CHAPTER I.

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HISTORY

OF

MODERN EUROPE

1792-1878

BY

C. A. FYFFE, M.A.

Barrister-at-Law; Fellow of University College, Oxford;

Vice-President of the Royal Historical Society

POPULAR EDITION

With Maps

PREFACE.

In acceding to the Publishers' request for a re-issue of the "History of

Modern Europe," in the form of a popular edition, I feel that I am only

fulfilling what would have been the wish of the Author himself. A few

manuscript corrections and additions found in his own copy of the work have

been adopted in the present edition; in general, however, my attention in

revising each sheet for the press has been devoted to securing an accurate

reproduction of the text and notes as they appeared in the previous

editions in three volumes. I trust that in this cheaper and more portable

form the work will prove, both to the student and the general reader, even

more widely acceptable than heretofore.

HENRIETTA F. A. FYFFE.

London, November, 1895.

PREFACE TO THE FIRST EDITION.

The object of this work is to show how the States of Europe have gained the

form and character which they possess at the present moment. The outbreak

of the Revolutionary War in 1792, terminating a period which now appears

far removed from us, and setting in motion forces which have in our own day

produced a united Germany and a united Italy, forms the natural

starting-point of a history of the present century. I have endeavoured to

tell a simple story, believing that a narrative in which facts are chosen

for their significance, and exhibited in their real connection, may be made

to convey as true an impression as a fuller history in which the writer is

not forced by the necessity of concentration to exercise the same rigour

towards himself and his materials. The second volume of the work will bring

the reader down to the year 1848: the third, down to the present time.

London, 1880.

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

In revising this volume for the second edition I have occupied myself

mainly with two sources of information--the unpublished Records of the

English Foreign Office, and the published works which have during recent

years resulted from the investigation of the Archives of Vienna. The

English Records from 1792 to 1814, for access to which I have to express my

thanks to Lord Granville, form a body of first-hand authority of

extraordinary richness, compass, and interest. They include the whole

correspondence between the representatives of Great Britain at Foreign

Courts and the English Foreign Office; a certain number of private

communications between Ministers and these representatives; a quantity of

reports from consuls, agents, and "informants" of every description; and in

addition to these the military reports, often admirably vivid and full of

matter, sent by the British officers attached to the head-quarters of our

Allies in most of the campaigns from 1792 to 1814. It is impossible that

any one person should go through the whole of this material, which it took

the Diplomatic Service a quarter of a century to write. I have endeavoured

to master the correspondence from each quarter of Europe which, for the

time being, had a preponderance in political or military interest, leaving

it when its importance became obviously subordinate to that of others; and

although I have no doubt left untouched much that would repay

investigation, I trust that the narrative has gained in accuracy from a

labour which was not a light one, and that the few short extracts which

space has permitted me to throw into the notes may serve to bring the

reader nearer to events. At some future time I hope to publish a selection

from the most important documents of this period. It is strange that our

learned Societies, so appreciative of every distant and trivial chronicle

of the Middle Ages, should ignore the records of a time of such surpassing

interest, and one in which England played so great a part. No just

conception can be formed of the difference between English statesmanship

and that of the Continental Courts in integrity, truthfulness, and public

spirit, until the mass of diplomatic correspondence preserved at London has

been studied; nor, until this has been done, can anything like an adequate

biography of Pitt be written.

The second and less important group of authorities with which I have busied

myself during the work of revision comprises the works of Hüffer, Vivenot,

Beer, Helfert, and others, based on Austrian documents, along with the

Austrian documents and letters that have been published by Vivenot. The

last-named writer is himself a partizan, but the material which he has

given to the world is most valuable. The mystery in which the Austrian

Government until lately enveloped all its actions caused some of these to

be described as worse than they really were; and I believe that in the

First Edition I under-estimated the bias of Prussian and North-German

writers. Where I have seen reasons to alter any statements, I have done so

without reserve, as it appears to me childish for any one who attempts to

write history to cling to an opinion after the balance of evidence seems to

be against it. The publication of the second volume of this work has been

delayed by the revision of the first; but I hope that it will appear before

many months more. I must express my obligations to Mr. Oscar Browning, a

fellow-labourer in the same field, who not only furnished me with various

corrections, but placed his own lectures at my disposal; and to Mr. Alfred

Kingston, whose unfailing kindness and courtesy make so great a difference

to those whose work lies in the department of the Record Office which is

under his care.

London, 1883.

PREFACE TO THE SECOND VOLUME. [2]

In writing this volume I have not had the advantage of consulting the

English Foreign Office Records for a later period than the end of 1815. A

rule not found necessary at Berlin and some other foreign capitals still

closes to historical inquirers the English documents of the last seventy

years. Restrictions are no doubt necessary in the case of transactions of

recent date, but the period of seventy years is surely unnecessarily long.

Public interests could not be prejudiced, nor could individuals be even

remotely affected, by the freest examination of the papers of 1820 or 1830.

The London documents of 1814-1815 are of various degrees of interest and

importance. Those relating to the Congress of Vienna are somewhat

disappointing. Taken all together, they add less to our knowledge on the

one or two points still requiring elucidation than the recently-published

correspondence of Talleyrand with Louis XVIII. The despatches from Italy

are on the other hand of great value, proving, what I believe was not

established before, that the Secret Treaty of 1815, whereby Austria gained

a legal right to prevent any departure from absolute Government at Naples,

was communicated to the British Ministry and received its sanction. This

sanction explains the obscure and embarrassed language of Castlereagh in

1820, which in its turn gave rise to the belief in Italy that England was

more deeply committed to Austria than it actually was, and probably

occasioned the forgery of the pretended Treaty of July 27, 1813, exposed in

vol. i. of this work, p. 538, 2nd edit. [3] The papers from France and

Spain are also interesting, though not establishing any new conclusions.

While regretting that I have not been able to use the London archives later

than 1815, I believe that it is nevertheless possible, without recourse to

unpublished papers, to write the history of the succeeding thirty years

with substantial correctness. There exist in a published form, apart from

documents printed officially, masses of first-hand material of undoubtedly

authentic character, such as the great English collection known by the

somewhat misleading name of Wellington Despatches, New Series; or again,

the collection printed as an appendix to Prokesch von Osten's History of

the Greek Rebellion, or the many volumes of Gentz' Correspondence belonging

to the period about 1820, when Gentz was really at the centre of affairs.

The Metternich papers, interesting as far as they go, are a mere selection.

The omissions are glaring, and scarcely accidental. Many minor collections

bearing on particular events might be named, such as those in Guizot's

Mémoires. Frequent references will show my obligation to the German series

of historical works constituting the Leipzig Staatengeschichte, as well as

to French authors who, like Viel-Castel, have worked with original sources

of information before them. There exist in English literature singularly

few works on this period of Continental history.

A greater publicity was introduced into political affairs on the Continent

by the establishment of Parliamentary Government in France in 1815, and

even by the attempts made to introduce it in other States. In England we

have always had freedom of discussion, but the amount of information made

public by the executive in recent times has been enormously greater than it

was at the end of the last century. The only documents published at the

outbreak of the war of 1793 were, so far as I can ascertain, the well-known

letters of Chauvelin and Lord Grenville. During the twenty years' struggle

with France next to nothing was known of the diplomatic transactions

between England and the Continental Powers. But from the time of the Reform

Bill onwards the amount of information given to the public has been

constantly increasing, and the reader of Parliamentary Papers in our own

day is likely to complain of diffusiveness rather than of reticence.

Nevertheless the perusal of published papers can never be quite the same

thing as an examination of the originals; and the writer who first has

access to the English archives after 1815 will have an advantage over those

who have gone before him.

The completion of this volume has been delayed by almost every circumstance

adverse to historical study and production, including a severe

Parliamentary contest. I trust, however, that no trace of partisanship or

unrest appears in the work, which I have valued for the sake of the mental

discipline which it demanded. With quieter times the third volume will, I

trust, advance more rapidly.

LONDON, October, 1886.

NOTE.--The third volume was published in 1889.

CONTENTS.

CHAPTER I.

FRANCE AND GERMANY AT THE OUTBREAK OF THE REVOLUTIONARY WAR.

Outbreak of the Revolutionary War in 1792--Its immediate causes--

Declaration of Pillnitz made and withdrawn--Agitation of the Priests and

Emigrants--War Policy of the Gironde--Provocations offered to France by the

Powers--State of Central Europe in 1792--The Holy Roman Empire--Austria--

Rule of the Hapsburgs--The Reforms of Maria Theresa and Joseph II.--Policy

of Leopold II.--Government and Foreign Policy of Francis II.--Prussia--

Government of Frederick William II.--Social Condition of Prussia--Secondary

States of Germany--Ecclesiastical States--Free Cities--Knights--Weakness of

Germany

CHAPTER II.

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

DIRECTORY.

French and Austrian Armies on the Flemish Frontier--Prussia enters the

War--Brunswick invades France--His Proclamation--Insurrection of Aug. 10 at

Paris--Massacres of September--Character of the War--Brunswick, checked at

Valmy, retreats--The War becomes a Crusade of France--Neighbours of

France--Custine enters Mainz--Dumouriez conquers the Austrian Netherlands--

Nice and Savoy annexed--Decree of the Convention against all Governments--

Execution of Louis XVI.--War with England, followed by war with the

Mediterranean States--Condition of England--English Parties, how affected

by the Revolution--The Gironde and the Mountain--Austria recovers the

Netherlands--The Allies invade France--La Vendée--Revolutionary System of

1793--Errors of the Allies--New French Commanders and Democratic

Army--Victories of Jourdan, Hoche, and Pichegru--Prussia withdrawing from

the War--Polish Affairs--Austria abandons the Netherlands--Treaties of

Basle--France in 1795--Insurrection of 13 Vendémiaire--Constitution of

1795--The Directory--Effect of the Revolution on the Spirit of Europe up to

1795

CHAPTER III.

ITALIAN CAMPAIGNS: TREATY OF CAMPO FORMIO.

Triple attack on Austria--Moreau, Jourdan--Bonaparte in Italy--Condition

of the Italian States--Professions and real intentions of Bonaparte and the

Directory--Battle of Montenotte--Armistice with Sardinia--Campaign in

Lombardy--Treatment of the Pope, Naples, Tuscany--Siege of Mantua--

Castiglione--Moreau and Jourdan in Germany--Their retreat--Secret Treaty

with Prussia--Negotiations with England--Cispadane Republic--Rise of the

idea of Italian Independence--Battles of Arcola and Rivoli--Peace with the

Pope at Tolentino--Venice--Preliminaries of Leoben--The French in

Venice--The French take the Ionian Islands and give Venice to

Austria--Genoa--Coup d'état of 17 Fructidor in Paris--Treaty of Campo

Formio--Victories of England at Sea--Bonaparte's project against Egypt

CHAPTER IV.

