatively weaker in Europe--Summary of the Permanent Effects of this Period on Europe.
[Napoleon in 1813.]
The first three months of the year 1813 were spent by Napoleon in vigorous preparation for a campaign in Northern Germany. Immediately after receiving the news of York's convention with the Russians he had ordered a levy of 350,000 men. It was in vain that Frederick William and Hardenberg affected to disavow the general as a traitor; Napoleon divined the national character of York's act, and laid his account for a war against the combined forces of Prussia and Russia. In spite of the catastrophe of the last campaign, Napoleon was still stronger than his enemies. Italy and the Rhenish Federation had never wavered in their allegiance; Austria, though a cold ally, had at least shown no signs of hostility. The resources of an empire of forty million inhabitants were still at Napoleon's command. It was in the youth and inexperience of the new soldiers, and in the scarcity of good officers, [179] that the losses of the previous year showed their most visible effect. Lads of seventeen, commanded in great part by officers who had never been through a campaign, took the place of the soldiers who had fought at Friedland and Wagram. They were as brave as their predecessors, but they failed in bodily strength and endurance. Against them came the remnant of the men who had pursued Napoleon from Moscow, and a Prussian army which was but the vanguard of an armed nation. Nevertheless, Napoleon had no cause to expect defeat, provided that Austria remained on his side. Though the Prussian nation entered upon the conflict in the most determined spirit, a war on the Elbe against Russia and Prussia combined was a less desperate venture than a war with Russia alone beyond the Niemen.
[Blücher crosses the Elbe, March, 1813.]
When King Frederick William published his declaration of war (March 17), the army of Eugène had already fallen back as far west as Magdeburg, leaving garrisons in most of the fortresses between the Elbe and the Russian frontier. Napoleon was massing troops on the Main, and preparing for an advance in force, when the Prussians, commanded by Blücher, and some weak divisions of the Russian army, pushed forward to the Elbe. On the 18th of March the Cossacks appeared in the suburbs of Dresden, on the right bank of the river. Davoust, who was in command of the French garrison, blew up two arches of the bridge, and retired to Magdeburg: Blücher soon afterwards entered Dresden, and called upon the Saxon nation to rise against Napoleon. But he spoke to deaf ears. The common people were indifferent; the officials waited to see which side would conquer. Blücher could scarcely obtain provisions for his army; he passed on westwards, and came into the neighbourhood of Leipzig. Here he found himself forced to halt, and to wait for his allies. Though a detachment of the Russian army under Witgenstein had already crossed the Elbe, the main army, with Kutusoff, was still lingering at Kalisch on the Polish frontier, where it had arrived six weeks before. As yet the Prussians had only 50,000 men ready for action; until the Russians came up, it was unsafe to advance far beyond the Elbe. Blücher counted every moment lost that kept him from battle: the Russian commander-in-chief, sated with glory and sinking beneath the infirmities of a veteran, could scarcely be induced to sign an order of march. At length Kutusoff's illness placed the command in younger hands. His strength failed him during the march from Poland; he was left dying in Silesia; and on the 24th of April the Czar and the King of Prussia led forward his veteran troops into Dresden.
[Napoleon enters Dresden, May 14.]
[Battle of Lützen, May 2.]
Napoleon was now known to be approaching with considerable force by the roads of the Saale. A pitched battle west of the Elbe was necessary before the Allies could hope to win over any of the States of the Rhenish Confederacy; the flat country beyond Leipzig offered the best possible field for cavalry, in which the Allies were strong and Napoleon extremely deficient. It was accordingly determined to unite all the divisions of the army with Blücher on the west of Leipzig, and to attack the French as soon as they descended from the hilly country of the Saale, and began their march across the Saxon plain. The Allies took post at Lützen: the French advanced, and at midday on the 2nd of May the battle of Lützen began. Till evening, victory inclined to the Allies. The Prussian soldiery fought with the utmost spirit; for the first time in Napoleon's campaigns, the French infantry proved weaker than an enemy when fighting against them in equal numbers. But the generalship of Napoleon turned the scale. Seventy thousand of the French were thrown upon fifty thousand of the Allies; the battle was fought in village streets and gardens, where cavalry were useless; and at the close of the day, though the losses on each side were equal, the Allies were forced from the positions which they had gained. Such a result was equivalent to a lost battle. Napoleon's junction with the army of Eugène at Magdeburg was now inevitable, unless a second engagement was fought and won. No course remained to the Allies but to stake everything upon a renewed attack, or to retire behind the Elbe and meet the reinforcements assembling in Silesia. King Frederick William declared for a second battle; [180] he was over-ruled, and the retreat commenced. Napoleon entered Dresden on May 14th. No attempt was made by the Allies to hold the line of the Elbe; all the sanguine hopes with which Blücher and his comrades had advanced to attack Napoleon within the borders of the Rhenish Confederacy were dashed to the ground. The Fatherland remained divided against itself. Saxony and the rest of the vassal States were secured to France by the victory of Lützen; the liberation of Germany was only to be wrought by prolonged and obstinate warfare, and by the wholesale sacrifice of Prussian life.
[Armistice, June 4.]
[Battle of Bautzen, May 21.]
It was with deep disappointment, but not with any wavering of purpose, that the allied generals fell back before Napoleon towards the Silesian fortresses. The Prussian troops which had hitherto taken part in the war were not the third part of those which the Government was arming; new Russian divisions were on the march from Poland. As the Allies moved eastwards from the Elbe, both their own forces and those of Napoleon gathered strength. The retreat stopped at Bautzen, on the river Spree; and here, on the 19th of May, 90,000 of the Allies and the same number of the French drew up in order of battle. The Allies held a long, broken chain of hills behind the river, and the ground lying between these hills and the village of Bautzen. On the 20th the French began the attack, and won the passage of the river. In spite of the approach of Ney with 40,000 more troops, the Czar and the King of Prussia determined to continue the battle on the following day. The struggle of the 21st was of the same obstinate and indecisive character as that at Lützen. Twenty-five thousand French had been killed or wounded before the day was over, but the bad generalship of the Allies had again given Napoleon the victory. The Prussian and Russian commanders were all at variance; Alexander, who had to decide in their contentions, possessed no real military faculty. It was not for want of brave fighting and steadfastness before the enemy that Bautzen was lost. The Allies retreated in perfect order, and without the loss of a single gun. Napoleon followed, forcing his wearied regiments to ceaseless exertion, in the hope of ruining by pursuit an enemy whom he could not overthrow in battle. In a few more days the discord of the allied generals and the sufferings of the troops would probably have made them unable to resist Napoleon's army, weakened as it was. But the conqueror himself halted in the moment of victory. On the 4th of June an armistice of seven weeks arrested the pursuit, and brought the first act of the War of Liberation to a close.
[Napoleon and Austria.]
Napoleon's motive for granting this interval to his enemies, the most fatal step in his whole career, has been vaguely sought among the general reasons for military delay; as a matter of fact, Napoleon was thinking neither of the condition of his own army nor of that of the Allies when he broke off hostilities, but of the probable action of the Court of Vienna. [181] "I shall grant a truce," he wrote to the Viceroy of Italy (June 2, 1813), "on account of the armaments of Austria, and in order to gain time to bring up the Italian army to Laibach to threaten Vienna." Austria had indeed resolved to regain, either by war or negotiation, the provinces which it had lost in 1809. It was now preparing to offer its mediation, but it was also preparing to join the Allies in case Napoleon rejected its demands. Metternich was anxious to attain his object, if possible, without war. The Austrian State was bankrupt; its army had greatly deteriorated since 1809; Metternich himself dreaded both the ambition of Russia and what he considered the revolutionary schemes of the German patriots. It was his object not to drive Napoleon from his throne, but to establish a European system in which neither France nor Russia should be absolutely dominant. Soon after the retreat from Moscow the Cabinet of Vienna had informed Napoleon, though in the most friendly terms, that Austria could not longer remain in the position of a dependent ally. [182] Metternich stated, and not insincerely, that by certain concessions Napoleon might still count on Austria's friendship; but at the same time he negotiated with the allied Powers, and encouraged them to believe that Austria would, under certain circumstances, strike on their behalf. The course of the campaign of May was singularly favourable to Metternich's policy. Napoleon had not won a decided victory; the Allies, on the other hand, were so far from success that Austria could set almost any price it pleased upon its alliance. By the beginning of June it had become a settled matter in the Austrian Cabinet that Napoleon must be made to resign the Illyrian Provinces conquered in 1809 and the districts of North Germany annexed in 1810; but it was still the hope of the Government to obtain this result by peaceful means. Napoleon saw that Austria was about to change its attitude, but he had by no means penetrated the real intentions of Metternich. He credited the Viennese Government with a stronger sentiment of hostility towards himself than it actually possessed; at the same time he failed to appreciate the fixed and settled character of its purpose. He believed that the action of Austria would depend simply upon the means which he possessed to intimidate it; that, if the army of Italy were absent, Austria would attack him; that, on the other hand, if he could gain time to bring the army of Italy into Carniola, Austria would keep the peace. It was with this belief, and solely for the purpose of bringing up a force to menace Austria, that Napoleon stayed his hand against the Prussian and Russian armies after the battle of Bautzen, and gave time for the gathering of the immense forces which were destined to effect his destruction.
