CHAPTER IV.

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

Germany suppressed--French intervention in Switzerland--Helvetic Republic--

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

influence of France abroad.

[Congress of Rastadt, Nov. 1797.]

The public articles of the Treaty of Campo Formio contained only the terms

which had been agreed upon by France and Austria in relation to Italy and

the Netherlands: the conditions of peace between France and the Germanic

Body, which had been secretly arranged between France and the two leading

Powers, were referred by a diplomatic fiction to a Congress that was to

assemble at Rastadt. Accordingly, after Prussia and Austria had each signed

an agreement abandoning the Rhenish Provinces, the Congress was duly

summoned. As if in mockery of his helpless countrymen, the Emperor informed

the members of the Diet that "in unshaken fidelity to the great principle

of the unity and indivisibility of the German Empire, they were to maintain

the common interests of the Fatherland with noble conscientiousness and

German steadfastness; and so, united with their imperial head, to promote a

just and lasting peace, founded upon the basis of the integrity of the

Empire and of its Constitution." [62] Thus the Congress was convoked upon

the pretence of preserving what the two greater States had determined to

sacrifice; while its real object, the suppression of the ecclesiastical

principalities and the curtailment of Bavaria, was studiously put out of

sight.

[Rivalry of the Germans.]

The Congress was composed of two French envoys, of the representatives of

Prussia and Austria, and of a committee, numbering with their secretaries

seventy-four persons, appointed by the Diet of Ratisbon. But the recognised

negotiators formed only a small part of the diplomatists who flocked to

Rastadt in the hope of picking up something from the wreck of the Empire.

Every petty German sovereign, even communities which possessed no political

rights at all, thought it necessary to have an agent on the spot, in order

to filch, if possible, some trifling advantage from a neighbour, or to

catch the first rumour of a proposed annexation. It was the saturnalia of

the whole tribe of busybodies and intriguers who passed in Germany for men

of state. They spied upon one another; they bribed the secretaries and

doorkeepers, they bribed the very cooks and coachmen, of the two omnipotent

French envoys. Of the national humiliation of Germany, of the dishonour

attaching to the loss of entire provinces and the reorganisation of what

remained at the bidding of the stranger, there seems to have been no sense

in the political circles of the day. The collapse of the Empire was viewed

rather as a subject of merriment. A gaiety of life and language prevailed,

impossible among men who did not consider themselves as the spectators of a

comedy. Cobenzl, the chief Austrian plenipotentiary, took his travels in a

fly, because his mistress, the _citoyenne_ Hyacinthe, had decamped with all

his carriages and horses. A witty but profane pamphlet was circulated, in

which the impending sacrifice of the Empire was described in language

borrowed from the Gospel narrative, Prussia taking the part of Judas

Iscariot, Austria that of Pontius Pilate, the Congress itself being the

chief priests and Pharisees assembling that they may take the Holy Roman

Empire by craft, while the army of the Empire figures as the "multitude who

smote upon their breasts and departed." In the utter absence of any German

pride or patriotism the French envoys not only obtained the territory that

they required, but successfully embroiled the two leading Powers with one

another, and accustomed the minor States to look to France for their own

promotion at the cost of their neighbours. The contradictory pledges which

the French Government had given to Austria and to Prussia caused it no

embarrassment. To deceive one of the two powers was to win the gratitude of

the other; and the Directory determined to fulfil its engagement to Prussia

at the expense of the bishoprics, and to ignore what it had promised to

Austria at the expense of Bavaria.

[Rhenish Provinces.]

[Ecclesiastical States suppressed.]