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

Congress of Rastadt--The Rhenish Provinces ceded--Ecclesiastical States of

Germany suppressed--French Intervention in Switzerland--Helvetic

Republic--The French invade the Papal States--Roman Republic--Expedition to

Egypt--Battle of the Nile--Coalition of 1798--Ferdinand of Naples enters

Rome--Mack's defeats--French enter Naples--Parthenopean Republic--War with

Austria and Russia--Battle of Stockach--Murder of the French Envoys at

Rastadt--Campaign in Lombardy--Reign of Terror at Naples--Austrian designs

upon Italy--Suvaroff and the Austrians--Campaign in Switzerland--Campaign

in Holland--Bonaparte returns from Egypt--Coup d'état of 18 Brumaire--

Constitution of 1799--System of Bonaparte in France--Its effect on the

influence of France abroad

CHAPTER V.

FROM MARENGO TO THE RUPTURE OF THE PEACE OF AMIENS.

Overtures of Bonaparte to Austria and England--The War continues--Massena

besieged in Genoa--Moreau invades Southern Germany--Bonaparte crosses the

St. Bernard, and descends in the rear of the Austrians--Battle of

Marengo--Austrians retire behind the Mincio--Treaty between England and

Austria--Austria continues the War--Battle of Hohenlinden--Peace of

Lunéville--War between England and the Northern Maritime League--Battle

of Copenhagen--Murder of Paul--End of the Maritime War--English Army

enters Egypt--French defeated at Alexandria--They capitulate at Cairo and

Alexandria--Preliminaries of Peace between England and France signed at

London, followed by Peace of Amiens--Pitt's Irish Policy and his

retirement--Debates on the Peace--Aggressions of Bonaparte during the

Continental Peace--Holland, Italy, Switzerland--Settlement of Germany

under French and Russian influence--Suppression of Ecclesiastical States

and Free Cities--Its effects--Stein--France under the Consulate--The

Civil Code--The Concordat

CHAPTER VI.

THE EMPIRE, TO THE PEACE OF PRESBURG.

England claims Malta--War renewed--Bonaparte occupies Hanover, and

blockades the Elbe--Remonstrances of Prussia--Cadoudal's Plot--Murder

of the Duke of Enghien--Napoleon Emperor--Coalition of 1805--Prussia

holds aloof--State of Austria--Failure of Napoleon's Attempt to gain

Naval Superiority in the Channel--Campaign in Western Germany--

Capitulation of Ulm--Trafalgar--Treaty of Potsdam between Prussia and

the Allies--The French enter Vienna--Haugwitz sent to Napoleon with

Prussian Ultimatum--Battle of Austerlitz--Haugwitz signs a Treaty of

Alliance with Napoleon--Peace--Treaty of Presburg--End of the Holy

Roman Empire--Naples given to Joseph Bonaparte--Battle of Maida--The

Napoleonic Empire and Dynasty--Federation of the Rhine--State of

Germany--Possibility of maintaining the Empire of 1806

CHAPTER VII.

DEATH OF PITT, TO THE PEACE OF TILSIT.

Death of Pitt--Ministry of Fox and Grenville--Napoleon forces Prussia into

war with England, and then offers Hanover to England--Prussia resolves on

war with Napoleon--State of Prussia--Decline of the Army--Southern Germany

with Napoleon--Austria neutral--England and Russia about to help Prussia,

but not immediately--Campaign of 1806--Battles of Jena and Auerstädt--Ruin

of the Prussian Army--Capitulation of Fortresses--Demands of Napoleon--The

War continues--Berlin Decree--Exclusion of English goods from the

Continent--Russia enters the war--Campaign in Poland and East

Prussia--Eylau--Treaty of Bartenstein--Friedland--Interview at

Tilsit--Alliance of Napoleon and Alexander--Secret Articles--English

expedition to Denmark--The French enter Portugal--Prussia after the Peace

of Tilsit--Stein's Edict of Emancipation--The Prussian Peasant--Reform of

the Prussian Army, and creation of Municipalities--Stein's other projects

of Reform, which are not carried out

CHAPTER VIII.

SPAIN, TO THE FALL OF SARAGOSSA.

Spain in 1806--Napoleon uses the quarrel between Ferdinand and Godoy--He

affects to be Ferdinand's Protector--Dupont's Army enters Spain--Murat in

Spain--Charles abdicates--Ferdinand King--Savary brings Ferdinand to

Bayonne--Napoleon makes both Charles and Ferdinand resign--Spirit of the

Spanish Nation--Contrast with Germany--Rising of all Spain--The Notables

at Bayonne--Campaign of 1808--Capitulation of Baylen--Wellesley lands in

Portugal--Vimieiro--Convention of Cintra--Effect of the Spanish Rising on

Europe--War Party in Prussia--Napoleon and Alexander at Erfurt--Stein

resigns, and is proscribed--Napoleon in Spain--Spanish Misgovernment--

Campaign on the Ebro--Campaign of Sir John Moore--Corunna--Napoleon

leaves Spain--Siege of Saragossa--Successes of the French

CHAPTER IX.

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

Austria preparing for war--The war to be one on behalf of the German

Nation--Patriotic movement in Prussia--Expected Insurrection in North

Germany--Plans of Campaign--Austrian Manifesto to the Germans--Rising of

the Tyrolese--Defeats of the Archduke Charles in Bavaria--French in

Vienna--Attempts of Dörnberg and Schill--Battle of Aspern--Second passage

of the Danube--Battle of Wagram--Armistice of Znaim--Austria waiting for

Events--Wellesley in Spain--He gains the Battle of Talavera, but

retreats--Expedition against Antwerp fails--Austria makes Peace--Treaty of

Vienna--Real Effects of the War of 1809--Austria after 1809--Metternich--

Marriage of Napoleon with Marie Louise--Severance of Napoleon and

Alexander--Napoleon annexes the Papal States, Holland, Le Valais, and the

North German Coast--The Napoleonic Empire: its benefits and wrongs--The

Czar withdraws from Napoleon's Commercial System--War with Russia

imminent--Wellington in Portugal; Lines of Torres Vedras; Massena's

Campaign of 1810, and retreat--Soult in Andalusia--Wellington's Campaign

of 1811--Capture of Ciudad Rodrigo and Badajoz--Salamanca

CHAPTER X.

RUSSIAN CAMPAIGN, TO THE TREATY OF KALISCH.

War approaching between France and Russia--Policy of Prussia--Hardenberg's

Ministry--Prussia forced into Alliance with Napoleon--Austrian Alliance--

Napoleon's Preparations--He enters Russia--Alexander and Bernadotte--Plan

of Russians to fight a battle at Drissa frustrated--They retreat on

Witepsk--Sufferings of the French--French enter Smolensko--Battle of

Borodino--Evacuation of Moscow--Moscow fired--The Retreat from Moscow--

French at Smolensko--Advance of Russian Armies from North and South--Battle

of Krasnoi--Passage of the Beresina--The French reach the Niemen--York's

Convention with the Russians--The Czar and Stein--Russian Army enters

Prussia--Stein raises East Prussia--Treaty of Kalisch--Prussia declares

War--Enthusiasm of the Nation--Idea of German Unity--The Landwehr

CHAPTER XI.

WAR OF LIBERATION, TO THE PEACE OF PARIS.

The War of Liberation--Blücher crosses the Elbe--Battle of Lützen--The

Allies retreat to Silesia--Battle of Bautzen--Armistice--Napoleon intends

to intimidate Austria--Mistaken as to the Forces of Austria--Metternich's

Policy--Treaty of Reichenbach--Austria offers its Mediation--Congress of

Prague--Austria enters the War--Armies and Plans of Napoleon and the

Allies--Campaign of August--Battles of Dresden, Grosbeeren, the Katzbach,

and Kulm--Effect of these Actions--Battle of Dennewitz--German Policy of

Austria favourable to the Princes of the Rhenish Confederacy--Frustrated

hopes of German Unity--Battle of Leipzig--The Allies reach the Rhine--

Offers of Peace at Frankfort--Plan of Invasion of France--Backwardness of

Austria--The Allies enter France--Campaign of 1814--Congress of

Châtillon--Napoleon moves to the rear of the Allies--The Allies advance

on Paris--Capitulation of Paris--Entry of the Allies--Dethronement of

Napoleon--Restoration of the Bourbons--The Charta--Treaty of Paris--

Territorial effects of the War, 1792-1814--Every Power except France had

gained--France relatively weaker in Europe--Summary of the permanent

effects of this period on Europe

END OF VOL. I. (ORIGINAL EDITION).

CHAPTER XII.

THE RESTORATION.

The Restoration of 1814--Norway--Naples--Westphalia--Spain--The Spanish

Constitution overthrown: victory of the clergy--Restoration in France--The

Charta--Encroachments of the nobles and clergy--Growing hostility to the

Bourbons--Congress of Vienna--Talleyrand and the Four Powers--The Polish

question--The Saxon question--Theory of Legitimacy--Secret alliance

against Russia and Prussia--Compromise--The Rhenish Provinces--Napoleon

leaves Elba and lands in France--His declarations--Napoleon at Grenoble,

at Lyons, at Paris--The Congress of Vienna unites Europe against

France--Murat's action in Italy--The Acte Additionnel--The Champ de

Mai--Napoleon takes up the offensive--Battles of Ligny, Quatre Bras,

Waterloo--Affairs at Paris--Napoleon sent to St. Helena--Wellington and

Fouché--Arguments on the proposed cession of French territory--Treaty of

Holy Alliance--Second Treaty of Paris--Conclusion of the work of the

Congress of Vienna--Federation of Germany--Estimate of the Congress of

Vienna and of the Treaties of 1815--The Slave Trade

CHAPTER XIII.

THE PROGRESS OF REACTION.