[Metternich offers Austria's mediation.]
Immediately after the conclusion of the armistice of June 4th, Metternich invited Napoleon to accept Austria's mediation for a general peace. The settlement which Metternich contemplated was a very different one from that on which Stein and the Prussian patriots had set their hopes. Austria was willing to leave to Napoleon the whole of Italy and Holland, the frontier of the Rhine, and the Protectorate of Western Germany: all that was required by Metternich, as arbiter of Europe, was the restoration of the provinces taken from Austria after the war of 1809, the reinstatement of Prussia in Western Poland, and the abandonment by France of the North-German district annexed in 1810. But to Napoleon the greater or less extent of the concessions asked by Austria was a matter of no moment. He was determined to make no concessions at all, and he entered into negotiations only for the purpose of disguising from Austria the real object with which he had granted the armistice. While Napoleon affected to be weighing the proposals of Austria, he was in fact calculating the number of marches which would place the Italian army on the Austrian frontier; this once effected, he expected to hear nothing more of Metternich's demands.
[Napoleon deceived as to the forces of Austria.]
It was a game of deceit; but there was no one who was so thoroughly deceived as Napoleon himself. By some extraordinary miscalculation on the part of his secret agents, he was led to believe that the whole force of Austria, both in the north and the south, amounted to only 100,000 men, [183] and it was on this estimate that he had formed his plans of intimidation. In reality Austria had double that number of men ready to take the field. By degrees Napoleon saw reason to suspect himself in error. On the 11th of July he wrote to his Foreign Minister, Maret, bitterly reproaching him with the failure of the secret service to gain any trustworthy information. It was not too late to accept Metternich's terms. Yet even now, when the design of intimidating Austria had proved an utter delusion, and Napoleon was convinced that Austria would fight, and fight with very powerful forces, his pride and his invincible belief in his own superiority prevented him from drawing back. He made an attempt to enter upon a separate negotiation with Russia, and, when this failed, he resolved to face the conflict with the whole of Europe.
[Treaty of Reichenbach, June 27.]
There was no longer any uncertainty among Napoleon's enemies. On the 27th of June, Austria had signed a treaty at Reichenbach, pledging itself to join the allied Powers in the event of Napoleon rejecting the conditions to be proposed by Austria as mediator; and the conditions so to be proposed were fixed by the same treaty. They were the following:--The suppression of the Duchy of Warsaw; the restoration to Austria of the Illyrian Provinces; and the surrender by Napoleon of the North-German district annexed to his Empire in 1810. Terms more hostile to France than these Austria declined to embody in its mediation. The Elbe might still sever Prussia from its German provinces lost in 1807; Napoleon might still retain, as chief of the Rhenish Confederacy, his sovereignty over the greater part of the German race.
[Austria enters the war, Aug. 10.]
[Congress of Prague, July 15-Aug. 10.]
From the moment when these conditions were fixed, there was nothing which the Prussian generals so much dreaded as that Napoleon might accept them, and so rob the Allies of the chance of crushing him by means of Austria's support. But their fears were groundless. The counsels of Napoleon were exactly those which his worst enemies would have desired him to adopt. War, and nothing but war, was his fixed resolve. He affected to entertain Austria's propositions, and sent his envoy Caulaincourt to a Congress which Austria summoned at Prague; but it was only for the purpose of gaining a few more weeks of preparation. The Congress met; the armistice was prolonged to the 10th of August. Caulaincourt, however, was given no power to close with Austria's demands. He was ignorant that he had only been sent to Prague in order to gain time. He saw the storm gathering: unable to believe that Napoleon intended to fight all Europe rather than make the concessions demanded of him, he imagined that his master still felt some doubt whether Austria and the other Powers meant to adhere to their word. As the day drew nigh which closed the armistice and the period given for a reply to Austria's ultimatum, Caulaincourt implored Napoleon not to deceive himself with hopes that Austria would draw back. Napoleon had no such hope; he knew well that Austria would declare war, and he accepted the issue. Caulaincourt heard nothing more. At midnight on the 10th of August the Congress declared itself dissolved. Before the dawn of the next morning the army in Silesia saw the blaze of the beacon-fires which told that negotiation was at an end, and that Austria was entering the war on the side of the Allies. [184]
[Armies of Napoleon and the Allies.]
Seven days' notice was necessary before the commencement of actual hostilities. Napoleon, himself stationed at Dresden, held all the lower course of the Elbe; and his generals had long had orders to be ready to march on the morning of the 18th. Forces had come up from all parts of the Empire, raising the French army at the front to 300,000 men; but, for the first time in Napoleon's career, his enemies had won from a pause in war results even surpassing his own. The strength of the Prussian and Russian armies was now enormously different from what it had been at Lützen and Bautzen. The Prussian Landwehr, then a weaponless and ill-clad militia drilling in the villages, was now fully armed, and in great part at the front. New Russian divisions had reached Silesia. Austria took the field with a force as numerous as that which had checked Napoleon in 1809. At the close of the armistice, 350,000 men actually faced the French positions upon the Elbe; 300,000 more were on the march, or watching the German fortresses and the frontier of Italy. The allied troops operating against Napoleon were divided into three armies. In the north, between Wittenberg and Berlin, Bernadotte commanded 60,000 Russians and Prussians, in addition to his own Swedish contingent. Blücher was placed at the head of 100,000 Russians and Prussians in Silesia. The Austrians remained undivided, and formed, together with some Russian and Prussian divisions, the great army of Bohemia, 200,000 strong, under the command of Schwarzenberg. The plan of the campaign had been agreed upon by the Allies soon after the Treaty of Reichenbach had been made with Austria. It was a sound, though not a daring one.
[Plan of the Allies.]
The three armies, now forming an arc from Wittenberg to the north of Bohemia, were to converge upon the line of Napoleon's communications behind Dresden; if separately attacked, their generals were to avoid all hazardous engagements, and to manoeuvre so as to weary the enemy and preserve their own general relations, as far as possible, unchanged. Blücher, as the most exposed, was expected to content himself the longest with the defensive; the great army of Bohemia, after securing the mountain-passes between Bohemia and Saxony, might safely turn Napoleon's position at Dresden, and so draw the two weaker armies towards it for one vast and combined engagement in the plain of Leipzig.
[Napoleon's plan of attack.]
In outline, the plan of the Allies was that which Napoleon expected them to adopt. His own design was to anticipate it by an offensive of extraordinary suddenness and effect. Hostilities could not begin before the morning of the 18th of August; by the 21st or the 22nd, Napoleon calculated that he should have captured Berlin. Oudinot, who was at Wittenberg with 80,000 men, had received orders to advance upon the Prussian capital at the moment that the armistice expired, and to force it, if necessary by bombardment, into immediate surrender. The effect of this blow, as Napoleon supposed, would be to disperse the entire reserve-force of the Prussian monarchy, and paralyse the action of its army in the field. While Oudinot marched on Berlin, Blücher was to be attacked in Silesia, and prevented from rendering any assistance either on the north or on the south. The mass of Napoleon's forces, centred at Dresden, and keeping watch upon the movements of the army of Bohemia, would either fight a great battle, or, if the Allies made a false movement, march straight upon Prague, the centre of Austria's supplies, and reach it before the enemy. All the daring imagination of Napoleon's earlier campaigns displayed itself in such a project, which, if successful, would have terminated the war within ten days; but this imagination was no longer, as in those earlier campaigns, identical with insight into real possibilities. The success of Napoleon's plan involved the surprise or total defeat of Bernadotte before Berlin, the disablement of Blücher, and a victory, or a strategical success equivalent to a victory, over the vast army of the south. It demanded of a soldiery, inferior to the enemy in numerical strength, the personal superiority which had belonged to the men of Jena and Austerlitz, when in fact the French regiments of conscripts had ceased to be a match for equal numbers of the enemy. But no experience could alter Napoleon's fixed belief in the fatuity of all warfare except his own. After the havoc of Borodino, after the even struggles of Lützen and Bautzen, he still reasoned as if he had before him the armies of Brunswick and Mack. His plan assumed the certainty of success in each of its parts; for the failure of a single operation hazarded all the rest, by requiring the transfer of reinforcements from armies already too weak for the tasks assigned to them. Nevertheless, the utmost that Napoleon would acknowledge was that the execution of his design needed energy. He still underrated the force which Austria had brought into the field against him. Though ignorant of the real position and strength of the army in Bohemia, and compelled to wait for the enemy's movements before striking on this side, he already in imagination saw the war decided by the fall of the Prussian capital.