A momentary difficulty arose upon the opening of the Congress, when it

appeared that, misled by the Emperor's protestations, the Diet had only

empowered its Committee to treat upon the basis of the integrity of the

Empire (Dec. 9). The French declined to negotiate until the Committee had

procured full powers: and the prospects of the integrity of the Empire were

made clear enough a few days later by the entry of the French into Mainz,

and the formal organisation of the Rhenish Provinces as four French

Departments. In due course a decree of the Diet arrived, empowering the

Committee to negotiate at their discretion: and for some weeks after the

inhabitants of the Rhenish Provinces had been subjected to the laws, the

magistracy, and the taxation of France, the Committee deliberated upon the

proposal for their cession with as much minuteness and as much impartiality

as if it had been a point of speculative philosophy. At length the French

put an end to the tedious trifling, and proceeded to the question of

compensation for the dispossessed lay Princes. This they proposed to effect

by means of the disestablishment, or secularisation, of ecclesiastical

States in the interior of Germany. Prussia eagerly supported the French

proposal, both with a view to the annexation of the great Bishopric of

Münster, and from ancient hostility to the ecclesiastical States as

instruments and allies of Catholic Austria. The Emperor opposed the

destruction of his faithful dependents; the ecclesiastical princes

themselves raised a bitter outcry, and demonstrated that the fall of their

order would unloose the keystone of the political system of Europe; but

they found few friends. If Prussia coveted the great spoils of Münster, the

minor sovereigns, as a rule, wore just as eager for the convents and abbeys

that broke the continuity of their own territories: only the feeblest of

all the members of the Empire, the counts, the knights, and the cities,

felt a respectful sympathy for their ecclesiastical neighbours, and foresaw

that in a system of annexation their own turn would come next. The

principle of secularisation was accepted by the Congress without much

difficulty, all the energy of debate being reserved for the discussion of

details: arrangements which were to transfer a few miles of ground and half

a dozen custom-houses from some bankrupt ecclesiastic to some French-bought

duke excited more interest in Germany than the loss of the Rhenish

Provinces, and the subjection of a tenth part of the German nation to a

foreign rule.

[Austria determines on war, 1798.]

One more question was unexpectedly presented to the Congress. After

proclaiming for six years that the Rhine was the natural boundary of

France, the French Government discovered that a river cannot be a military

frontier at all. Of what service, urged the French plenipotentiaries, were

Strasburg and Mainz, so long as they were commanded by the guns on the

opposite bank? If the Rhine was to be of any use to France, France must be

put in possession of the fortresses of Kehl and Castel upon the German

side. Outrageous as such a demand appears, it found supporters among the

venal politicians of the smaller Courts, and furnished the Committee with

material for arguments that extended over four months. But the policy of

Austria was now taking a direction that rendered the resolutions of the

Congress of very little importance. It had become clear that France was

inclining to an alliance with Prussia, and that the Bavarian annexations

promised to Austria by the secret articles of Campo Formio were to be

withheld. Once convinced, by the failure of a private negotiation in

Alsace, that the French would neither be content with their gains of 1797,

nor permit Austria to extend its territory in Italy, Thugut determined upon

a renewal of the war. [63] In spite of a powerful opposition at Court,

Thugut's stubborn will still controlled the fortune of Austria: and the

aggressions of the French Republic in Switzerland and the Papal States, at

the moment when it was dictating terms of peace to the Empire, gave only

too much cause for the formation of a new European league.

[French intervention in Switzerland.]

At the close of the last century there was no country where the spirit of

Republican freedom was so strong, or where the conditions of life were so

level, as in Switzerland; its inhabitants, however, were far from enjoying

complete political equality. There were districts which stood in the

relation of subject dependencies to one or other of the ruling cantons: the

Pays de Vaud was governed by an officer from Berne; the valley of the

Ticino belonged to Uri; and in most of the sovereign cantons themselves

authority was vested in a close circle of patrician families. Thus,

although Switzerland was free from the more oppressive distinctions of

caste, and the Governments, even where not democratic, were usually just

and temperate, a sufficiently large class was excluded from political

rights to give scope to an agitation which received its impulse from Paris.