Concert of Europe after 1815--Spirit of the Foreign Policy of Alexander, of

Metternich, and of the English Ministry--Metternich's action in Italy,

England's in Sicily and Spain--The Reaction in France--Richelieu and the

New Chamber--Execution of Ney--Imprisonments and persecutions--Conduct of

the Ultra-Royalists in Parliament--Contests on the Electoral Bill and the

Budget--The Chamber prorogued--Affair of Grenoble--Dissolution of the

Chamber--Electoral Law and Financial Settlement of 1817--Character of the

first years of peace in Europe generally--Promise of a Constitution in

Prussia--Hardenberg opposed by the partisans of autocracy and

privilege--Schmalz' Pamphlet--Delay of Constitutional Reform in Germany at

large--The Wartburg Festival--Progress of Reaction--The Czar now inclines

to repression--Congress of Aix-la-Chapelle--Evacuation of France--Growing

influence of Metternich in Europe--His action on Prussia--Murder of

Kotzebue--The Carlsbad Conference and measures of repression in

Germany--Richelieu and Decazes--Murder of the Duke of Berry--Progress of

the reaction in France--General causes of the victory of reaction in Europe

CHAPTER XIV.

THE MEDITERRANEAN MOVEMENTS OF 1820.

Movements in the Mediterranean States beginning in 1820--Spain from

1814 to 1820--The South American Colonies--The Army at Cadiz: Action

of Quiroga and Riego--Movement at Corunna--Ferdinand accepts the

Constitution of 1812--Naples from 1815 to 1820--The Court-party, the

Muratists, the Carbonari--The Spanish Constitution proclaimed at

Naples--Constitutional movement in Portugal--Alexander's proposal with

regard to Spain--The Conference and Declaration of Troppau--Protest of

England--Conference of Laibach--The Austrians invade Naples and restore

absolute Monarchy--Insurrection in Piedmont, which fails--Spain from

1820 to 1822--Death of Castlereagh--The Congress of Verona--Policy of

England--The French invade Spain--Restoration of absolute Monarchy, and

violence of the reaction--England prohibits the conquest of the Spanish

Colonies by France, and subsequently recognises their independence--

Affairs in Portugal--Canning sends troops to Lisbon--The Policy of

Canning--Estimate of his place in the history of Europe

CHAPTER XV.

GREECE AND EASTERN AFFAIRS.

Condition of Greece: its Races and Institutions--The Greek Church

--Communal System--The Ægæan Islands--The Phanariots--Greek intellectual

revival: Koraes--Beginning of Greek National Movement; Contact of Greece

with the French Revolution and Napoleon--The Hetæria Philike--Hypsilanti's

Attempt in the Danubian Provinces: its failure--Revolt of the Morea:

Massacres: Execution of Gregorius, and Terrorism at Constantinople

--Attitude of Russia, Austria, and England--Extension of the Revolt:

Affairs at Hydra--The Greek Leaders--Fall of Tripolitza--The Massacre of

Chios--Failure of the Turks in the Campaign of 1822--Dissensions of the

Greeks--Mahmud calls upon Mehemet Ali for Aid--Ibrahim conquers Crete and

invades the Morea--Siege of Missolonghi--Philhellenism in Europe--Russian

proposal for Intervention--Conspiracies in Russia: Death of Alexander:

Accession of Nicholas--Military Insurrection at St. Petersburg--

Anglo-Russian Protocol--Treaty between England, Russia, and France--Death

of Canning--Navarino--War between Russia and Turkey--Campaigns of 1828 and

1829--Treaty of Adrianople--Capodistrias President of Greece--Leopold

accepts and then declines the Greek Crown--Murder of Capodistrias--Otho,

King of Greece

CHAPTER XVI.

THE MOVEMENTS OF 1830.

France before 1830--Reign of Charles X.--Ministry of Martignac--Ministry

of Polignac--The Duke of Orleans--War in Algiers--The July Ordinances--

Revolution of July--Louis Philippe King--Nature and effects of the July

Revolution--Affairs in Belgium--The Belgian Revolution--The Great

Powers--Intervention, and establishment of the Kingdom of Belgium--Affairs

of Poland--Insurrection at Warsaw--War between Russia and Poland--Overthrow

of the Poles: End of the Polish Constitution--Affairs of Italy--

Insurrection in the Papal States--France and Austria--Austrian

Intervention--Ancona occupied by the French--Affairs of Germany--Prussia;

the Zollverein--Brunswick, Hanover, Saxony--The Palatinate--Reaction in

Germany--The exiles in Switzerland: Incursion into Savoy--Dispersion of the

Exiles--France under Louis Philippe: Successive risings--Period of

Parliamentary activity--England after 1830: The Reform Bill

CHAPTER XVII.

SPANISH AND EASTERN AFFAIRS.

France and England after 1830--Affairs of Portugal--Don Miguel--Don Pedro

invades Portugal--Ferdinand of Spain--The Pragmatic Sanction--Death of

Ferdinand: Regency of Christina--The Constitution--Quadruple

Alliance--Miguel and Carlos expelled from Portugal--Carlos enters

Spain--The Basque Provinces--Carlist War: Zumalacarregui--The Spanish

Government seeks French assistance, which is refused--Constitution of

1837--End of the War--Regency of Espartero--Isabella Queen--Affairs of

the Ottoman Empire--Ibrahim invades Syria; his victories--Rivalry of

France and Russia at Constantinople--Peace of Kutaya and Treaty of Unkiar

Skelessi--Effect of this Treaty--France and Mehemet Ali--Commerce of the

Levant--Second War between Mehemet and the Porte--Ottoman disasters--The

Policy of the Great Powers--Quadruple Treaty without France--Ibrahim

expelled from Syria--Final Settlement--Turkey after 1840--Attempted

reforms of Reschid Pasha

CHAPTER XVIII.

EUROPE BEFORE 1848.

Europe during the Thirty-years' Peace--Italy and Austria--Mazzini--The

House of Savoy--Gioberti--Election of Pius IX.--Reforms expected--

Revolution at Palermo--Agitation in Northern Italy--Lombardy--State of

the Austrian Empire--Growth of Hungarian national spirit--The Magyars

and Slavs--Transylvania--Parties among the Magyars--Kossuth--The Slavic

national movements in Austria--The government enters on reforms in

Hungary--Policy of the Opposition--The Rural system of Austria--

Insurrection in Galicia: the nobles and the peasants--Agrarian

edict--Public opinion in Vienna--Prussia--Accession and character of

King Frederick William IV.--Convocation of the United Diet--Its

debates and dissolution--France--The Spanish Marriages--Reform

movement--Socialism--Revolution of February--End of the Orleanist

Monarchy

END OF VOL. II. (ORIGINAL EDITION).

CHAPTER XIX.

THE MARCH REVOLUTION, 1848.

Europe in 1789 and in 1848--Agitation in Western Germany before and

after the Revolution at Paris--Austria and Hungary--The March Revolution

at Vienna--Flight of Metternich--The Hungarian Diet--Hungary wins its

independence--Bohemian movement--Autonomy promised to Bohemia--

Insurrection of Lombardy--Of Venice--Piedmont makes war on Austria--A

general Italian war against Austria imminent--The March Days at

Berlin--Frederick William IV.--A National Assembly promised--

Schleswig-Holstein--Insurrection in Holstein--War between Germany and

Denmark--The German Ante-Parliament--Republican Rising in Baden--Meeting

of the German National Assembly at Frankfort--Europe generally in March,

1848--The French Provisional Government--The National Workshops--The

Government and the Red Republicans--French National Assembly--Riot of

May 15--Measures against the National Workshops--The Four Days of

June--Cavaignac--Louis Napoleon--He is elected to the Assembly--Elected

President

CHAPTER XX.

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

EMPIRE.

Austria and Italy--Vienna from March to May--Flight of the Emperor

--Bohemian National Movement--Windischgrätz subdues Prague--Campaign around

Verona--Papal Allocution--Naples in May--Negotiations as to Lombardy--

Reconquest of Venetia--Battle of Custozza--The Austrians enter

Milan--Austrian Court and Hungary--The Serbs in Southern Hungary--Serb

Congress at Carlowitz--Jellacic--Affairs of Croatia--Jellacic, the Court

and the Hungarian Movement--Murder of Lamberg--Manifesto of October 3--

Vienna on October 6--The Emperor at Olmütz--Windischgrätz conquers

Vienna--The Parliament at Kremsier--Schwarzenberg Minister--Ferdinand

abdicates--Dissolution of the Kremsier Parliament--Unitary Edict--Hungary

--The Roumanians in Transylvania--The Austrian Army occupies Pesth--

Hungarian Government at Debreczin--The Austrians driven out of

Hungary--Declaration of Hungarian Independence--Russian Intervention--The

Hungarian Summer Campaign--Capitulation of Vilagos--Italy--Murder of

Rossi--Tuscany--The March Campaign in Lombardy--Novara--Abdication of

Charles Albert--Victor Emmanuel--Restoration in Tuscany--French

Intervention in Rome--Defeat of Oudinot--Oudinot and Lesseps--The French

enter Rome--The Restored Pontifical Government--Fall of Venice--Ferdinand

reconquers Sicily--Germany--The National Assembly at Frankfort--The

Armistice of Malmö--Berlin from April to September--The Prussian Army--Last

Days of the Prussian Parliament--Prussian Constitution granted by

Edict--The German National Assembly and Austria--Frederick William IV.

elected Emperor--He refuses the Crown--End of the National Assembly--

Prussia attempts to form a separate Union--The Union Parliament at

Erfurt--Action of Austria--Hesse-Cassel--The Diet of Frankfort

restored--Olmütz--Schleswig-Holstein--Germany after 1849--Austria after

1851--France after 1848--Louis Napoleon--The October Message--Law Limiting

the Franchise--Louis Napoleon and the Army--Proposed Revision of the

Constitution--The Coup d'Etat--Napoleon III. Emperor

CHAPTER XXI.

THE CRIMEAN WAR.

England and France in 1851--Russia under Nicholas--The Hungarian

Refugees--Dispute between France and Russia on the Holy Places--Nicholas

and the British Ambassador--Lord Stratford de Redcliffe--Menschikoff's

Mission--Russian troops enter the Danubian Principalities--Lord Aberdeen's

Cabinet--Movements of the Fleets--The Vienna Note--The Fleets pass the

Dardanelles--Turkish Squadron destroyed at Sinope--Declaration of

War--Policy of Austria--Policy of Prussia--The Western Powers and the

European Concert--Siege of Silistria--The Principalities evacuated--

Further objects of the Western Powers--Invasion of the Crimea--Battle of

the Alma--The Flank March--Balaclava--Inkermann--Winter in the

Crimea--Death of Nicholas--Conference of Vienna--Austria--Progress of the

Siege--Plans of Napoleon III.--Canrobert and Pélissier--Unsuccessful

Assault--Battle of the Tchernaya--Capture of the Malakoff--Fall of

Sebastopol--Fall of Kars--Negotiations for Peace--The Conference of

Paris--Treaty of Paris--The Danubian Principalities--Continued discord in

the Ottoman Empire--Revision of the Treaty of Paris in 1871

CHAPTER XXII.