[Triple movement, Aug. 18-26.]
[Battle of Dresden, Aug. 26, 27.]
[Battles of Grossbeeren, Aug. 23, and the Katzbach, Aug. 26.]
On the 18th of August the forward movement began. Oudinot advanced from Wittenberg towards Berlin; Napoleon himself hurried into Silesia, intending to deal Blücher one heavy blow, and instantly to return and place himself before Schwarzenberg. On the 21st, and following days, the Prussian general was attacked and driven eastwards. Napoleon committed the pursuit to Macdonald, and hastened back to Dresden, already threatened by the advance of the Austrians from Bohemia. Schwarzenberg and the allied sovereigns, as soon as they heard that Napoleon had gone to seek Blücher in Silesia, had in fact abandoned their cautious plans, and determined to make an assault upon Dresden with the Bohemian army alone. But it was in vain that they tried to surprise Napoleon. He was back at Dresden on the 25th, and ready for the attack. Never were Napoleon's hopes higher than on this day. His success in Silesia had filled him with confidence. He imagined Oudinot to be already in Berlin; and the advance of Schwarzenberg against Dresden gave him the very opportunity which he desired for crushing the Bohemian army in one great battle, before it could draw support either from Blücher or from Bernadotte. Another Austerlitz seemed to be at hand. Napoleon wrote to Paris that he should be in Prague before the enemy; and, while he completed his defences in front of Dresden, he ordered Vandamme, with 40,000 men, to cross the Elbe at Königstein, and force his way south-westwards on to the roads into Bohemia, in the rear of the Great Army, in order to destroy its magazines and menace its line of retreat on Prague. On August 26th Schwarzenberg's host assailed the positions of Napoleon on the slopes and gardens outside Dresden. Austrians, Russians, and Prussians all took part in the attack. Moreau, the victor of Hohenlinden, stood by the side of the Emperor Alexander, whom he had come to help against his own countrymen. He lived only to witness one of the last and greatest victories of France. The attack was everywhere repelled: the Austrian divisions were not only beaten, but disgraced and overthrown. At the end of two days' fighting the Allies were in full retreat, leaving 20,000 prisoners in the hands of Napoleon. It was a moment when the hearts of the bravest sank, and when hope itself might well vanish, as the rumour passed through the Prussian regiments that Metternich was again in friendly communication with Napoleon. But in the midst of Napoleon's triumph intelligence arrived which robbed it of all its worth. Oudinot, instead of conquering Berlin, had been defeated by the Prussians of Bernadotte's army at Grossbeeren (Aug. 23), and driven back upon the Elbe. Blücher had turned upon Macdonald in Silesia, and completely overthrown his army on the river Katzbach, at the very moment when the Allies were making their assault upon Dresden. It was vain to think of a march upon Prague, or of the annihilation of the Austrians, when on the north and the east Napoleon's troops were meeting with nothing but disaster. The divisions which had been intended to support Vandamme's movement from Königstein upon the rear of the Great Army were retained in the neighbourhood of Dresden, in order to be within reach of the points where their aid might be needed. Vandamme, ignorant of his isolation, was left with scarcely 40,000 men to encounter the Great Army in its retreat.
[Battle of Kulm, Aug. 29, 30.]
He threw himself upon a Russian corps at Kulm, in the Bohemian mountains, on the morning of the 29th. The Russians, at first few in number, held their ground during the day; in the night, and after the battle had recommenced on the morrow, vast masses of the allied troops poured in. The French fought desperately, but were overwhelmed. Vandamme himself was made prisoner, with 10,000 of his men. The whole of the stores and most of the cannon of his army remained in the enemy's hands.
[Effect of the twelve days, Aug. 18-30.]
[Battle of Dennewitz, Sept. 6.]
The victory at Kulm secured the Bohemian army from pursuit, and almost extinguished the effects of its defeat at Dresden. Thanks to the successes of Blücher and of Bernadotte's Prussian generals, which prevented Napoleon from throwing all his forces on to the rear of the Great Army, Schwarzenberg's rash attack had proved of no worse significance than an unsuccessful raid. The Austrians were again in the situation assigned to them in the original plan of the campaign, and capable of resuming their advance into the interior of Saxony: Blücher and the northern commanders had not only escaped separate destruction, but won great victories over the French: Napoleon, weakened by the loss of 100,000 men, remained exactly where he had been at the beginning of the campaign. Had the triple movement by which he meant to overwhelm his adversaries been capable of execution, it would now have been fully executed. The balance, however, had turned against Napoleon; and the twelve days from the 18th to the 29th of August, though marked by no catastrophe like Leipzig or Waterloo, were in fact the decisive period in the struggle of Europe against Napoleon. The attack by which he intended to prevent the junction of the three armies had been made, and had failed. Nothing now remained for him but to repeat the same movements with a discouraged force against an emboldened enemy, or to quit the line of the Elbe, and prepare for one vast and decisive encounter with all three armies combined. Napoleon drove from his mind the thought of failure; he ordered Ney to take command of Oudinot's army, and to lead it again, in increased strength, upon Berlin; he himself hastened to Macdonald's beaten troops in Silesia, and rallied them for a new assault upon Blücher. All was in vain. Ney, advancing on Berlin, was met by the Prussian general Billow at Dennewitz, and totally routed (Sept. 6): Blücher, finding that Napoleon himself was before him, skilfully avoided battle, and forced his adversary to waste in fruitless marches the brief interval which he had snatched from his watch on Schwarzenberg. Each conflict with the enemy, each vain and exhausting march, told that the superiority had passed from the French to their foes, and that Napoleon's retreat was now only a matter of time. "These creatures have learnt something," said Napoleon in the bitterness of his heart, as he saw the columns of Blücher manoeuvring out of his grasp. Ney's report of his own overthrow at Dennewitz sounded like an omen of the ruin of Waterloo. "I have been totally defeated," he wrote, "and do not yet know whether my army has re-assembled. The spirit of the generals and officers is shattered. To command in such conditions is but half to command. I had rather be a common grenadier."
[Metternich.]
[German policy of Stein and of Austria.]
The accession of Austria had turned the scale in favour of the Allies; it rested only with the allied generals themselves to terminate the warfare round Dresden, and to lead their armies into the heart of Saxony. For a while the course of the war flagged, and military interests gave place to political. It was in the interval between the first great battles and the final advance on Leipzig that the future of Germany was fixed by the three allied Powers. In the excitement of the last twelve months little thought had been given, except by Stein and his friends, to the political form to be set in the place of the Napoleonic Federation of the Rhine. Stein, in the midst of the Russian campaign, had hoped for a universal rising of the German people against Napoleon, and had proposed the dethronement of all the German princes who supported his cause. His policy had received the general approval of Alexander, and, on the entrance of the Russian army into Germany, a manifesto had been issued appealing to the whole German nation, and warning the vassals of Napoleon that they could only save themselves by submission. [185] A committee had been appointed by the allied sovereigns, under the presidency of Stein himself, to administer the revenues of all Confederate territory that should be occupied by the allied armies. Whether the reigning Houses should be actually expelled might remain in uncertainty; but it was the fixed hope of Stein and his friends that those princes who were permitted to retain their thrones would be permitted to retain them only as officers in a great German Empire, without sovereign rights either over their own subjects or in relation to foreign States. The Kings of Bavaria and Würtemberg had gained their titles and much of their despotic power at home from Napoleon; their independence of the Head of Germany had made them nothing more than the instruments of a foreign conqueror. Under whatever form the central authority might be revived, Stein desired that it should be the true and only sovereign Power in Germany, a Power to which every German might appeal against the oppression of a minor Government, and in which the whole nation should find its representative before the rest of Europe. In the face of such a central authority, whether an elected Parliament or an Imperial Council, the minor princes could at best retain but a fragment of their powers; and such was the theory accepted at the allied head-quarters down to the time when Austria proffered its mediation and support. Then everything changed. The views of the Austrian Government upon the future system of Germany were in direct opposition to those of Stein's party. Metternich dreaded the thought of popular agitation, and looked upon Stein, with his idea of a National Parliament and his plans for dethroning the Rhenish princes, as little better than the Jacobins of 1792. The offer of a restored imperial dignity in Germany was declined by the Emperor of Austria at the instance of his Minister. With characteristic sense of present difficulties, and blindness to the great forces which really contained their solution, Metternich argued that the minor princes would only be driven into the arms of the foreigner by the establishment of any supreme German Power. They would probably desert Napoleon if the Allies guaranteed to them everything that they at present possessed; they would be freed from all future temptation to attach themselves to France if Austria contented itself with a diplomatic influence and with the ties of a well-constructed system of treaties. In spite of the influence of Stein with the Emperor Alexander, Metternich's views prevailed. Austria had so deliberately kept itself in balance during the first part of the year 1813, that the Allies were now willing to concede everything, both in this matter and in others, in return for its support. Nothing more was heard of the dethronement of the Confederate princes, or even of the limitation of their powers. It was agreed by the Treaty of Teplitz, signed by Prussia, Russia, and Austria on September 9th, that every State of the Rhenish Confederacy should be placed in a position of absolute independence. Negotiations were opened with the King of Bavaria, whose army had steadily fought on the side of Napoleon in every campaign since 1806. Instead of being outlawed as a criminal, he was welcomed as an ally. The Treaty of Ried, signed on the 3rd of October, guaranteed to the King of Bavaria, in return for his desertion of Napoleon, full sovereign rights, and the whole of the territory which he had received from Napoleon, except the Tyrol and the Austrian district on the Inn. What had been accorded to the King of Bavaria could not be refused to the rest of Napoleon's vassals who were willing to make their peace with the Allies in time. Germany was thus left at the mercy of a score of petty Cabinets. It was seen by the patriotic party in Prussia at what price the alliance of Austria had been purchased. Austria had indeed made it possible to conquer Napoleon, but it had also made an end of all prospect of the union of the German nation.