It was indeed among communities advanced in comfort and intelligence, and

divided from those who governed them by no great barrier of wealth and

prestige, that the doctrines of the Revolution found a circulation which

they could never gain among the hereditary serfs of Prussia or the

priest-ridden peasantry of the Roman States. As early as the year 1792 a

French army had entered the territory of Geneva, in order to co-operate

with the democratic party in the city. The movement was, however, checked

by the resolute action of the Bernese Senate; and the relations of France

to the Federal Government had subsequently been kept upon a friendly

footing by the good sense of Barthélemy, the French ambassador at Berne,

and the discretion with which the Swiss Government avoided every occasion

of offence. On the conquest of Northern Italy, Bonaparte was brought into

direct connection with Swiss affairs by a reference of certain points in

dispute to his authority as arbitrator. Bonaparte solved the difficulty by

annexing the district of the Valteline to the Cisalpine Republic; and from

that time he continued in communication with the Swiss democratic leaders

on the subject of a French intervention in Switzerland, the real purpose of

which was to secure the treasure of Berne, and to organise a government,

like that of Holland and the Cisalpine Republic, in immediate dependence

upon France.

[Helvetic Republic, April 12.]

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

At length the moment for armed interference arrived. On the 15th December,

1797, a French force entered the Bishopric of Basle, and gave the signal

for insurrection in the Pays de Vaud. The Senate of Berne summoned the Diet

of the Confederacy to provide for the common defence: the oath of

federation was renewed, and a decree was passed calling out the Federal

army. It was now announced by the French that they would support the

Vaudois revolutionary party, if attacked. The Bernese troops, however,

advanced; and the bearer of a flag of truce having been accidentally

killed, war was declared between the French Republic and the Government of

Berne. Democratic movements immediately followed in the northern and

western cantons; the Bernese Government attempted to negotiate with the

French invaders, but discovered that no terms would be accepted short of

the entire destruction of the existing Federal Constitution. Hostilities

commenced; and the Bernese troops, supported by contingents from most of

the other cantons, offered a brave but ineffectual resistance to the

advance of the French, who entered the Federal capital on the 6th of March,

1798. The treasure of Berne, amounting to about £800,000, accumulated by

ages of thrift and good management, was seized in order to provide for

Bonaparte's next campaign, and for a host of voracious soldiers and

contractors. A system of robbery and extortion, more shameless even than

that practised in Italy, was put in force against the cantonal governments,

against the monasteries, and against private individuals. In compensation

for the material losses inflicted upon the country, the new Helvetic

Republic, one and indivisible, was proclaimed at Aarau. It conferred an

equality of political rights upon all natives of Switzerland, and

substituted for the ancient varieties of cantonal sovereignty a single

national government, composed, like that of France, of a Directory and two

Councils of Legislature.

The towns and districts which had been hitherto excluded from a share in

government welcomed a change which seemed to place them on a level with

their former superiors: the mountain-cantons fought with traditional

heroism in defence of the liberties which they had inherited from their

fathers; but they were compelled, one after another, to submit to the

overwhelming force of France, and to accept the new constitution. Yet, even

now, when peace seemed to have been restored, and the whole purpose of

France attained, the tyranny and violence of the invaders exhausted the

endurance of a spirited people. The magistrates of the Republic were

expelled from office at the word of a French Commission; hostages were

seized; at length an oath of allegiance to the new order was required as a

condition for the evacuation of Switzerland by the French army. Revolt

broke out in Unterwalden, and a handful of peasants met the French army at

the village of Stanz, near the eastern shore of the Lake of Lucerne (Sept.

8). There for three days they fought with unyielding courage. Their

resistance inflamed the French to a cruel vengeance; slaughtered families

and burning villages renewed, in this so-called crusade of liberty, the

savagery of ancient war.

[French intrigues in Rome.]