THE CREATION OF THE ITALIAN KINGDOM.

Piedmont after 1849--Ministry of Azeglio--Cavour Prime Minister--Designs

of Cavour--His Crimean Policy--Cavour at the Conference of Paris--Cavour

and Napoleon III.--The Meeting at Plombières--Preparations in Italy--Treaty

of January, 1859--Attempts at Mediation--Austrian Ultimatum--Campaign of

1859--Magenta--Movement in Central Italy--Solferino--Napoleon and

Prussia--Interview of Villafranca--Cavour resigns--Peace of Zürich--Central

Italy after Villafranca--The Proposed Congress--"The Pope and the

Congress"--Cavour resumes office--Cavour and Napoleon--Union of the Duchies

and the Romagna with Piedmont--Savoy and Nice added to France--Cavour on

this cession--European opinion--Naples--Sicily--Garibaldi lands at

Marsala--Capture of Palermo--The Neapolitans evacuate Sicily--Cavour and

the Party of Action--Cavour's Policy as to Naples--Garibaldi on the

mainland--Persano and Villamarina at Naples--Garibaldi at Naples--The

Piedmontese Army enters Umbria and the Marches--Fall of Ancona--Garibaldi

and Cavour--The Armies on the Volturno--Fall of Gaeta--Cavour's Policy

with regard to Rome and Venice--Death of Cavour--The Free Church in the

Free State

CHAPTER XXIII.

GERMAN ASCENDENCY WON BY PRUSSIA.

Germany after 1858--The Regency in Prussia--Army-reorganisation--King

William I.--Conflict between the Crown and the Parliament--Bismarck--The

struggle continued--Austria from 1859--The October Diploma--Resistance of

Hungary--The Reichsrath--Russia under Alexander II.--Liberation of the

Serfs--Poland--The Insurrection of 1863--Agrarian measures in Poland--

Schleswig-Holstein--Death of Frederick VII.--Plans of Bismarck--Campaign

in Schleswig--Conference of London--Treaty of Vienna--England and Napoleon

III.--Prussia and Austria--Convention of Gastein--Italy--Alliance of

Prussia with Italy--Proposals for a Congress fail--War between Austria and

Prussia--Napoleon III.--Königgrätz--Custozza--Mediation of Napoleon

--Treaty of Prague--South Germany--Projects for compensation to

France--Austria and Hungary--Deák--Establishment of the Dual System in

Austria-Hungary

CHAPTER XXIV.

THE WAR BETWEEN FRANCE AND GERMANY.

Napoleon III.--The Mexican Expedition--Withdrawal of the French and death

of Maximilian--The Luxemburg Question--Exasperation in France against

Prussia--Austria--Italy--Mentana--Germany after 1866--The Spanish

Candidature of Leopold of Hohenzollern--French declaration--Benedetti and

King William--Withdrawal of Leopold and demand for guarantees--The telegram

from Ems--War--Expected Alliances of France--Austria--Italy--Prussian

plans--The French army--Causes of French inferiority--Weissenburg--Wörth--

Spicheren--Borny--Mars-la-Tour--Gravelotte--Sedan--The Republic proclaimed

at Paris--Favre and Bismarck--Siege of Paris--Gambetta at Tours--The Army

of the Loire--Fall of Metz--Fighting at Orleans--Sortie of Champigny--The

Armies of the North, of the Loire, of the East--Bourbaki's ruin--

Capitulation of Paris and Armistice--Preliminaries of Peace--Germany--

Establishment of the German Empire--The Commune of Paris--Second Siege--

Effects of the war as to Russia and Italy--Rome

CHAPTER XXV.

EASTERN AFFAIRS.

France after 1871--Alliance of the Three Emperors--Revolt of Herzegovina--

The Andrássy Note--Murder of the Consuls at Salonika--The Berlin

Memorandum--Rejected by England--Abdul Aziz deposed--Massacres in

Bulgaria--Servia and Montenegro declare War--Opinion in England--Disraeli--

Meeting of Emperors at Reichstadt--Servian Campaign--Declaration of the

Czar--Conference at Constantinople--Its Failure--The London Protocol--

Russia declares War--Advance on the Balkans--Osman at Plevna--Second Attack

on Plevna--The Shipka Pass--Roumania--Third Attack on Plevna--Todleben--

Fall of Plevna--Passage of the Balkans--Armistice--England--The Fleet

passes the Dardanelles--Treaty of San Stefano--England and Russia--Secret

Agreement--Convention with Turkey--Congress of Berlin--Treaty of

Berlin--Bulgaria

MAPS.

EUROPEAN STATES IN 1792

CENTRAL EUROPE IN 1812

MODERN EUROPE.

CHAPTER I.

Outbreak of the Revolutionary War in 1792--Its immediate causes--

Declaration of Pillnitz made and withdrawn--Agitation of the Priests and

Emigrants--War Policy of the Gironde--Provocations offered to France by

the Powers--State of Central Europe in 1792--The Holy Roman Empire--

Austria--Rule of the Hapsburgs--The Reforms of Maria Theresa and Joseph

II.--Policy of Leopold II.--Government and Foreign Policy of Francis

II.--Prussia--Government of Frederick William II.--Social condition or

Prussia--Secondary States of Germany--Ecclesiastical States--Free

Cities--Knights--Weakness of Germany

On the morning of the 19th of April, 1792, after weeks of stormy agitation

in Paris, the Ministers of Louis XVI. brought down a letter from the King

to the Legislative Assembly of France. The letter was brief but

significant. It announced that the King intended to appear in the Hall of

Assembly at noon on the following day. Though the letter did not disclose

the object of the King's visit, it was known that Louis had given way to

the pressure of his Ministry and the national cry for war, and that a

declaration of war against Austria was the measure which the King was about

to propose in person to the Assembly. On the morrow the public thronged the

hall; the Assembly broke off its debate at midday in order to be in

readiness for the King. Louis entered the hall in the midst of deep

silence, and seated himself beside the President in the chair which was now

substituted for the throne of France. At the King's bidding General

Dumouriez, Minister of Foreign Affairs, read a report to the Assembly upon

the relations of France to foreign Powers. The report contained a long

series of charges against Austria, and concluded with the recommendation of

war. When Dumouriez ceased reading Louis rose, and in a low voice declared

that he himself and the whole of the Ministry accepted the report read to

the Assembly; that he had used every effort to maintain peace, and in vain;

and that he was now come, in accordance with the terms of the Constitution,

to propose that the Assembly declare war against the Austrian Sovereign. It

was not three months since Louis himself had supplicated the Courts of

Europe for armed aid against his own subjects. The words which he now

uttered were put in his mouth by men whom he hated, but could not resist:

the very outburst of applause that followed them only proved the fatal

antagonism that existed between the nation and the King. After the

President of the Assembly had made a short answer, Louis retired from the

hall. The Assembly itself broke up, to commence its debate on the King's

proposal after an interval of some hours. When the House re-assembled in

the evening, those few courageous men who argued on grounds of national

interest and justice against the passion of the moment could scarcely

obtain a hearing. An appeal for a second day's discussion was rejected; the

debate abruptly closed; and the declaration of war was carried against

seven dissentient votes. It was a decision big with consequences for France

and for the world. From that day began the struggle between Revolutionary

France and the established order of Europe. A period opened in which almost

every State on the Continent gained some new character from the aggressions

of France, from the laws and political changes introduced by the conqueror,

or from the awakening of new forces of national life in the crisis of

successful resistance or of humiliation. It is my intention to trace the

great lines of European history from that time to the present, briefly

sketching the condition of some of the principal States at the outbreak of

the Revolutionary War, and endeavouring to distinguish, amid scenes of

ever-shifting incident, the steps by which the Europe of 1792 has become

the Europe of to-day.

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

The first two years of the Revolution had ended without bringing France

into collision with foreign Powers. This was not due to any goodwill that

the Courts of Europe bore to the French people, or to want of effort on the

part of the French aristocracy to raise the armies of Europe against their

own country. The National Assembly, which met in 1789, had cut at the roots

of the power of the Crown; it had deprived the nobility of their privileges,

and laid its hand upon the revenues of the Church. The brothers of King

Louis XVI., with a host of nobles too impatient to pursue a course of

steady political opposition at home, quitted France, and wearied foreign

Courts with their appeals for armed assistance. The absolute monarchs of

the Continent gave them a warm and even ostentatious welcome; but they

confined their support to words and tokens of distinction, and until the

summer of 1791 the Revolution was not seriously threatened with the

interference of the stranger. The flight of King Louis from Paris in June,

1791, followed by his capture and his strict confinement within the

Tuileries, gave rise to the first definite project of foreign intervention.

[4] Louis had fled from his capital and from the National Assembly; he

returned, the hostage of a populace already familiar with outrage and

bloodshed. For a moment the exasperation of Paris brought the Royal Family

into real jeopardy. The Emperor Leopold, brother of Marie Antoinette,

trembled for the safety of his unhappy sister, and addressed a letter to

the European Courts from Padua, on the 6th of July, proposing that the

Powers should unite to preserve the Royal Family of France from popular

violence. Six weeks later the Emperor and King Frederick William II. of

Prussia met at Pillnitz, in Saxony. A declaration was published by the two

Sovereigns, stating that they considered the position of the King of France

to be matter of European concern, and that, in the event of all the other

great Powers consenting to a joint action, they were prepared to supply an

armed force to operate on the French frontier.

[Declaration of Pillnitz withdrawn.]

Had the National Assembly instantly declared war on Leopold and Frederick

William, its action would have been justified by every rule of

international law. The Assembly did not, however, declare war, and for a

good reason. It was known at Paris that the manifesto was no more than a

device of the Emperor's to intimidate the enemies of the Royal Family.

Leopold, when he pledged himself to join a coalition of all the Powers, was

in fact aware that England would be no party to any such coalition. He was

determined to do nothing that would force him into war; and it did not

occur to him that French politicians would understand the emptiness of his

threats as well as he did himself. Yet this turned out to be the case; and

whatever indignation the manifesto of Pillnitz excited in the mass of the

French people, it was received with more derision than alarm by the men who

were cognisant of the affairs of Europe. All the politicians of the

National Assembly knew that Prussia and Austria had lately been on the

verge of war with one another upon the Eastern question; they even

underrated the effect of the French revolution in appeasing the existing

enmities of the great Powers. No important party in France regarded the

Declaration of Pillnitz as a possible reason for hostilities; and the

challenge given to France was soon publicly withdrawn. It was withdrawn

when Louis XVI., by accepting the Constitution made by the National

Assembly, placed himself, in the sight of Europe, in the position of a free

agent. On the 14th September, 1791, the King, by a solemn public oath,

identified his will with that of the nation. It was known in Paris that he

had been urged by the emigrants to refuse his assent, and to plunge the

nation into civil war by an open breach with the Assembly. The frankness

with which Louis pledged himself to the Constitution, the seeming sincerity

of his patriotism, again turned the tide of public opinion in his favour.