[Allies cross the Elbe, Oct. 3.]
Till the last days of September the position of the hostile armies round Dresden remained little changed, Napoleon unweariedly repeated his attacks, now on one side, now on another, but without result. The Allies on their part seemed rooted to the soil. Bernadotte, balanced between the desire to obtain Norway from the Allies and a foolish hope of being called to the throne of France, was bent on doing the French as little harm as possible; Schwarzenberg, himself an indifferent general, was distracted by the councillors of all the three monarchs; Blücher alone pressed for decided and rapid action. At length the Prussian commander gained permission to march northwards, and unite his army with Bernadotte's in a forward movement across the Elbe. The long-expected Russian reserves, led by Bennigsen, reached the Bohemian mountains; and at the beginning of October the operation began which was to collect the whole of the allied forces in the plain of Leipzig. Blücher forced the passage of the Elbe at Wartenburg. It was not until Napoleon learnt that the army of Silesia had actually crossed the river that he finally quitted Dresden. Then, hastening northwards, he threw himself upon the Prussian general; but Blücher again avoided battle, as he had done in Silesia; and on the 7th of October his army united with Bernadotte's, which had crossed the Elbe two days before.
The enemy was closing in upon Napoleon. Obstinately as he had held on to the line of the Elbe, he could hold on no longer. In the frustration of all his hopes there flashed across his mind the wild project of a march eastwards to the Oder, and the gathering of all the besieged garrisons for a campaign in which the enemy should stand between himself and France; but the dream lasted only long enough to gain a record. Napoleon ventured no more than to send a corps back to the Elbe to threaten Berlin, in the hope of tempting Blücher and Bernadotte to abandon the advance which they had now begun in co-operation with the great army of Schwarzenberg. From the 10th to the 14th of October, Napoleon lingered at Düben, between Dresden and Leipzig, restlessly expecting to hear of Blücher's or Bernadotte's retreat. The only definite information that he could gain was that Schwarzenberg was pressing on towards the west. At length he fell back to Leipzig, believing that Blücher, but not Bernadotte, was advancing to meet Schwarzenberg and take part in a great engagement. As he entered Leipzig on October 14th the cannon of Schwarzenberg was heard on the south.
[Battle of Leipzig. Oct 16-19.]
Napoleon drew up for battle. The number of his troops in position around the city was 170,000: about 15,000 others lay within call. He placed Marmont and Ney on the north of Leipzig at the village of Möckern, to meet the expected onslaught of Blücher; and himself, with the great mass of his army, took post on the south, facing Schwarzenberg. On the morning of the 16th, Schwarzenberg began the attack. His numbers did not exceed 150,000, for the greater part of the Russian army was a march in the rear. The battle was an even one. The Austrians failed to gain ground: with one more army-corps Napoleon saw that he could overpower the enemy. He was still without intelligence of Blücher's actual appearance in the north; and in the rash hope that Blücher's coming might be delayed, he sent orders to Ney and Marmont to leave their positions and hurry to the south to throw themselves upon Schwarzenberg. Ney obeyed. Marmont, when the order reached him, was actually receiving Blücher's first fire. He determined to remain and defend the village of Möckern, though left without support. York, commanding the vanguard of Blücher's army, assailed him with the utmost fury. A third part of the troops engaged on each side were killed or wounded before the day closed; but in the end the victory of the Prussians was complete. It was the only triumph won by the Allies on this first day of the battle, but it turned the scale against Napoleon. Marmont's corps was destroyed; Ney, divided between Napoleon and Marmont, had rendered no effective help to either. Schwarzenberg, saved from a great disaster, needed only to wait for Bernadotte and the Russian reserves, and to renew the battle with an additional force of 100,000 men.
[Storm of Leipzig, 19th. French retreat.]
[Battle of the 18th.]
In the course of the night Napoleon sent proposals for peace. It was in the vain hope of receiving some friendly answer from his father-in-law, the Austrian Emperor, that he delayed making his retreat during the next day, while it might still have been unmolested. No answer was returned to his letter. In the evening of the 17th, Bennigsen's army reached the field of battle. Next morning began that vast and decisive encounter known in the language of Germany as "the battle of the nations," the greatest battle in all authentic history, the culmination of all the military effort of the Napoleonic age. Not less than 300,000 men fought on the side of the Allies; Napoleon's own forces numbered 170,000. The battle raged all round Leipzig, except on the west, where no attempt was made to interpose between Napoleon and the line of his retreat. As in the first engagement, the decisive successes were those of Blücher, now tardily aided by Bernadotte, on the north; Schwarzenberg's divisions, on the south side of the town, fought steadily, but without gaining much ground. But there was no longer any doubt as to the issue of the struggle. If Napoleon could not break the Allies in the first engagement, he had no chance against them now when they had been joined by 100,000 more men. The storm of attack grew wilder and wilder: there were no new forces to call up for the defence. Before the day was half over Napoleon drew in his outer line, and began to make dispositions for a retreat from Leipzig. At evening long trains of wounded from the hospitals passed through the western gates of the city along the road towards the Rhine. In the darkness of night the whole army was withdrawn from its positions, and dense masses poured into the town, until every street was blocked with confused and impenetrable crowds of cavalry and infantry. The leading divisions moved out of the gates before sunrise. As the throng lessened, some degree of order was restored, and the troops which Napoleon intended to cover the retreat took their places under the walls of Leipzig. The Allies advanced to the storm on the morning of the 19th. The French were driven into the town; the victorious enemy pressed on towards the rear of the retreating columns. In the midst of the struggle an explosion was heard above the roar of the battle. The bridge over the Elster, the only outlet from Leipzig to the west, had been blown up by --the mistake of a French soldier before the rear-guard began to cross. The mass of fugitives, driven from the streets of the town, found before them an impassable river. Some swam to the opposite bank or perished in attempting to do so; the rest, to the number of 15,000, laid down their arms. This was the end of the battle. Napoleon had lost in the three days 40,000 killed and wounded, 260 guns, and 30,000 prisoners. The killed and wounded of the Allies reached the enormous sum of 54,000.
[Conditions of peace offered to Napoleon at Frankfort, Nov. 9th.]
[Allies follow Napoleon to the Rhine.]