Intrigues at Rome paved the way for a French intervention in the affairs of

the Papal States, coincident in time with the invasion of Switzerland. The

residence of the French ambassador at Rome, Joseph Bonaparte, was the

centre of a democratic agitation. The men who moved about him were in great

part strangers from the north of Italy, but they found adherents in the

middle and professional classes in Rome itself, although the mass of the

poor people, as well as the numerous body whose salaries or profits

depended upon ecclesiastical expenditure, were devoted to the priests and

the Papacy. In anticipation of disturbances, the Government ordered

companies of soldiers to patrol the city. A collision occurred on the 28th

December, 1797, between the patrols and a band of revolutionists, who,

being roughly handled by the populace as well as by the soldiers, made

their way for protection to the courtyard of the Palazzo Corsini, where

Joseph Bonaparte resided. Here, in the midst of a confused struggle,

General Duphot, a member of the Embassy, was shot by a Papal soldier. [64]

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

[Roman Republic, Feb. 15, 1798.]

The French had now the pretext against the Papal Government which they

desired. Joseph Bonaparte instantly left the city, and orders were sent to

Berthier, chief of the staff in northern Italy, to march upon Rome.

Berthier advanced amid the acclamations of the towns and the curses of the

peasantry, and entered Rome on the 10th of February, 1798. Events had

produced in the capital a much stronger inclination towards change than

existed on the approach of Bonaparte a year before. The treaty of Tolentino

had shaken the prestige of Papal authority; the loss of so many well-known

works of art, the imposition of new and unpopular taxes, had excited as

much hatred against the defeated government as against the extortionate

conquerors; even among the clergy and their retainers the sale of a portion

of the Church-lands and the curtailment of the old Papal splendours had

produced alienation and discontent. There existed too within the Italian

Church itself a reforming party, lately headed by Ricci, bishop of Pistoia,

which claimed a higher degree of independence for the clergy, and condemned

the assumption of universal authority by the Roman See. The ill-judged

exercise of the Pope's temporal power during the last six years had gained

many converts to the opinion that the head of the Church would best perform

his office if emancipated from a worldly sovereignty, and restored to his

original position of the first among the bishops. Thus, on its approach to

Rome, the Republican army found the city ripe for revolution. On the 15th

of February an excited multitude assembled in the Forum, and, after

planting the tree of liberty in front of the Capitol, renounced the

authority of the Pope, and declared that the Roman people constituted

itself a free Republic. The resolution was conveyed to Berthier, who

recognised the Roman Commonwealth, and made a procession through the city

with the solemnity of an ancient triumph. The Pope shut himself up in the

Vatican. His Swiss guard was removed, and replaced by one composed of

French soldiers, at whose hands the Pontiff, now in his eighty-first year,

suffered unworthy insults. He was then required to renounce his temporal

power, and, upon his refusal, was removed to Tuscany, and afterwards beyond

the Alps to Valence, where in 1799 he died, attended by a solitary

ecclesiastic.

In the liberated capital a course of spoliation began, more thorough and

systematic than any that the French had yet effected. The riches of Rome

brought all the brokers and contractors of Paris to the spot. The museums,

the Papal residence, and the palaces of many of the nobility were robbed of

every article that could be moved; the very fixtures were cut away, when

worth the carriage. On the first meeting of the National Institute in the

Vatican it was found that the doors had lost their locks; and when, by

order of the French, masses were celebrated in the churches in expiation of

the death of Duphot, the patrols who were placed at the gates to preserve

order rushed in and seized the sacred vessels. Yet the general robbery was

far less the work of the army than of the agents and contractors sent by

the Government. In the midst of endless peculation the soldiers were in

want of their pay and their food. A sense of the dishonour done to France

arose at length in the subordinate ranks of the army; and General Massena,

who succeeded Berthier, was forced to quit his command in consequence of

the protests of the soldiery against a system to which Massena had

conspicuously given his personal sanction. It remained to embody the

recovered liberties of Rome in a Republican Constitution, which was, as a

matter of course, a reproduction of the French Directory and Councils of

Legislature, under the practical control of the French general in command.