His flight was forgiven; the restrictions placed upon his personal liberty

were relaxed. Louis seemed to be once more reconciled with France, and

France was relieved from the ban of Europe. The Emperor announced that the

circumstances which had provoked the Declaration of Pillnitz no longer

existed, and that the Powers, though prepared to revive the League if

future occasion should arise, suspended all joint action in reference to

the internal affairs of France.

[Priests and emigrants keep France in agitation.]

The National Assembly, which, in two years, had carried France so far

towards the goal of political and social freedom, now declared its work

ended. In the mass of the nation there was little desire for further

change. The grievances which pressed most heavily upon the common course of

men's lives--unfair taxation, exclusion from public employment, monopolies

among the townspeople, and the feudal dues which consumed the produce of

the peasant--had been swept away. It was less by any general demand for

further reform than by the antagonisms already kindled in the Revolution

that France was forced into a new series of violent changes. The King

himself was not sincerely at one with the nation; in everything that most

keenly touched his conscience he had unwillingly accepted the work of the

Assembly. The Church and the noblesse were bent on undoing what had already

been done. Without interfering with doctrine or ritual, the National

Assembly had re-organised the ecclesiastical system of France, and had

enforced that supremacy of the State over the priesthood to which,

throughout the eighteenth century, the Governments of Catholic Europe had

been steadily tending. The Civil Constitution of the Clergy, which was

created by the National Assembly in 1790, transformed the priesthood from a

society of landowners into a body of salaried officers of the State, and

gave to the laity the election of their bishops and ministers. The change,

carried out in this extreme form, threw the whole body of bishops and a

great part of the lower clergy into revolt. Their interests were hurt by

the sale of the Church lands; their consciences were wounded by the system

of popular election, which was condemned by the Pope. In half the pulpits

of France the principles of the Revolution were anathematised, and the

vengeance of heaven denounced against the purchasers of the secularised

Church lands. Beyond the frontier the emigrant nobles, who might have

tempered the Revolution by combining with the many liberal men of their

order who remained at home, gathered in arms, and sought the help of

foreigners against a nation in which they could see nothing but rebellious

dependents of their own. The head-quarters of the emigrants were at

Coblentz in the dominions of the Elector of Trèves. They formed themselves

into regiments, numbering in all some few thousands, and occupied

themselves with extravagant schemes of vengeance against all Frenchmen who

had taken part in the destruction of the privileges of their caste.

[Legislative Assembly. Oct. 1791.]

[War policy of the Gironde.]

Had the elections which followed the dissolution of the National Assembly

sent to the Legislature a body of men bent only on maintaining the

advantages already won, it would have been no easy task to preserve the

peace of France in the presence of the secret or open hostility of the

Court, the Church, and the emigrants. But the trial was not made. The

leading spirits among the new representatives were not men of compromise.

In the Legislative Body which met in 1791 there were all the passions of

the Assembly of 1789, without any of the experience which that Assembly had

gained. A decree, memorable among the achievements of political folly, had

prohibited members of the late Chamber from seeking re-election. The new

Legislature was composed of men whose political creed had been drawn almost

wholly from literary sources; the most dangerous theorists of the former

Assembly were released from Parliamentary restraints, and installed, like

Robespierre, as the orators of the clubs. Within the Chamber itself the

defenders of the Monarchy and of the Constitution which had just been given

to France were far outmatched by the party of advance. The most conspicuous

of the new deputies formed the group named after the district of the

Gironde, where several of their leaders had been elected. The orator

Vergniaud, pre-eminent among companions of singular eloquence, the

philosopher Condorcet, the veteran journalist Brissot, gave to this party

an ascendancy in the Chamber and an influence in the country the more

dangerous because it appeared to belong to men elevated above the ordinary

regions of political strife. Without the fixed design of turning the

monarchy into a republic, the orators of the Gironde sought to carry the

revolutionary movement over the barrier erected against it in the

Constitution of 1791. From the moment of the opening of the Assembly it was

clear that the Girondins intended to precipitate the conflict between the

Court and the nation by devoting all the wealth of their eloquence to the

subjects which divided France the most. To Brissot and the men who

furnished the ideas of the party, it would have seemed a calamity that the

Constitution of 1791, with its respect for the prerogative of the Crown and

its tolerance of mediæval superstition, should fairly get underway. In

spite of Robespierre's prediction that war would give France a strong

sovereign in the place of a weak one, the Girondins persuaded themselves

that the best means of diminishing or overthrowing monarchical power in

France was a war with the sovereigns of Europe; and henceforward they

laboured for war with scarcely any disguise. [5]

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

Nor were occasions wanting, if war was needful for France. The protection

which the Elector of Trèves gave to the emigrant army at Coblentz was so

flagrant a violation of international law that the Gironde had the support

of the whole nation when they called upon the King to demand the dispersal

of the emigrants in the most peremptory form. National feeling was keenly

excited by debates in which the military preparations of the emigrants and

the encouragement given to them by foreign princes were denounced with all

the energy of southern eloquence. On the 13th of December Louis declared to

the Electors of Trèves and Mainz that he would treat them as enemies unless

the armaments within their territories were dispersed by January 15th; and

at the same time he called upon the Emperor Leopold, as head of the

Germanic body, to use his influence in bringing the Electors to reason. The

demands of France were not resisted. On the 16th January, 1792, Louis

informed the Assembly that the emigrants had been expelled from the

electorates, and acknowledged the good offices of Leopold in effecting this

result. The substantial cause of war seemed to have disappeared; but

another had arisen in its place. In a note of December 21st the Austrian

Minister Kaunitz used expressions which implied that a league of the Powers

was still in existence against France. Nothing could have come more

opportunely for the war-party in the Assembly. Brissot cried for an

immediate declaration of war, and appealed to the French nation to

vindicate its honour by an attack both upon the emigrants and upon their

imperial protector. The issue depended upon the relative power of the Crown

and the Opposition. Leopold saw that war was inevitable unless the

Constitutional party, which was still in office, rallied for one last

effort, and gained a decisive victory over its antagonists. In the hope of

turning public opinion against the Gironde, he permitted Kaunitz to send a

despatch to Paris which loaded the leaders of the war-party with abuse, and

exhorted the French nation to deliver itself from men who would bring upon

it the hostility of Europe. (Feb. 17.) [6] The despatch gave singular proof

of the inability of the cleverest sovereign and the most experienced

minister of the age to distinguish between the fears of a timid cabinet and

the impulses of an excited nation. Leopold's vituperations might have had

the intended effect if they had been addressed to the Margrave of Baden or

the Doge of Venice; addressed to the French nation and its popular Assembly

in the height of civil conflict, they were as oil poured upon the flames.

Leopold ruined the party which he meant to reinforce; he threw the nation

into the arms of those whom he attacked. His despatch was received in the

Assembly with alternate murmurs and bursts of laughter; in the clubs it

excited a wild outburst of rage. The exchange of diplomatic notes continued

for a few weeks more; but the real answer of France to Austria was the

"Marseillaise," composed at Strasburg almost simultaneously with Kaunitz'

attack upon the Jacobins. The sudden death of the Emperor on March 1st

produced no pause in the controversy. Delessart, the Foreign Minister of

Louis, was thrust from office, and replaced by Dumouriez, the

representative of the war-party.

[War declared, April 20th, 1792.]

Expostulation took a sharper tone; old subjects of complaint were revived;

and the armies on each side were already pressing towards the frontier when

the unhappy Louis was brought down to the Assembly by his Ministers, and

compelled to propose the declaration of war.

[Pretended grounds of war.]

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

the French politicians.]

It is seldom that the professed grounds correspond with the real motives of

a war; nor was this the case in 1792. The ultimatum of the Austrian

Government demanded that compensation should be made to certain German

nobles whose feudal rights over their peasantry had been abolished in

Alsace; that the Pope should be indemnified for Avignon and the Venaissin,

which had been taken from him by France; and that a Government should be

established at Paris capable of affording the Powers of Europe security

against the spread of democratic agitation. No one supposed the first two

grievances to be a serious ground for hostilities. The rights of the German

nobles in Alsace over their villagers were no doubt protected by the

treaties which ceded those districts to France; but every politician in

Europe would have laughed at a Government which allowed the feudal system

to survive in a corner of its dominions out of respect for a settlement a

century and a half old: nor had the Assembly refused to these foreign

seigneurs a compensation claimed in vain by King Louis for the nobles of

France. As to the annexation of Avignon and the Venaissin, a power which,

like Austria, had joined in dismembering Poland, and had just made an

unsuccessful attempt to dismember Turkey, could not gravely reproach France

for incorporating a district which lay actually within it, and whose

inhabitants, or a great portion of them, were anxious to become citizens of

France. The third demand, the establishment of such a government as Austria

should deem satisfactory, was one which no high-spirited people could be

expected to entertain. Nor was this, in fact, expected by Austria. Leopold

had no desire to attack France, but he had used threats, and would not

submit to the humiliation of renouncing them. He would not have begun a war

for the purpose of delivering the French Crown; but, when he found that he

was himself certain to be attacked, he accepted a war with the Revolution

without regret. On the other side, when the Gironde denounced the league of

the Kings, they exaggerated a far-off danger for the ends of their domestic

policy. The Sovereigns of the Continent had indeed made no secret of their

hatred to the Revolution. Catherine of Russia had exhorted every Court in

Europe to make war; Gustavus of Sweden was surprised by a violent death in

the midst of preparations against France; Spain, Naples, and Sardinia were

ready to follow leaders stronger than themselves. But the statesmen of the

French Assembly well understood the interval that separates hostile feeling

from actual attack; and the unsubstantial nature of the danger to France,

whether from the northern or the southern Powers, was proved by the very

fact that Austria, the hereditary enemy of France, and the country of the

hated Marie Antoinette, was treated as the main enemy. Nevertheless, the

Courts had done enough to excite the anger of millions of French people who

knew of their menaces, and not of their hesitations and reserves. The man

who composed the "Marseillaise" was no maker of cunningly-devised fables;

the crowds who first sang it never doubted the reality of the dangers which

the orators of the Assembly denounced. The Courts of Europe had heaped up

the fuel; the Girondins applied the torch. The mass of the French nation

had little means of appreciating what passed in Europe; they took their

facts from their leaders, who considered it no very serious thing to plunge

a nation into war for the furtherance of internal liberty. Events were soon

to pass their own stern and mocking sentence upon the wisdom of the

Girondin statesmanship.