The campaign was at an end. Napoleon led off a large army, but one that was in no condition to turn upon its pursuers. At each stage in the retreat thousands of fever-stricken wretches were left to terrify even the pursuing army with the dread of their infection. It was only when the French found the road to Frankfort blocked at Hanau by a Bavarian force that they rallied to the order of battle. The Bavarians were cut to pieces; the road was opened; and, a fortnight after the Battle of Leipzig, Napoleon, with the remnant of his great army, re-crossed the Rhine. Behind him the fabric of his Empire fell to the ground. Jerome fled from Westphalia; [186] the princes of the Rhenish Confederacy came one after another to make their peace with the Allies; Bülow, with the army which had conquered Ney at Dennewitz, marched through the north of Germany to the deliverance of Holland. Three days after Napoleon had crossed the Rhine the Czar reached Frankfort; and here, on the 7th of November, a military council was held, in which Blücher and Gneisenau, against almost all the other generals, advocated an immediate invasion of France. The soldiers, however, had time to re-consider their opinions, for, on the 9th, it was decided by the representatives of the Powers to send an offer of peace to Napoleon, and the operations of the war were suspended by common consent. The condition on which peace was offered to Napoleon was the surrender of the conquests of France beyond the Alps and the Rhine. The Allies were still willing to permit the Emperor to retain Belgium, Savoy, and the Rhenish Provinces; they declined, however, to enter into any negotiation until Napoleon had accepted this basis of peace; and they demanded a distinct reply before the end of the month of November.
[Offer of peace withdrawn, Dec. 1.]
[Plan of invasion of France.]
[Allies enter France, Jan., 1814.]
Napoleon, who had now arrived in Paris, and saw around him all the signs of power, returned indefinite answers. The month ended without the reply which the Allies required; and on the 1st of December the offer of peace was declared to be withdrawn. It was still undecided whether the war should take the form of an actual invasion of France. The memory of Brunswick's campaign of 1792, and of the disasters of the first coalition in 1793, even now exercised a powerful influence over men's minds. Austria was unwilling to drive Napoleon to extremities, or to give to Russia and Prussia the increased influence which they would gain in Europe from the total overthrow of Napoleon's power. It was ultimately determined that the allied armies should enter France, but that the Austrians, instead of crossing the north-eastern frontier, should make a détour by Switzerland, and gain the plateau of Langres in Champagne, from which the rivers Seine, Marne, and Aube, with the roads following their valleys, descend in the direction of the capital. The plateau of Langres was said to be of such strategical importance that its occupation by an invader would immediately force Napoleon to make peace. As a matter of fact, the plateau was of no strategical importance whatever; but the Austrians desired to occupy it, partly with the view of guarding against any attack from the direction of Italy and Lyons, partly from their want of the heavy artillery necessary for besieging the fortresses farther north, [187] and from a just appreciation of the dangers of a campaign conducted in a hostile country intersected by several rivers. Anything was welcomed by Metternich that seemed likely to avert, or even to postpone, a struggle with Napoleon for life or death. Blücher correctly judged the march through Switzerland to be mere procrastination. He was himself permitted to take the straight road into France, though his movements were retarded in order to keep pace with the cautious steps of Schwarzenberg. On the last day of the year 1813 the Prussian general crossed the Rhine near Coblentz; on the 18th of January, 1814, the Austrian army, having advanced from Switzerland by Belfort and Vesoul, reached its halting-place on the plateau of Langres. Here the march stopped; and here it was expected that terms of peace would be proposed by Napoleon.
[Wellington entering France from the south.]
It was not on the eastern side alone that the invader was now entering France. Wellington had passed the Pyrenees. His last victorious march into the north of Spain began on the day when the Prussian and Russian armies were defeated by Napoleon at Bautzen (May 21, 1813). During the armistice of Dresden, a week before Austria signed the treaty which fixed the conditions of its armed mediation, he had gained an overwhelming triumph at Vittoria over King Joseph and the French army, as it retreated with all the spoils gathered in five years' occupation of Spain (June 21). A series of bloody engagements had given the English the passes of the Pyrenees in those same days of August and September that saw the allied armies close around Napoleon at Dresden; and when, after the catastrophe of Leipzig, the wreck of Napoleon's host was retreating beyond the Rhine, Soult, the defender of the Pyrenees, was driven by the British general from his entrenchments on the Nivelle, and forced back under the walls of Bayonne.
[French armies unable to hold the frontier.]
[Napoleon's plan of defence.]
Twenty years had passed since, in the tempestuous morn of the Revolution, Hoche swept the armies of the first coalition across the Alsatian frontier. Since then, French soldiers had visited every capital, and watered every soil with their blood; but no foreign soldier had set foot on French soil. Now the cruel goads of Napoleon's military glory had spent the nation's strength, and the force no longer existed which could bar the way to its gathered enemies. The armies placed upon the eastern frontier had to fall back before an enemy five times more numerous than themselves. Napoleon had not expected that the Allies would enter France before the spring. With three months given him for organisation, he could have made the frontier-armies strong enough to maintain their actual positions; the winter advance of the Allies compelled him to abandon the border districts of France, and to concentrate his defence in Champagne, between the Marne, the Seine, and the Aube. This district was one which offered extraordinary advantages to a great general acting against an irresolute and ill-commanded enemy. By holding the bridges over the three rivers, and drawing his own supplies along the central road from Paris to Arcis-sur-Aube, Napoleon could securely throw the bulk of his forces from one side to the other against the flank of the Allies, while his own movements were covered by the rivers, which could not be passed except at the bridges. A capable commander at the head of the Allies would have employed the same river-strategy against Napoleon himself, after conquering one or two points of passage by main force; but Napoleon had nothing of the kind to fear from Schwarzenberg; and if the Austrian head-quarters continued to control the movements of the allied armies, it was even now doubtful whether the campaign would close at Paris or on the Rhine.
[Campaign of 1814.]
For some days after the arrival of the monarchs and diplomatists at Langres (Jan. 22), Metternich and the more timorous among the generals opposed any further advance into France, and argued that the army had already gained all it needed by the occupation of the border provinces. It was only upon the threat of the Czar to continue the war by himself that the Austrians consented to move forward upon Paris. After several days had been lost in discussion, the advance from Langres was begun. Orders were given to Blücher, who had pushed back the French divisions commanded by Marmont and Mortier, and who was now near St. Dizier on the Marne, to meet the Great Army at Brienne. This was the situation of the Allies when, on the 25th of January, Napoleon left Paris, and placed himself at Châlons on the Marne, at the head of his left wing, having his right at Troyes and at Arcis, guarding the bridges over the Seine and the Aube. Napoleon knew that Blücher was moving towards the Austrians; he hoped to hold the Prussian general in check at St. Dizier, and to throw himself upon the heads of Schwarzenberg's columns as they moved towards the Aube. Blücher, however, had already passed St. Dizier when Napoleon reached it. Napoleon pursued, and overtook the Prussians at Brienne. After an indecisive battle, Blücher fell back towards Schwarzenberg. The allied armies effected their junction, and Blücher, now supported by the Austrians, turned and marched down the right bank of the Aube to meet Napoleon. Napoleon, though far outnumbered, accepted battle. He was attacked at La Rothière close above Brienne, and defeated with heavy loss (Feb. 1). A vigorous pursuit would probably have ended the war; but the Austrians held back. Schwarzenberg believed peace to be already gained, and condemned all further action as useless waste of life. In spite of the protests of the Emperor Alexander, he allowed Napoleon to retire unmolested. Schwarzenberg's inaction was no mere error in military judgment. There was a direct conflict between the Czar and the Austrian Cabinet as to the end to be obtained by the war. Alexander already insisted on the dethronement of Napoleon; the Austrian Government would have been content to leave Napoleon in power if he would accept a peace giving France no worse a frontier than it had possessed in 1791. Castlereagh, who had come from England, and Hardenberg were as yet inclined to support Metternich's policy, although the whole Prussian army, the public opinion of Great Britain, and the counsels of Stein and all the bolder Prussian statesmen, were on the side of the Czar. [188]
[Congress of Châtillon, Feb. 5-9.]
Already the influence of the peace-party was so far in the ascendant that negotiations had been opened with Napoleon. Representatives of all the Powers assembled at Châtillon, in Burgundy; and there, towards the end of January, Caulaincourt appeared on behalf of France. The first sitting took place on the 5th of February; on the following day Caulaincourt received full powers from Napoleon to conclude peace. The Allies laid down as the condition of peace the limitation of France to the frontiers of 1791. Had Caulaincourt dared to conclude peace instantly on these terms, Napoleon would have retained his throne; but he was aware that Napoleon had only granted him full powers in consequence of the disastrous battle of La Rothière, and he feared to be disavowed by his master as soon as the army had escaped from danger. Instead of simply accepting the Allies' offer, he raised questions as to the future of Italy and Germany. The moment was lost; on the 9th of February the Czar recalled his envoy from Châtillon, and the sittings of the Congress were broken off.
[Defeats of Blücher on the Marne Feb. 10-14.]
[Montereau, Feb 18.]
[Austrians fall back towards Langres.]