What Rome had given to the Revolution in the fashion of classical

expressions was now more than repaid. The Directors were styled Consuls;

the divisions of the Legislature were known as the Senate and the

Tribunate; the Prætorship and the Quæstorship were recalled to life in the

Courts of Justice. That the new era might not want its classical memorial,

a medal was struck, with the image and superscription of Roman heroism, to

"Berthier, the restorer of the city," and to "Gaul, the salvation of the

human race."

[Expedition to Egypt, May, 1798.]

It was in the midst of these enterprises in Switzerland and Central Italy

that the Directory assembled the forces which Bonaparte was to lead to the

East. The port of Expedition to embarkation was Toulon; and there, on the

9th of May, 1798, Bonaparte took the command of the most formidable

armament that had ever left the French shores. Great Britain was still but

feebly represented in the Mediterranean, a detachment from St. Vincent's

fleet at Cadiz, placed under the command of Nelson, being the sole British

force in these waters. Heavy reinforcements were at hand; but in the

meantime Nelson had been driven by stress of weather from his watch upon

Toulon. On the 19th of May the French armament put out to sea, its

destination being still kept secret from the soldiers themselves. It

appeared before Malta on the 16th of June. By the treachery of the knights

Bonaparte was put in possession of this stronghold, which he could not even

have attempted to besiege. After a short delay the voyage was resumed, and

the fleet reached Alexandria without having fallen in with the English, who

had now received their reinforcements. The landing was safely effected, and

Alexandria fell at the first assault. After five days the army advanced

upon Cairo. At the foot of the Pyramids the Mameluke cavalry vainly threw

themselves upon Bonaparte's soldiers. They were repulsed with enormous loss

on their own side and scarcely any on that of the French. Their camp was

stormed; Cairo was occupied; and there no longer existed a force in Egypt

capable of offering any serious resistance to the invaders.

[Battle of the Nile, Aug. 1.]

But the fortune which had brought Bonaparte's army safe into the Egyptian

capital was destined to be purchased by the utter destruction of his fleet.

Nelson had passed the French in the night, when, after much perplexity, he

decided on sailing in the direction of Egypt. Arriving at Alexandria before

his prey, he had hurried off in an imaginary pursuit to Rhodes and Crete.

At length he received information which led him to visit Alexandria a

second time. He found the French fleet, numbering thirteen ships of the

line and four frigates, at anchor in Aboukir Bay. [65] His own fleet was

slightly inferior in men and guns, but he entered battle with a

presentiment of the completeness of his victory. Other naval battles have

been fought with larger forces; no destruction was ever so complete as that

of the Battle of the Nile (August 1). Two ships of the line and two

frigates, out of the seventeen sail that met Nelson, alone escaped from his

hands. Of eleven thousand officers and men, nine thousand were taken

prisoners, or perished in the engagement. The army of Bonaparte was cut off

from all hope of support or return; the Republic was deprived of

communication with its best troops and its greatest general.

[Coalition of 1798.]

A coalition was now gathering against France superior to that of 1793 in

the support of Russia and the Ottoman Empire, although Spain was now on the

side of the Republic, and Prussia, in spite of the warnings of the last two

years, refused to stir from its neutrality. The death of the Empress

Catherine, and the accession of Paul, had caused a most serious change in

the prospects of Europe. Hitherto the policy of the Russian Court had been

to embroil the Western Powers with one another, and to confine its efforts

against the French Republic to promises and assurances; with Paul, after an

interval of total reaction, the professions became realities. [66] No

monarch entered so cordially into Pitt's schemes for a renewal of the

European league; no ally had joined the English minister with a sincerity

so like his own. On the part of the Ottoman Government, the pretences of

friendship with which Bonaparte disguised the occupation of Egypt were

taken at their real worth. War was declared by the Porte; and a series of

negotiations, carried on during the autumn of 1798, united Russia, England,

Turkey, and Naples in engagements of mutual support against the French

Republic.