[Germany follows Austria into the war.]

[State of Germany.]

After voting the Declaration of War the French Assembly accepted a

manifesto, drawn up by Condorcet, renouncing in the name of the French

people all intention of conquest. The manifesto expressed what was

sincerely felt by men like Condorcet, to whom the Revolution was still too

sacred a cause to be stained with the vulgar lust of aggrandisement. But

the actual course of the war was determined less by the intentions with

which the French began it than by the political condition of the States

which bordered upon the French frontier. The war was primarily a war with

Austria, but the Sovereign of Austria was also the head of Germany. The

German Ecclesiastical Princes who ruled in the Rhenish provinces had been

the most zealous protectors of the emigrants; it was impossible that they

should now find shelter in neutrality. Prussia had made an alliance with

the Emperor against France; other German States followed in the wake of one

or other of the great Powers. If France proved stronger than its enemy,

there were governments besides that of Austria which would have to take

their account with the Revolution. Nor indeed was Austria the power most

exposed to violent change. The mass of its territory lay far from France;

at the most, it risked the loss of Lombardy and the Netherlands. Germany at

large was the real area threatened by the war, and never was a political

community less fitted to resist attack than Germany at the end of the

eighteenth century. It was in the divisions of the German people, and in

the rivalries of the two leading German governments, that France found its

surest support throughout the Revolutionary war, and its keenest stimulus

to conquest. It will throw light upon the sudden changes that now began to

break over Europe if we pause to make a brief survey of the state of

Germany at the outbreak of the war, to note the character and policy of its

reigning sovereigns, and to cast a glance over the circumstances which had

brought the central district of Europe into its actual condition.

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

[Holy Roman Empire.]

Germany at large still preserved the mediæval name and forms of the Holy

Roman Empire. The members of this so-called Empire were, however, a

multitude of independent States; and the chief of these States, Austria,

combined with its German provinces a large territory which did not even in

name form part of the Germanic body. The motley of the Empire was made up

by governments of every degree of strength and weakness. Austria and

Prussia possessed both political traditions and resources raising them to

the rank of great European Powers; but the sovereignties of the second

order, such as Saxony and Bavaria, had neither the security of strength nor

the free energy often seen in small political communities; whilst in the

remaining petty States of Germany, some hundreds in number, all public life

had long passed out of mind in a drowsy routine of official benevolence or

oppression. In theory there still existed a united Germanic body; in

reality Germany was composed of two great monarchies in embittered rivalry

with one another, and of a multitude of independent principalities and

cities whose membership in the Empire involved little beyond a liability to

be dragged into the quarrels of their more powerful neighbours. A German

national feeling did not exist, because no combination existed uniting the

interests of all Germany. The names and forms of political union had come

down from a remote past, and formed a grotesque anachronism amid the

realities of the eighteenth century. The head of the Germanic body held

office not by hereditary right, but as the elected successor of Charlemagne

and the Roman Cæsars. Since the fifteenth century the imperial dignity had

rested with the Austrian House of Hapsburg; but, with the exception of

Charles V., no sovereign of that House had commanded forces adequate to the

creation of a united German state, and the opportunity which then offered

itself was allowed to pass away. The Reformation severed Northern Germany

from the Catholic monarchy of the south. The Thirty Years' War, terminating

in the middle of the seventeenth century, secured the existence of

Protestantism on the Continent of Europe, but it secured it at the cost of

Germany, which was left exhausted and disintegrated. By the Treaty of

Westphalia, A.D. 1648, the independence of every member of the Empire was

recognised, and the central authority was henceforth a mere shadow. The

Diet of the Empire, where the representatives of the Electors, of the

Princes, and of the Free Cities, met in the order of the Middle Ages, sank

into a Heralds' College, occupied with questions of title and precedence;

affairs of real importance were transacted by envoys from Court to Court.

For purposes of war the Empire was divided into Circles, each Circle

supplying in theory a contingent of troops; but this military organisation

existed only in letter. The greater and the intermediate States regulated

their armaments, as they did their policy, without regard to the Diet of

Ratisbon; the contingents of the smaller sovereignties and free cities were

in every degree of inefficiency, corruption, and disorder; and in spite of

the courage of the German soldier, it could make little difference in a

European war whether a regiment which had its captain appointed by the city

of Gmünd, its lieutenant by the Abbess of Rotenmünster, and its ensign by

the Abbot of Gegenbach, did or did not take the field with numbers fifty

per cent. below its statutory contingent. [7] How loose was the connection

subsisting between the members of the Empire, how slow and cumbrous its

constitutional machinery, was strikingly proved after the first inroads of

the French into Germany in 1792, when the Diet deliberated for four weeks

before calling out the forces of the Empire, and for five months before

declaring war.

[Austria.]

[Catholic policy of the Hapsburgs.]

The defence of Germany rested in fact with the armies of Austria and

Prussia. The Austrian House of Hapsburg held the imperial title, and

gathered around it the sovereigns of the less progressive German States.

While the Protestant communities of Northern Germany identified their

interests with those of the rising Prussian Monarchy, religious sympathy

and the tradition of ages attached the minor Catholic Courts to the

political system of Vienna. Austria gained something by its patronage; it

was, however, no real member of the German family. Its interests were not

the interests of Germany; its power, great and enduring as it proved, was

not based mainly upon German elements, nor used mainly for German ends. The

title of the Austrian monarch gave the best idea of the singular variety of

races and nationalities which owed their political union only to their

submission to a common head. In the shorter form of state the reigning

Hapsburg was described as King of Hungary, Bohemia, Croatia, Slavonia, and

Galicia; Archduke of Austria; Grand Duke of Transylvania; Duke of Styria,

Carinthia, and Carniola; and Princely Count of Hapsburg and Tyrol. At the

outbreak of the war of 1792 the dominions of the House of Austria included

the Southern Netherlands and the Duchy of Milan, in addition to the great

bulk of the territory which it still governs. Eleven distinct languages

were spoken in the Austrian monarchy, with countless varieties of dialects.

Of the elements of the population the Slavic was far the largest, numbering

about ten millions, against five million Germans and three million Magyars;

but neither numerical strength nor national objects of desire coloured the

policy of a family which looked indifferently upon all its subject races as

instruments for its own aggrandisement. Milan and the Netherlands had come

into the possession of Austria since the beginning of the eighteenth

century, but the destiny of the old dominions of the Hapsburg House had

been fixed for many generations in the course of the Thirty Years' War. In

that struggle, as it affected Austria, the conflict of the ancient and the

reformed faith had become a conflict between the Monarchy, allied with the

Church, and every element of national life and independence, allied with

the Reformation. Protestantism, then dominant in almost all the Hapsburg

territories, was not put down without extinguishing the political liberties

of Austrian Germany, the national life of Bohemia, the spirit and ambition

of the Hungarian nobles. The detestable desire of the Emperor Ferdinand,

"Rather a desert than a country full of heretics," was only too well

fulfilled in the subsequent history of his dominions. In the German

provinces, except the Tyrol, the old Parliaments, and with them all trace

of liberty, disappeared; in Bohemia the national Protestant nobility lost

their estates, or retained them only at the price of abandoning the

religion, the language, and the feelings of their race, until the country

of Huss passed out of the sight of civilised Europe, and Bohemia

represented no more than a blank, unnoticed mass of tillers of the soil. In

Hungary, where the nation was not so completely crushed in the Thirty

Years' War, and Protestantism survived, the wholesale executions in 1686,

ordered by the Tribunal known as the "Slaughter-house of Eperies,"

illustrated the traditional policy of the Monarchy towards the spirit of

national independence. Two powers alone were allowed to subsist in the

Austrian dominions, the power of the Crown and the power of the Priesthood;

and, inasmuch as no real national unity could exist among the subject

races, the unity of a blind devotion to the Catholic Church was enforced

over the greater part of the Monarchy by all the authority of the State.

[Reforms of Maria Theresa, 1740-1780.]

Under the pressure of this soulless despotism the mind of man seemed to

lose all its finer powers. The seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, in

which no decade passed in England and France without the production of some

literary masterpiece, some scientific discovery, or some advance in

political reasoning, are marked by no single illustrious Austrian name,

except that of Haydn the musician. When, after three generations of torpor

succeeding the Thirty Years' War, the mind of North Germany awoke again in

Winckelmann and Lessing, and a widely-diffused education gave to the middle

class some compensation for the absence of all political freedom, no trace

of this revival appeared in Austria. The noble hunted and slept; the serf

toiled heavily on; where a school existed, the Jesuit taught his schoolboys

ecclesiastical Latin, and sent them away unable to read their

mother-tongue. To this dull and impenetrable society the beginnings of

improvement could only be brought by military disaster. The loss of Silesia

in the first years of Maria Theresa disturbed the slumbers of the

Government, and reform began. Although the old provincial Assemblies,

except in Hungary and the Netherlands, had long lost all real power, the

Crown had never attempted to create a uniform system of administration: the

collection of taxes, the enlistment of recruits, was still the business of

the feudal landowners of each district. How such an antiquated order was

likely to fare in the presence of an energetic enemy was clearly enough

shown in the first attack made upon Austria by Frederick the Great. As the

basis of a better military organisation, and in the hope of arousing a

stronger national interest among her subjects, Theresa introduced some of

the offices of a centralised monarchy, at the same time that she improved

the condition of the serf, and substituted a German education and German

schoolmasters for those of the Jesuits. The peasant, hitherto in many parts

of the monarchy attached to the soil, was now made free to quit his lord's

land, and was secured from ejectment so long as he fulfilled his duty of

labouring for the lord on a fixed number of days in the year. Beyond this

Theresa's reform did not extend. She had no desire to abolish the feudal

character of country life; she neither wished to temper the sway of

Catholicism, nor to extinguish those provincial forms which gave to the

nobles within their own districts a shadow of political independence.

Herself conservative in feeling, attached to aristocracy, and personally

devout, Theresa consented only to such change as was recommended by her

trusted counsellors, and asked no more than she was able to obtain by the

charm of her own queenly character.

[Joseph II., 1780-1790.]