Schwarzenberg was now slowly and unwillingly moving forwards along the Seine towards Troyes. Blücher was permitted to return to the Marne, and to advance upon Paris by an independent line of march. He crossed the country between the Aube and the Marne, and joined some divisions which he had left behind him on the latter river. But his dispositions were outrageously careless: his troops were scattered over a space of sixty miles from Châlons westward, as if he had no enemy to guard against except the weak divisions commanded by Mortier and Marmont, which had uniformly fallen back before his advance. Suddenly Napoleon himself appeared at the centre of the long Prussian line at Champaubert. He had hastened northwards in pursuit of Blücher with 30,000 men, as soon as Schwarzenberg entered Troyes; and on February 10th a weak Russian corps that lay in the centre of Blücher's column was overwhelmed before it was known the Emperor had left the Seine. Then, turning leftwards, Napoleon overthrew the Prussian vanguard at Montmirail, and two days later attacked and defeated Blücher himself, who was bringing up the remainder of his troops in total ignorance of the enemy with whom he had to deal. In four days Blücher's army, which numbered 70,000 men, had thrice been defeated in detail by a force of 30,000. Blücher was compelled to fall back upon Châlons; Napoleon instantly returned to the support of Oudinot's division, which he had left in front of Schwarzenberg. In order to relieve Blücher, the Austrians had pushed forward on the Seine beyond Montereau. Within three days after the battle with Blücher, Napoleon was back upon the Seine, and attacking the heads of the Austrian column. On the 18th of February he gained so decisive a victory at Montereau that Schwarzenberg abandoned the advance, and fell back upon Troyes, sending word to Blücher to come southwards again and help him to fight a great battle. Blücher moved off with admirable energy, and came into the neighbourhood of Troyes within a week after his defeats upon the Marne. But the design of fighting a great battle was given up. The disinclination of the Austrians to vigorous action was too strong to be overcome; and it was finally determined that Schwarzenberg should fall back almost to the plateau of Langres, leaving Blücher to unite with the troops of Bülow which had conquered Holland, and to operate on the enemy's flank and rear.
[Congress of Châtillon resumed, Feb. 17-March 15.]
The effect of Napoleon's sudden victories on the Marne was instantly seen in the councils of the allied sovereigns. Alexander, who had withdrawn his envoy from Châtillon, could no longer hold out against negotiations with Napoleon. He restored the powers of his envoy, and the Congress re-assembled. But Napoleon already saw himself in imagination driving the invaders beyond the Rhine, and sent orders to Caulaincourt to insist upon the terms proposed at Frankfort, which left to France both the Rhenish Provinces and Belgium. At the same time he attempted to open a private negotiation with his father-in-law the Emperor of Austria, and to detach him from the cause of the Allies. The attempt failed; the demands now made by Caulaincourt overcame even the peaceful inclinations of the Austrian Minister; and on the 1st of March the Allies signed a new treaty at Chaumont, pledging themselves to conclude no peace with Napoleon that did not restore the frontier of 1791, and to maintain a defensive alliance against France for a period of twenty years. [189] Caulaincourt continued for another fortnight at Châtillon, instructed by Napoleon to prolong the negotiations, but forbidden to accept the only conditions which the Allies were willing to grant.
[Napoleon follows Blücher to the north. Battle of Laon, March 10.]
Blücher was now on his way northwards to join the so-called army of Bernadotte upon the Aisne. Since the Battle of Leipzig, Bernadotte himself had taken no part in the movements of the army nominally under his command. The Netherlands had been conquered by Bülow and the Russian general Winzingerode, and these officers were now pushing southwards in order to take part with Blücher in a movement against Paris. Napoleon calculated that the fortress of Soissons would bar the way to the northern army, and enable him to attack and crush Blücher before he could effect a junction with his colleagues. He set out in pursuit of the Prussians, still hoping for a second series of victories like those he had won upon the Marne. But the cowardice of the commander of Soissons ruined his chances of success. The fortress surrendered to the Russians at the first summons. Blücher met the advanced guard of the northern army upon the Aisne on the 4th of March, and continued his march towards Laon for the purpose of uniting with its divisions which lay in the rear. The French followed, but the only advantage gained by Napoleon was a victory over a detached Russian corps at Craonne. Marmont was defeated with heavy loss by a sally of Blücher from his strong position on the hill of Laon (March 10); and the Emperor himself, unable to restore the fortune of the battle, fell back upon Soissons, and thence marched southward to throw himself again upon the line of the southern army.
[Napoleon marches to the rear of the Allies, March 23.]
[The Allies advance on Paris.]
Schwarzenberg had once more begun to move forward on the news of Blücher's victory at Laon. His troops were so widely dispersed that Napoleon might even now have cut the line in halves had he known Schwarzenberg's real position. But he made a détour in order to meet Oudinot's corps, and gave the Austrians time to concentrate at Arcis-sur-Aube. Here, on the 20th of March, Napoleon found himself in face of an army of 100,000 men. His own army was less than a third of that number; yet with unalterable contempt for the enemy he risked another battle. No decided issue was reached in the first day's fighting, and Napoleon remained in position, expecting that Schwarzenberg would retreat during the night. But on the morrow the Austrians were still fronting him. Schwarzenberg had at length learnt his own real superiority, and resolved to assist the enemy no longer by a wretched system of retreat. A single act of firmness on the part of the Austrian commander showed Napoleon that the war of battles was at an end. He abandoned all hope of resisting the invaders in front: it only remained for him to throw himself on to their rear, and, in company with the frontier-garrisons and the army of Lyons, to attack their communications with Germany. The plan was no unreasonable one, if Paris could either have sustained a siege or have fallen into the enemy's hands without terminating the war. But the Allies rightly judged that Napoleon's power would be extinct from the moment that Paris submitted. They received the intelligence of the Emperor's march to the east, and declined to follow him. The armies of Schwarzenberg and Blücher approached one another, and moved together on Paris. It was at Vitry, on March 27th, that Napoleon first discovered that the troops which had appeared to be following his eastward movement were but a detachment of cavalry, and that the allied armies were in full march upon the capital. He instantly called up every division within reach, and pushed forward by forced marches for the Seine, hoping to fall upon Schwarzenberg's rear before the allied vanguard could reach Paris. But at each hour of the march it became more evident that the enemy was far in advance. For two days Napoleon urged his men forward; at length, unable to bear the intolerable suspense, he quitted the army on the morning of the 30th, and drove forward at the utmost speed along the road through Fontainebleau to the capital. As day sank, he met reports of a battle already begun. When he reached the village of Fromenteau, fifteen miles from Paris, at ten o'clock at night, he heard that Paris had actually surrendered.
[Attack on Paris, March 30.]
[Capitulation of Marmont.]
[Allies enter Paris, March 31.]
The Allies had pressed forward without taking any notice of Napoleon's movements, and at early morning on the 30th they had opened the attack on the north-eastern heights of Paris. Marmont, with the fragments of a beaten army and some weak divisions of the National Guard, had but 35,000 men to oppose to three times that number of the enemy. The Government had taken no steps to arm the people, or to prolong resistance after the outside line of defence was lost, although the erection of barricades would have held the Allies in check until Napoleon arrived with his army. While Marmont fought in the outer suburbs, masses of the people were drawn up on Montmartre, expecting the Emperor's appearance, and the spectacle of a great and decisive battle. But the firing in the outskirts stopped soon after noon: it was announced that Marmont had capitulated. The report struck the people with stupor and fury. They had vainly been demanding arms since early morning; and even after the capitulation unsigned papers were handed about by men of the working classes, advocating further resistance. [190] But the people no longer knew how to follow leaders of its own. Napoleon had trained France to look only to himself: his absence left the masses, who were still eager to fight for France, helpless in the presence of the conqueror: there were enemies enough of the Government among the richer classes to make the entry of the foreigner into Paris a scene of actual joy and exultation. To such an extent had the spirit of caste and the malignant delight in Napoleon's ruin overpowered the love of France among the party of the old noblesse, that upon the entry of the allied forces into Paris on the 31st of March hundreds of aristocratic women kissed the hands, or the very boots and horses, of the leaders of the train, and cheered the Cossacks who escorted a band of French prisoners, bleeding and exhausted, through the streets.
[Napoleon dethroned, April 2.]
Napoleon's reign was indeed at an end. Since the rupture of the Congress of Châtillon on the 18th of March, the Allies had determined to make his dethronement a condition of peace. As the end approached, it was seen that no successor was possible but the chief of the House of Bourbon, although Austria would perhaps have consented to the establishment of a Regency under the Empress Marie Louise, and the Czar had for a time entertained the project of placing Bernadotte at the head of the French State. Immediately after the entry into Paris it was determined to raise the exile Louis XVIII. to the throne. The politicians of the Empire who followed Talleyrand were not unwilling to unite with the conquerors, and with the small party of Royalist noblesse, in recalling the Bourbon dynasty. Alexander, who was the real master of the situation, rightly judged Talleyrand to be the man most capable of enlisting the public opinion of France on the side of the new order. He took up his abode at Talleyrand's house, and employed this dexterous statesman as the advocate both of the policy of the Allies, and of the principles of constitutional liberty, which at this time Alexander himself sincerely befriended. A Provisional Government was appointed under Talleyrand's leadership. On the 2nd of April the Senate proclaimed the dethronement of Napoleon. On the 6th it published a Constitution, and recalled the House of Bourbon.