[Nelson at Naples, Sept., 1798.]

A Russian army set out on its long march towards the Adriatic: the levies

of Austria prepared for a campaign in the spring of 1799; but to the

English Government every moment that elapsed before actual hostilities was

so much time given to uncertainties; and the man who had won the Battle of

the Nile ridiculed the precaution which had hitherto suffered the French to

spread their intrigues through Italy, and closed the ports of Sicily and

Naples to his own most urgent needs. Towards the end of September, Nelson

appeared in the Bay of Naples, and was received with a delirium that

recalled the most effusive scenes in the French Revolution. [67] In the

city of Naples, as in the kingdom generally, the poorest classes were the

fiercest enemies of reform, and the steady allies of the Queen and the

priesthood against that section of the better-educated classes which had

begun to hope for liberty. The system of espionage and persecution with

which the sister of Marie Antoinette avenged upon her own subjects the

sufferings of her kindred had grown more oppressive with every new victory

of the Revolution. In the summer of 1798 there were men languishing for the

fifth year in prison, whose offences had never been investigated, and whose

relatives were not allowed to know whether they were dead or alive. A mode

of expression, a fashion of dress, the word of an informer, consigned

innocent persons to the dungeon, with the possibility of torture. In the

midst of this tyranny of suspicion, in the midst of a corruption which made

the naval and military forces of the kingdom worse than useless, King

Ferdinand and his satellites were unwearied in their theatrical invocations

of the Virgin and St. Januarius against the assailants of divine right and

the conquerors of Rome. A Court cowardly almost beyond the example of

Courts, a police that had trained every Neapolitan to look upon his

neighbour as a traitor, an administration that had turned one of the

hardiest races in Europe into soldiers of notorious and disgraceful

cowardice--such were the allies whom Nelson, ill-fitted for politics by his

sailor-like inexperience and facile vanity, heroic in his tenderness and

fidelity, in an evil hour encouraged to believe themselves invincible

because they possessed his own support. On the 14th of November, 1798, King

Ferdinand published a proclamation, which, without declaring war on the

French, announced that the King intended to occupy the Papal States and

restore the Papal government. The manifesto disclaimed all intention of

conquest, and offered a free pardon to all compromised persons. Ten days

later the Neapolitan army crossed the frontier, led by the Austrian

general, Mack, who passed among his admirers for the greatest soldier in

Europe. [68]

[Ferdinand enters Rome, Nov. 29.]

The mass of the French troops, about twelve thousand in number, lay in the

neighbourhood of Ancona; Rome and the intermediate stations were held by

small detachments. Had Mack pushed forward towards the Upper Tiber, his

inroad, even if it failed to crush the separated wings of the French army,

must have forced them to retreat; but, instead of moving with all his

strength through Central Italy, Mack led the bulk of his army upon Rome,

where there was no French force capable of making a stand, and sent weak

isolated columns towards the east of the peninsula, where the French were

strong enough to make a good defence. On the approach of the Neapolitans to

Rome, Championnet, the French commander, evacuated the city, leaving a

garrison in the Castle of St. Angelo, and fell back on Civita Castellana,

thirty miles north of the capital. The King of Naples entered Rome on the

29th November. The restoration of religion was celebrated by the erection

of an immense cross in the place of the tree of liberty, by the immersion

of several Jews in the Tiber, by the execution of a number of compromised

persons whose pardon the King had promised, and by a threat to shoot one of

the sick French soldiers in the hospital for every shot fired by the guns

of St. Angelo. [69] Intelligence was despatched to the exiled Pontiff of

the discomfiture of his enemies. "By help of the divine grace," wrote King

Ferdinand, "and of the most miraculous St. Januarius, we have to-day with

our army entered the sacred city of Rome, so lately profaned by the

impious, who now fly terror-stricken at the sight of the Cross and of my

arms. Leave then, your Holiness, your too modest abode, and on the wings of

cherubim, like the virgin of Loreto, come and descend upon the Vatican, to

purify it by your sacred presence." A letter to the King of Piedmont, who

had already been exhorted by Ferdinand to encourage his peasants to

assassinate French soldiers, informed him that "the Neapolitans, guided by

General Mack, had sounded the hour of death to the French, and proclaimed

to Europe, from the summit of the Capitol, that the time of the Kings had

come."