With the accession of her son Joseph II. in 1780 a new era began for

Austria. The work deferred by Theresa was then taken up by a monarch whose

conceptions of social and religious reform left little for the boldest

innovators of France ten years later to add. There is no doubt that the

creation of a great military force for enterprises of foreign conquest was

an end always present in Joseph's mind, and that the thirst for

uncontrolled despotic power never left him; but by the side of these

coarser elements there was in Joseph's nature something of the true fire of

the man who lives for ideas. Passionately desirous of elevating every class

of his subjects at the same time that he ignored all their habits and

wishes, Joseph attempted to transform the motley and priest-ridden

collection of nations over whom he ruled into a single homogeneous body,

organised after the model of France and Prussia, worshipping in the spirit

of a tolerant and enlightened Christianity, animated in its relations of

class to class by the humane philosophy of the eighteenth century. In the

first year of his reign Joseph abolished every jurisdiction that did not

directly emanate from the Crown, and scattered an army of officials from

Ostend to the Dniester to conduct the entire public business of his

dominions under the immediate direction of the central authority at Vienna.

In succeeding years edict followed edict, dissolving monasteries,

forbidding Church festivals and pilgrimages, securing the protection of the

State to every form of Christian worship, abolishing the exemption from

land-tax and the monopoly of public offices enjoyed by the nobility,

transforming the Universities from dens of monkish ignorance into schools

of secular learning, converting the peasant's personal service into a

rent-charge, and giving him in the officer of the Crown a protector and an

arbiter in all his dealings with his lord. Noble and enlightened in his

aims, Joseph, like every other reformer of the eighteenth century,

underrated the force which the past exerts over the present; he could see

nothing but prejudice and unreason in the attachment to provincial custom

or time-honoured opinion; he knew nothing of that moral law which limits

the success of revolutions by the conditions which precede them. What was

worst united with what was best in resistance to his reforms. The bigots of

the University of Louvain, who still held out against the discoveries of

Newton, excited the mob to insurrection against Joseph, as the enemy of

religion; the Magyar landowners in Hungary resisted a system which

extinguished the last vestiges of their national independence at the same

time that it destroyed the harsh dominion which they themselves exercised

over their peasantry. Joseph alternated between concession and the extreme

of autocratic violence. At one moment he resolved to sweep away every local

right that fettered the exercise of his power; then, after throwing the

Netherlands into successful revolt, and forcing Hungary to the verge of

armed resistance, he revoked his unconstitutional ordinances (January 28,

1790), and restored all the institutions of the Hungarian monarchy which

existed at the date of his accession.

[Leopold II., 1790-1792.]

A month later, death removed Joseph from his struggle and his sorrows. His

successor, Leopold II., found the monarchy involved as Russia's ally in an

attack upon Turkey; threatened by the Northern League of Prussia, England,

and Holland; exhausted in finance; weakened by the revolt of the

Netherlands; and distracted in every province by the conflict of the

ancient and the modern system of government, and the assertion of new

social rights that seemed to have been created only in order to be

extinguished. The recovery of Belgium and the conclusion of peace with

Turkey were effected under circumstances that brought the adroit and

guarded statesmanship of Leopold into just credit. His settlement of the

conflict between the Crown and the Provinces, between the Church and

education, between the noble and the serf, marked the line in which, for

better or for worse, Austrian policy was to run for sixty years. Provincial

rights, the privileges of orders and corporate bodies, Leopold restored;

the personal sovereignty of his house he maintained unimpaired. In the more

liberal part of Joseph's legislation, the emancipation of learning from

clerical control, the suppression of unjust privilege in taxation, the

abolition of the feudal services of the peasant, Leopold was willing to

make concessions to the Church and the aristocracy; to the spirit of

national independence which his predecessor's aggression had excited in

Bohemia as well as in Hungary, he made no concession beyond the restoration

of certain cherished forms. An attempt of the Magyar nobles to affix

conditions to their acknowledgment of Leopold as King of Hungary was

defeated; and, by creating new offices at Vienna for the affairs of Illyria

and Transylvania, and making them independent of the Hungarian Diet,

Leopold showed that the Crown possessed an instrument against the dominant

Magyar race in the Slavic and Romanic elements of the Hungarian Kingdom.

[8] On the other hand, Leopold consented to restore to the Church its

control over the higher education, and to throw back the burden of taxation

upon land not occupied by noble owners. He gave new rigour to the

censorship of the press; but the gain was not to the Church, to which the

censorship had formerly belonged, but to the Government, which now employed

it as an instrument of State. In the great question of the emancipation of

the serf Leopold was confronted by a more resolute and powerful body of

nobility in Hungary than existed in any other province. The right of the

lord to fetter the peasant to the soil and to control his marriage Leopold

refused to restore in any part of his dominions; but, while in parts of

Bohemia he succeeded in maintaining the right given by Joseph to the

peasant to commute his personal service for a money payment, in Hungary he

was compelled to fall back upon the system of Theresa, and to leave the

final settlement of the question to the Diet. Twenty years later the

statesman who emancipated the peasants of Prussia observed that Hungary was

the only part of the Austrian dominions in which the peasant was not in a

better condition than his fellows in North Germany; [9] and so torpid was

the humanity of the Diet that until the year 1835 the prison and the

flogging-board continued to form a part of every Hungarian manor.

[Death of Leopold, March 1, 1792.]

[Francis II., 1792.]

Of the self-sacrificing ardour of Joseph there was no trace in Leopold's

character; yet his political aims were not low. During twenty-four years'

government of Tuscany he had proved himself almost an ideal ruler in the

pursuit of peace, of religious enlightenment, and of the material

improvement of his little sovereignty. Raised to the Austrian throne, the

compromise which he effected with the Church and the aristocracy resulted

more from a supposed political necessity than from his own inclination. So

long as Leopold lived, Austria would not have wanted an intelligence

capable of surveying the entire field of public business, nor a will

capable of imposing unity of action upon the servants of State. To the

misfortune of Europe no less than of his own dominions, Leopold was carried

off by sickness at the moment when the Revolutionary War broke out. An

uneasy reaction against Joseph's reforms and a well-grounded dread of the

national movements in Hungary and the Netherlands were already the

principal forces in the official world at Vienna; in addition to these came

the new terror of the armed proselytism of the Revolution. The successor of

Leopold, Francis II., was a sickly prince, in whose homely and

unimaginative mind the great enterprises of Joseph, amidst which he had

been brought up, excited only aversion. Amongst the men who surrounded him,

routine and the dread of change made an end of the higher forms of public

life. The Government openly declared that all change should cease so long

as the war lasted; even the pressing question of the peasant's relation to

his lord was allowed to remain unsettled by the Hungarian Diet, lest the

spirit of national independence should find expression in its debates. Over

the whole internal administration of Austria the torpor of the days before

Theresa seemed to be returning. Its foreign policy, however, bore no trace

of this timorous, conservative spirit. Joseph, as restless abroad as at

home, had shared the ambition of the Russian Empress Catherine, and

troubled Europe with his designs upon Turkey, Venice, and Bavaria. These

and similar schemes of territorial extension continued to fill the minds of

Austrian courtiers and ambassadors. Shortly after the outbreak of war with

France the aged minister Kaunitz, who had been at the head of the Foreign

Office during three reigns, retired from power. In spite of the first

partition of Poland, made in combination with Russia and Prussia in 1772,

and in spite of subsequent attempts of Joseph against Turkey and Bavaria,

the policy of Kaunitz had not been one of mere adventure and shifting

attack. He had on the whole remained true to the principle of alliance with

France and antagonism to Prussia; and when the revolution brought war

within sight, he desired to limit the object of the war to the restoration

of monarchical government in France. The conditions under which the young

Emperor and the King of Prussia agreed to turn the war to purposes of

territorial aggrandisement caused Kaunitz, with a true sense of the fatal

import of this policy, to surrender the power which he had held for forty

years. It was secretly agreed between the two courts that Prussia should

recoup itself for its expenses against France by seizing part of Poland. On

behalf of Austria it was demanded that the Emperor should annex Bavaria,

giving Belgium to the Elector as compensation. Both these schemes violated

what Kaunitz held to be sound policy. He believed that the interests of

Austria required the consolidation rather than the destruction of Poland;

and he declared the exchange of the Netherlands for Bavaria to be, in the

actual state of affairs, impracticable. [10] Had the coalition of 1792 been

framed on the principles advocated by Kaunitz, though Austria might not

have effected the restoration of monarchial power in France, the alliance

would not have disgracefully shattered on the crimes and infamies attending

the second partition of Poland.

From the moment when Kaunitz retired from office, territorial extension

became the great object of the Austrian Court. To prudent statesmen the

scattered provinces and varied population of the Austrian State would have

suggested that Austria had more to lose than any European Power; to the men

of 1792 it appeared that she had more to gain. The Netherlands might be

increased with a strip of French Flanders; Bavaria, Poland, and Italy were

all weak neighbours, who might be made to enrich Austria in their turn. A

sort of magical virtue was attached to the acquisition of territory. If so

many square miles and so many head of population were gained, whether of

alien or kindred race, mutinous or friendly, the end of all statesmanship

was realised, and the heaviest sacrifice of life and industry repaid.

Austria affected to act as the centre of a defensive alliance, and to fight

for the common purpose of giving a Government to France which would respect

the rights of its neighbours. In reality, its own military operations were

too often controlled, and an effective common warfare frustrated, at one

moment by a design upon French Flanders, at another by the course of Polish

or Bavarian intrigue, at another by the hope of conquests in Italy. Of all

the interests which centred in the head of the House of Hapsburg, the least

befriended at Vienna was the interest of the Empire and of Germany.

[Prussia.]

Nor, if Austria was found wanting, had Germany any permanent safeguard in

the rival Protestant State. Prussia, the second great German Power and the

ancient enemy of Austria, had been raised to an influence in Europe quite

out of proportion to its scanty resources by the genius of Frederick the

Great and the earlier Princes of the House of Hohenzollern. Its population

was not one-third of that of France or Austria; its wealth was perhaps not

superior to that of the Republic of Venice. That a State so poor in men and

money should play the part of one of the great Powers of Europe was

possible only so long as an energetic ruler watched every movement of that

complicated machinery which formed both army and nation after the prince's

own type. Frederick gave his subjects a just administration of the law; he

taught them productive industries; he sought to bring education to their

doors [11]; but he required that the citizen should account himself before

all the servant of the State. Every Prussian either worked in the great

official hierarchy or looked up to it as the providence which was to direct

all his actions and supply all his judgments. The burden of taxation

imposed by the support of an army relatively three times as great as that

of any other Power was wonderfully lightened by Frederick's economy: far

more serious than the tobacco-monopoly and the forage-requisitions, at

which Frederick's subjects grumbled during his life-time, was the danger

that a nation which had only attained political greatness by its obedience

to a rigorous administration should fall into political helplessness, when

the clear purpose and all-controlling care of its ruler no longer animated

a system which, without him, was only a pedantic routine. What in England

we are accustomed to consider as the very substance of national life,--the

mass of political interest and opinion, diffused in some degree amongst all

classes, at once the support and the judge of the servants of the

State,--had in Prussia no existence. Frederick's subjects obeyed and

trusted their Monarch; there were probably not five hundred persons outside

the public service who had any political opinions of their own. Prussia did

not possess even the form of a national representation; and, although

certain provincial assemblies continued to meet, they met only to receive

the instructions of the Crown-officers of their district. In the absence of

all public criticism, the old age of Frederick must in itself have

endangered the efficiency of the military system which had raised Prussia

to its sudden eminence. [12] The impulse of Frederick's successor was

sufficient to reverse the whole system of Prussian foreign policy, and to

plunge the country in alliance with Austria into a speculative and

unnecessary war.