Louis XVIII. was still in England: his brother, the Count of Artois, had joined the invaders in France and assumed the title of Lieutenant of the Kingdom; but the influence of Alexander was necessary to force this obstinate and unteachable man into anything like a constitutional position. The Provisional Government invited the Count to take up the administration until the King's arrival, in virtue of a decree of the Senate. D'Artois declined to recognise the Senate's competency, and claimed the Lieutenancy of the Kingdom as his brother's representative. The Senate refusing to admit the Count's divine right, some unmeaning words were exchanged when d'Artois entered Paris; and the Provisional Government, disregarding the claims of the Royal Lieutenant, continued in the full exercise of its powers. At length the Czar insisted that d'Artois should give way. The decree of the Senate was accordingly accepted by him at the Tuileries on the 14th of April; the Provisional Government retired, and a Council of State was formed, in which Talleyrand still continued to exercise the real powers of government. In the address made by d'Artois on this occasion, he stated that although the King had not empowered him to accept the Constitution made by the Senate on the 6th of April, he entertained no doubt that the King would accept the principles embodied in that Constitution, which were those of Representative Government, of the freedom of the press, and of the responsibility of ministers. A week after d'Artois' declaration, Louis XVIII. arrived in France.
[Louis XVIII. and the Czar.]
[Louis XVIII. enters Paris, May 3.]
Louis XVIII., though capable of adapting himself in practice to a constitutional system, had never permitted himself to question the divine right of the House of Bourbon to sovereign power. The exiles who surrounded him were slow to understand the needs of the time. They recommended the King to reject the Constitution. Louis made an ambiguous answer when the Legislative Body met him at Compiègne and invited an expression of the royal policy. It was again necessary for the Czar to interfere, and to explain to the King that France could no longer be an absolute monarchy. Louis, however, was a better arguer than the Count of Artois. He reasoned as a man whom the sovereigns of Europe had felt it their duty to restore without any request from himself. If the Senate of Napoleon, he urged, had the right to give France a Constitution, he himself ought never to have been brought from his peaceful English home. He was willing to grant a free Constitution to his people in exercise of his own royal rights, but he could not recognise one created by the servants of an usurper. Alexander was but half satisfied with the liberal professions of Louis: he did not, however, insist on his acceptance of the Constitution drawn up by the Senate, but he informed him that until the promises made by d'Artois were confirmed by a royal proclamation, there would be no entry into Paris. The King at length signed a proclamation written by Talleyrand, and made his festal entry into the capital on the 3rd of May.
[Feeling of Paris.]
The promises of Louis himself, the unbroken courtesy and friendliness shown by the Allies to Paris since their victory a month before, had almost extinguished the popular feeling of hostility towards a dynasty which owed its recall to the overthrow of French armies. The foreign leaders themselves had begun to excite a certain admiration and interest. Alexander was considered, and with good reason, as a generous enemy; the simplicity of the King of Prussia, his misfortunes, his well-remembered gallantry at the Battle of Jena, gained him general sympathy. It needed but little on the part of the returning Bourbons to convert the interest and curiosity of Paris into affection. The cortège which entered the capital with Louis XVIII. brought back, in a singular motley of obsolete and of foreign costumes, the bearers of many unforgotten names. The look of the King himself, as he drove through Paris, pleased the people. The childless father of the murdered Duke of Enghien gained the pitying attention of those few who knew the face of a man twenty-five years an exile. But there was one among the members of the returning families whom every heart in Paris went out to meet. The daughter of Louis XVI., who had shared the captivity of her parents and of her brother, the sole survivor of her deeply-wronged house, now returned as Duchess of Angoulême. The uniquely mournful history of her girlhood, and her subsequent marriage with her cousin, the son of the Count of Artois, made her the natural object of a warmer sympathy than could attach to either of the brothers of Louis XVI. But adversity had imprinted its lines too deeply upon the features and the disposition of this joyless woman for a moment's light to return. Her voice and her aspect repelled the affection which thousands were eager to offer to her. Before the close of the first days of the restored monarchy, it was felt that the Bourbons had brought back no single person among them who was capable of winning the French nation's love.
[Napoleon sent to Elba.]
[Napoleon.]
The recall of the ancient line had been allowed to appear to the world as the work of France itself; Napoleon's fate could only be fixed by his conquerors. After the fall of Paris, Napoleon remained at Fontainebleau awaiting events. The soldiers and the younger officers of his army were still ready to fight for him; the marshals, however, were utterly weary, and determined that France should no longer suffer for the sake of a single man. They informed Napoleon that he must abdicate. Yielding to their pressure, Napoleon, on the 3rd of April, drew up an act of abdication in favour of his infant son, and sent it by Caulaincourt to the allied sovereigns at Paris. The document was rejected by the Allies; Caulaincourt returned with the intelligence that Napoleon must renounce the throne for himself and all his family. For a moment the Emperor thought of renewing the war; but the marshals refused their aid more resolutely than before, and, on the 6th of April, Napoleon signed an unconditional surrender of the throne for himself and his heirs. He was permitted by the Allies to retain the unmeaning title of Emperor, and to carry with him a body-guard and a considerable revenue to the island of Elba, henceforward to be his principality and his prison. The choice of this island, within easy reach of France and Italy, and too extensive to be guarded without a large fleet, was due to Alexander's ill-judged generosity towards Napoleon, and to a promise made to Marmont that the liberty of the Emperor should be respected. Alexander was not left without warning of the probable effects of his leniency. Sir Charles Stewart, military representative of Great Britain at the allied head-quarters, urged both his own and the allied Governments to substitute some more distant island for Elba, if they desired to save Europe from a renewed Napoleonic war, and France from the misery of a second invasion. The Allies, though not without misgivings, adhered to their original plan, and left it to time to justify the predictions of their adviser.
[Treaty of Paris, May 30.]
It was well known what would be the terms of peace, now that Napoleon was removed from the throne. The Allies had no intention of depriving France of any of the territory that it had held before 1792: the conclusion of a definitive Treaty was only postponed until the Constitution, which Alexander required King Louis XVIII. to grant, had been drawn up by a royal commission and approved by the King. On the 27th of May the draft of this Constitution, known as the Charta, was laid before the King, and sanctioned by him; on the 30th, the Treaty of Paris was signed by the representatives of France and of all the great Powers. [191] France, surrendering all its conquests, accepted the frontier of the 1st of January, 1792, with a slight addition of territory on the side of Savoy and at points on its northern and eastern border. It paid no indemnity. It was permitted to retain all the works of art accumulated by twenty years of rapine, except the trophies carried from the Brandenburg Gate of Berlin and the spoils of the Library of Vienna. It received back nearly all the colonies which had been taken from it by Great Britain. By the clauses of the Treaty disposing of the territory that had formed the Empire and the dependencies of Napoleon, Holland was restored to the House of Orange, with the provision that its territory should be largely increased; Switzerland was declared independent; it was stipulated that Italy, with the exception of the Austrian Provinces, should consist of independent States, and that Germany should remain distributed among a multitude of sovereigns, independent, but united by a Federal tie. The navigation of the Rhine was thrown open. By a special agreement with Great Britain the French Government undertook to unite its efforts to those of England in procuring the suppression of the Slave-trade by all the Powers, and pledged itself to abolish the Slave-trade among French subjects within five years at the latest. For the settlement of all European questions not included in the Treaty of Paris it was agreed that a Congress of the Powers should, within two months, assemble at Vienna. These were the public articles of the Treaty of Paris. Secret clauses provided that the Allies--that is, the Allies independently of France--should control the distributions of territory to be made at the Congress; that Austria should receive Venetia and all Northern Italy as far as the Ticino; that Genoa should be given to the King of Sardinia; and that the Southern Netherlands should be united into a single kingdom with Holland, and thus form a solid bulwark against France on the north. No mention was made of Naples, whose sovereign, Murat, had abandoned Napoleon and allied himself with Austria, but without fulfilling in good faith the engagements into which he had entered against his former master. A nominal friend of the Allies, he knew that he had played a double game, and that his sovereignty, though not yet threatened, was insecure. [192]
[Territorial arrangements of 1814.]