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

The despatches to Piedmont fell into the hands of the enemy, and the usual

modes of locomotion would scarcely have brought Pope Pius to Rome in time

to witness the exit of his deliverer. Ferdinand's rhapsodies were cut short

by the news that his columns advancing into the centre and east of the

Papal States had all been beaten or captured. Mack, at the head of the main

army, now advanced to avenge the defeat upon the French at Civita

Castellana and Terni. But his dispositions were as unskilful as ever:

wherever his troops encountered the enemy they were put to the rout; and,

as he had neglected to fortify or secure a single position upon his line of

march, his defeat by a handful of French soldiers on the north of Rome

involved the loss of the country almost up to the gates of Naples. On the

first rumour of Mack's reverses the Republican party at Rome declared for

France. King Ferdinand fled; Championnet re-entered Rome, and, after a few

days' delay, advanced into Neapolitan territory. Here, however, he found

himself attacked by an enemy more formidable than the army which had been

organised to expel the French from Italy. The Neapolitan peasantry, who, in

soldiers' uniform and under the orders of Mack, could scarcely be brought

within sight of the French, fought with courage when an appeal to their

religious passions collected them in brigand-like bands under leaders of

their own. Divisions of Championnet's army sustained severe losses; they

succeeded, however, in effecting their junction upon the Volturno; and the

stronghold of Gaeta, being defended by regular soldiers and not by

brigands, surrendered to the French at the first summons.

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

Mack was now concentrating his troops in an entrenched camp before Capua.

The whole country was rising against the invaders; and, in spite of lost

battles and abandoned fortresses, the Neapolitan Government if it had

possessed a spark of courage, might still have overthrown the French army,

which numbered only 18,000 men. But the panic and suspicion which the

Government had fostered among its subjects were now avenged upon itself.

The cry of treachery was raised on every side. The Court dreaded a

Republican rising; the priests and the populace accused the Court of

conspiracy with the French; Mack protested that the soldiers were resolved

to be beaten; the soldiers swore that they were betrayed by Mack. On the

night of the 21st of December, the Royal Family secretly went on board

Nelson's ship the _Vanguard_, and after a short interval they set sail

for Palermo, leaving the capital in charge of Prince Pignatelli, a courtier

whom no one was willing to obey. [70] Order was, however, maintained by a

civic guard enrolled by the Municipality, until it became known that Mack

and Pignatelli had concluded an armistice with the French, and surrendered

Capua and the neighbouring towns. Then the populace broke into wild uproar.

The prisons were thrown open; and with the arms taken from the arsenal the

lazzaroni formed themselves into a tumultuous army, along with thousands of

desperate men let loose from the gaols and the galleys. The priests,

hearing that negotiations for peace were opened, raised the cry of treason

anew; and, with the watchword of the Queen, "All the gentlemen are

Jacobins; only the people are faithful," they hounded on the mob to riot

and murder. On the morning of January 15th hordes of lazzaroni issued from

the gates to throw themselves upon the French, who were now about nine

miles from the city; others dragged the guns down from the forts to defend

the streets. The Republican party, however, and that considerable body

among the upper class which was made Republican by the chaos into which the

Court, with its allies, the priests, and the populace, had thrown Naples,

kept up communication with Championnet, and looked forward to the entrance

of the French as the only means of averting destruction and massacre. By a

stratagem carried out on the night of the 20th they gained possession of

the fort of St. Elmo, while the French were already engaged in a bloody

assault upon the suburbs. On the 23rd Championnet ordered the attack to be

renewed. The conspirators within St. Elmo hoisted the French flag and

turned their guns upon the populace; the fortress of the Carmine was

stormed by the French; and, before the last struggle for life and death

commenced in the centre of the city, the leaders of the lazzaroni listened

to words of friendship which Championnet addressed to them in their own

language, and, with the incoherence of a half-savage race, escorted his

soldiers with cries of joy to the Church of St. Januarius, which

Championnet promised to respect and protect.