[Frederick William II., 1786.]

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

On the death of Frederick in 1786, the crown passed to Frederick William

II., his nephew. Frederick William was a man of common type, showy and

pleasure-loving, interested in public affairs, but incapable of acting on

any fixed principle. His mistresses gave the tone to political society. A

knot of courtiers intrigued against one another for the management of the

King; and the policy of Prussia veered from point to point as one unsteady

impulse gave place to another. In countries less dependent than Prussia

upon the personal activity of the monarch, Frederick William's faults might

have been neutralised by able Ministers; in Prussia the weakness of the

King was the decline of the State. The whole fabric of national greatness

had been built up by the royal power; the quality of the public service,

apart from which the nation was politically non-existent, was the quality

of its head. When in the palace profusion and intrigue took the place of

Frederick the Great's unflagging labour, the old uprightness, industry, and

precision which had been the pride of Prussian administration fell out of

fashion everywhere. Yet the frivolity of the Court was a less active cause

of military decline than the abandonment of the first principles of

Prussian policy. [13] If any political sentiment existed in the nation, it

was the sentiment of antagonism to Austria. The patriotism of the army,

with all the traditions of the great King, turned wholly in this direction.

When, out of sympathy with the Bourbon family and the emigrant French

nobles, Frederick William allied himself with Austria (Feb. 1792), and

threw himself into the arms of his ancient enemy in order to attack a

nation which had not wronged him, he made an end of all zealous obedience

amongst his servants. Brunswick, the Prussian Commander-in-Chief, hated the

French emigrants as much as he did the Revolution; and even the generals

who did not originally share Brunswick's dislike to the war recovered their

old jealousy of Austria after the first defeat, and exerted themselves only

to get quit of the war at the first moment that Prussia could retire from

it without disgrace. The very enterprise in which Austria had consented

that the Court of Berlin should seek its reward--the seizure of a part of

Poland--proved fatal to the coalition. The Empress Catherine was already

laying her hand for the second time upon this unfortunate country. It was

easy for the opponents of the Austrian alliance who surrounded King

Frederick William to contrast the barren effort of a war against France

with the cheap and certain advantages to be won by annexation, in concert

with Russia, of Polish territory. To pursue one of these objects with

vigour it was necessary to relinquish the other. Prussia was not rich

enough to maintain armies both on the Vistula and the Rhine. Nor, in the

opinion of its rulers, was it rich enough to be very tender of its honour

or very loyal towards its allies. [14]

[Social system of Prussia.]

In the institutions of Prussia two opposite systems existed side by side,

exhibiting in the strongest form a contrast which in a less degree was

present in most Continental States. The political independence of the

nobility had long been crushed; the King's Government busied itself with

every detail of town and village administration; yet along with this

rigorous development of the modern doctrine of the unity and the authority

of the State there existed a social order more truly archaic than that of

the Middle Ages at their better epochs. The inhabitants of Prussia were

divided into the three classes of nobles, burghers, and peasants, each

confined to its own stated occupations, and not marrying outside its own

order. The soil of the country bore the same distinction; peasant's land

could not be owned by a burgher; burgher's land could not be owned by a

noble. No occupation was lawful for the noble, who was usually no more than

a poor gentleman, but the service of the Crown; the peasant, even where

free, might not practise the handicraft of a burgher. But the mass of the

peasantry in the country east of the Elbe were serfs attached to the soil;

and the noble, who was not permitted to exercise the slightest influence

upon the government of his country, inherited along with his manor a

jurisdiction and police-control over all who were settled within it.

Frederick had allowed serfage to continue because it gave him in each

manorial lord a task-master whom he could employ in his own service. System

and obedience were the sources of his power; and if there existed among his

subjects one class trained to command and another trained to obey, it was

so much the easier for him to force the country into the habits of industry

which he required of it. In the same spirit, Frederick officered his army

only with men of the noble caste. They brought with them the habit of

command ready-formed; the peasants who ploughed and threshed at their

orders were not likely to disobey them in the presence of the enemy. It was

possible that such a system should produce great results so long as

Frederick was there to guard against its abuses; Frederick gone, the

degradation of servitude, the insolence of caste, was what remained. When

the army of France, led by men who had worked with their fathers in the

fields, hunted a King of Prussia amidst his capitulating grandees from the

centre to the verge of his dominions, it was seen what was the permanent

value of a system which recognised in the nature of the poor no capacity

but one for hereditary subjection. The French peasant, plundered as he was

by the State, and vexed as he was with feudal services, knew no such

bondage as that of the Prussian serf, who might not leave the spot where he

was born; only in scattered districts in the border-provinces had serfage

survived in France. It is significant of the difference in self-respect

existing in the peasantry of the two countries that the custom of striking

the common soldier, universal in Germany, was in France no more than an

abuse, practised by the admirers of Frederick, and condemned by the better

officers themselves.

[Minor States of Germany.]

[Ecclesiastical States.]

In all the secondary States of Germany the government was an absolute

monarchy; though, here and there, as in Würtemberg, the shadow of the old

Assembly of the Estates survived; and in Hanover the absence of the

Elector, King George III., placed power in the hands of a group of nobles

who ruled in his name. Society everywhere rested on a sharp division of

classes similar in kind to that of Prussia; the condition of the peasant

ranging from one of serfage, as it existed in Mecklenburg, [15] to one of

comparative freedom and comfort in parts of the southern and western

States. The sovereigns differed widely in the enlightenment or selfishness

of their rule; but, on the whole, the character of government had changed

for the better of late years; and, especially in the Protestant States,

efforts to improve the condition of the people were not wanting. Frederick

the Great had in fact created a new standard of monarchy in Germany. Forty

years earlier, Versailles, with its unfeeling splendours, its glorification

of the personal indulgence of the monarch, had been the ideal which, with a

due sense of their own inferiority, the German princes had done their best

to imitate. To be a sovereign was to cover acres of ground with state

apartments, to lavish the revenues of the country upon a troop of

mistresses and adventurers, to patronise the arts, to collect with the same

complacency the masterpieces of ancient painting that adorn the Dresden

Gallery, or an array of valuables scarcely more interesting than the chests

of treasure that were paid for them. In the ecclesiastical States, headed

by the Electorates of Mainz, Trèves, and Cologne, the affectations of a

distinctive Christian or spiritual character had long been abandoned. The

prince-bishop and canons, who were nobles appointed from some other

province, lived after the gay fashion of the time, at the expense of a land

in which they had no interest extending beyond their own lifetime. The only

feature distinguishing the ecclesiastical residence from that of one of the

minor secular princes was that the parade of state was performed by monks

in the cathedral instead of by soldiers on the drill-ground, and that even

the pretence of married life was wanting among the flaunting harpies who

frequented a celibate Court. Yet even on the Rhine and on the Moselle the

influence of the great King of Prussia had begun to make itself felt. The

intense and penetrating industry of Frederick was not within the reach of

every petty sovereign who might envy its results; but the better spirit of

the time was seen under some of the ecclesiastical princes in the

encouragement of schools, the improvement of the roads, and a retrenchment

in courtly expenditure. That deeply-seated moral disease which resulted

from centuries of priestly rule was not to be so lightly shaken off. In a

district where Nature most bountifully rewards the industry of man,

twenty-four out of every hundred of the population were monks, nuns, or

beggars. [16]

[Petty States. Free Cities. Knights.]

Two hundred petty principalities, amongst which Weimar, the home of Goethe,

stood out in the brightest relief from the level of princely routine and

self-indulgence; fifty imperial cities, in most of which the once vigorous

organism of civic life had shrivelled to the type of the English rotten

borough, did not exhaust the divisions of Germany. Several hundred Knights

of the Empire, owing no allegiance except to the Emperor, exercised, each

over a domain averaging from three to four hundred inhabitants, all the

rights of sovereignty, with the exception of the right to make war and

treaties. The districts in which this order survived were scattered over

the Catholic States of the south-west of Germany, where the knights

maintained their prerogatives by federations among themselves and by the

support of the Emperor, to whom they granted sums of money. There were

instances in which this union of the rights of the sovereign and the

landlord was turned to good account; but the knight's land was usually the

scene of such poverty and degradation that the traveller needed no guide to

inform him when he entered it. Its wretched tracks interrupted the great

lines of communication between the Rhine and further Germany; its hovels

were the refuge of all the criminals and vagabonds of the surrounding

country; for no police existed but the bailiffs of the knight, and the only

jurisdiction was that of the lawyer whom the knight brought over from the

nearest town. Nor was the disadvantage only on the side of those who were

thus governed. The knight himself, even if he cherished some traditional

reverence for the shadow of the Empire, was in the position of a man who

belongs to no real country. If his sons desired any more active career than

that of annuitants upon the family domains, they could obtain it only by

seeking employment at one or other of the greater Courts, and by

identifying themselves with the interests of a land which they entered as

strangers.

Such was in outline the condition of Germany at the moment when it was

brought into collision with the new and unknown forces of the French

Revolution. A system of small States, which in the past of Greece and Italy

had produced the finest types of energy and genius, had in Germany resulted

in the extinction of all vigorous life, and in the ascendancy of all that

was stagnant, little, and corrupt. If political disorganisation, the decay

of public spirit, and the absence of a national idea, are the signs of

impending downfall, Germany was ripe for foreign conquest. The obsolete and

dilapidated fabric of the Empire had for a century past been sustained only

by the European tradition of the Balance of Power, or by the absence of

serious attack from without. Austria once overpowered, the Empire was ready

to fall to pieces by itself: and where, among the princes or the people of

Germany, were the elements that gave hope of its renovation in any better

form of national life?