Much yet remained to be settled by the Congress at Vienna, but in the Treaty of Paris two at least of the great Powers saw the objects attained for which they had straggled so persistently through all the earlier years of the war, and which at a later time had appeared to pass almost out of the range of possibility. England saw the Netherlands once more converted into a barrier against France, and Antwerp held by friendly hands. Austria reaped the full reward of its cool and well-balanced diplomacy during the crisis of 1813, in the annexation of an Italian territory that made it the real mistress of the Peninsula. Castlereagh and every other English politician felt that Europe had done itself small honour in handing Venice back to the Hapsburg; but this had been the condition exacted by Metternich at Prague before he consented to throw the sword of Austria into the trembling scale; [193] and the Republican traditions both of Venice and of Genoa counted for little among the statesmen of 1814, in comparison with the divine right of a Duke of Modena or a Prince of Hesse Cassel. [194] France itself, though stripped of the dominion won by twenty years of warfare, was permitted to retain, for the benefit of a restored line of kings, the whole of its ancient territory, and the spoil of all the galleries and museums of Western Europe. It would have been no unnatural wrong if the conquerors of 1814 had dealt with the soil of France as France had dealt with other lands; it would have been an act of bare justice to restore to its rightful owners the pillage that had been brought to Paris, and to recover from the French treasury a part of the enormous sums which Napoleon had extorted from conquered States. But the Courts were too well satisfied with their victory to enter into a strict account upon secondary matters; and a prudent regard on the part of the Allies to the prospects of the House of Bourbon saved France from experiencing what it had inflicted upon others.
[All the Powers except France gained territory by the war, 1792-1814.]
The policy which now restored to France the frontier of 1792 was viewed with a very different feeling in France and in all other countries. Europe looked with a kind of wonder upon its own generosity; France forgot the unparalleled provocations which it had offered to mankind, and only remembered that Belgium and the Rhenish Provinces had formed part of the Republic and the Empire for nearly twenty years. These early conquests of the Republic, which no one had attempted to wrest from France since 1795, had undoubtedly been the equivalent for which, in the days of the Directory, Austria had been permitted to extend itself in Italy, and Prussia in Germany. In the opinion of men who sincerely condemned Napoleon's distant conquests, the territory between France and the Rhine was no more than France might legitimately demand, as a counterpoise to the vast accessions falling to one or other of the Continental Powers out of the territory of Poland, Venice, and the body of suppressed States in Germany. Poland, excluding the districts taken from it before 1792, contained a population twice as great as that of Belgium and the Rhenish Provinces together: Venice carried with it, in addition to a commanding province on the Italian mainland, the Eastern Adriatic Coast as far as Ragusa. If it were true that the proportionate increase of power formed the only solid principle of European policy, France sustained a grievous injury in receiving back the limits of 1791, when every other State on the Continent was permitted to retain the territory, or an equivalent for the territory, which it had gained in the great changes that took place between 1791 and 1814. But in fact there had never been a time during the last hundred and fifty years when France, under an energetic Government, had not possessed a force threatening to all its neighbours. France, reduced to its ancient limits, was still the equal, and far more than the equal, of any of the Continental Powers, with all that they had gained during the Revolutionary War. It remained the first of European nations, though no longer, as in the eighteenth century, the one great nation of the western continent. Its efforts after universal empire had aroused other nations into life. Had the course of French conquest ceased before Napoleon grasped power, France would have retained its frontier of the Rhine, and long have exercised an unbounded influence over both Germany and Italy, through the incomparably juster and brighter social life which the Revolution, combined with all that France had inherited from the past, enabled it to display to those countries. Napoleon, in the attempt to impose his rule upon all Europe, created a power in Germany whose military future was to be not less solid than that of France itself, and left to Europe, in the accord of his enemies, a firmer security against French attack than any that the efforts of statesmen had ever framed.
[Permanent effect on Europe of period 1792-1814.]
[National sense excited in Germany and Italy.]
The league of the older monarchies had proved stronger in the end than the genius and the ambition of a single man. But if, in the service of Napoleon, France had exhausted its wealth, sunk its fleets, and sacrificed a million lives, only that it might lose all its earlier conquests, and resume limits which it had outgrown before Napoleon held his first command, it was not thus with the work which, for or against itself, France had effected in Europe during the movements of the last twenty years. In the course of the epoch now ending the whole of the Continent up to the frontiers of Austria and Russia had gained the two fruitful ideas of nationality and political freedom. There were now two nations in Europe where before there had been but aggregates of artificial States. Germany and Italy were no longer mere geographical expressions: in both countries, though in a very unequal degree, the newly-aroused sense of nationality had brought with it the claim for unity and independence. In Germany, Prussia had set a great example, and was hereafter to reap its reward; in Italy there had been no State and no statesman to take the lead either in throwing off Napoleon's rule, or in forcing him, as the price of support, to give to his Italian kingdom a really national government. Failing to act for itself, the population of all Italy, except Naples, was parcelled out between Austria and the ancient dynasties; but the old days of passive submission to the foreigner were gone for ever, and time was to show whether those were the dreamers who thought of a united Italy, or those who thought that Metternich's statesmanship had for ever settled the fate of Venice and of Milan.
[Desire for political liberty.]
The second legacy of the Revolutionary epoch, the idea of constitutional freedom, which in 1789 had been as much wanting in Spain, where national spirit was the strongest, as in those German States where it was the weakest, had been excited in Italy by the events of 1796 and 1798, in Spain by the disappearance of the Bourbon king and the self-directed struggle of the nation against the invader; in Prussia it had been introduced by the Government itself when Stein was at the head of the State. "It is impossible," wrote Lord Castlereagh in the spring of 1814, "not to perceive a great moral change coming on in Europe, and that the principles of freedom are in full operation." [195] There was in fact scarcely a Court in Europe which was not now declaring its intention to frame a Constitution. The professions might be lightly made; the desire and the capacity for self-government might still be limited to a narrower class than the friends of liberty imagined; but the seed was sown, and a movement had begun which was to gather strength during the next thirty years of European history, while one revolution after another proved that Governments could no longer with safety disregard the rights of their subjects.
[Social changes.]
Lastly, in all the territory that had formed Napoleon's Empire and dependencies, and also in Prussia, legal changes had been made in the rights and relations of the different classes of society, so important as almost to create a new type of social life. Within the Empire itself the Code Napoléon, conferring upon the subjects of France the benefits which the French had already won for themselves, had superseded a society resting on class-privilege, on feudal service, and on the despotism of custom, by a society resting on equality before the law, on freedom of contract, and on the unshackled ownership and enjoyment of land, whether the holder possessed an acre or a league. The principles of the French Code, if not the Code itself, had been introduced into Napoleon's kingdom of Italy, into Naples, and into almost all the German dependencies of France. In Prussia the reforms of Stein and Hardenberg had been directed, though less boldly, towards the same end; and when, after 1814, the Rhenish Provinces were annexed to Prussia by the Congress of Vienna, the Government was wise enough and liberal enough to leave these districts in the enjoyment of the laws which France had given them, and not to risk a comparison between even the best Prussian legislation and the Code Napoleon. In other territory now severed from France and restored to German or Italian princes, attempts were not wanting to obliterate the new order and to re-introduce the burdens and confusions of the old regime. But these reactions, even where unopposed for a time, were too much in conflict with the spirit of the age to gain more than a temporary and precarious success. The people had begun to know good and evil: examples of a free social order were too close at hand to render it possible for any part of the western continent to relapse for any very long period into the condition of the eighteenth century.
[Limits.]
It was indeed within a distinct limit that the Revolutionary epoch effected its work of political and social change. Neither England nor Austria received the slightest impulse to progress. England, on the contrary, suspended almost all internal improvement during the course of the war; the domestic policy of the Austrian Court, so energetic in the reign immediately preceding the Revolution, became for the next twenty years, except where it was a policy of repression, a policy of pure vacancy and inaction. But in all other States of Western Europe the period which reached its close with Napoleon's fall left deep and lasting traces behind it. Like other great epochs of change, it bore its own peculiar character. It was not, like the Renaissance and the Reformation, a time when new worlds of faith and knowledge transformed the whole scope and conception of human life; it was not, like our own age, a time when scientific discovery and increased means of communication silently altered the physical conditions of existence; it was a time of changes directly political in their nature, and directly effected by the political agencies of legislation and of war. In the perspective of history the Napoleonic age will take its true place among other, and perhaps greater, epochs. Its elements of mere violence and disturbance will fill less space in the eyes of mankind; its permanent creations, more. As an epoch of purely political energy, concentrating the work of generations within the compass of twenty five years, it will perhaps scarcely find a parallel.