[Parthenopean Republic.]

Championnet used his victory with a discretion and forbearance rare amongst

French conquerors. He humoured the superstition of the populace; he

encouraged the political hopes of the enlightened. A vehement revulsion of

feeling against the fugitive Court and in favour of Republican government

followed the creation of a National Council by the French general, and his

ironical homage to the patron saint. The Kingdom of Naples was converted

into the Parthenopean Republic. New laws, new institutions, discussed in a

representative assembly, excited hopes and interests unknown in Naples

before. But the inevitable incidents of a French occupation, extortion and

impoverishment, with all their bitter effects on the mind of the people,

were not long delayed. In every country district the priests were exciting

insurrection. The agents of the new Government, men with no experience in

public affairs, carried confusion wherever they went. Civil war broke out

in fifty different places; and the barbarity of native leaders of

insurrection, like Fra Diavolo, was only too well requited by the French

columns which traversed the districts in revolt.

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

The time was ill chosen by the French Government for an extension of the

area of combat to southern Italy. Already the first division of the Russian

army, led by Suvaroff, had reached Moravia, and the Court of Vienna was

only awaiting its own moment for declaring war. So far were the

newly-established Governments in Rome and Naples from being able to assist

the French upon the Adige, that the French had to send troops to Rome and

Naples to support the new Governments. The force which the French could

place upon the frontier was inferior to that which two years of preparation

had given to Austria: the Russians, who were expected to arrive in Lombardy

in April, approached with the confidence of men who had given to the French

none of their recent triumphs. Nor among the leaders was personal

superiority any longer markedly on the side of the French, as in the war of

the First Coalition. Suvaroff and the Archduke Charles were a fair match

for any of the Republican generals, except Bonaparte, who was absent in

Egypt. The executive of France had deeply declined. Carnot was in exile;

the work of organisation which he had pursued with such energy and

disinterestedness flagged under his mediocre and corrupt successors.

Skilful generals and brave soldiers were never wanting to the Republic; but

no single controlling will, no storm of national passion, inspired the

Government with the force which it had possessed under the Convention, and

which returned to it under Napoleon.

A new character was given to the war now breaking out by the inclusion of

Switzerland in the area of combat. In the war of the First Coalition,

Switzerland had been neutral territory; but the events of 1798 had left the

French in possession of all Switzerland west of the Rhine, and an Austrian

force subsequently occupied the Grisons. The line separating the combatants

now ran without a break from Mainz to the Adriatic. The French armies were

in continuous communication with one another, and the movements of each

could be modified according to the requirements of the rest. On the other

hand, a disaster sustained at any one point of the line endangered every

other point; for no neutral territory intervened, as in 1796, to check a

lateral movement of the enemy, and to protect the communications of a

French army in Lombardy from a victorious Austrian force in southern

Germany. The importance of the Swiss passes in this relation was understood

and even overrated by the French Government; and an energy was thrown into

their mountain warfare which might have produced greater results upon the

plains.

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

Three armies formed the order of battle on either side. Jourdan held the

French command upon the Rhine; Massena in Switzerland; Scherer, the least

capable of the Republican generals, on the Adige. On the side of the

Allies, the Archduke Charles commanded in southern Germany; in Lombardy the

Austrians were led by Kray, pending the arrival of Suvaroff and his corps;

in Switzerland the command was given to Hotze, a Swiss officer who had

gained some distinction in foreign service. It was the design of the French

to push their centre under Massena through the mountains into the Tyrol,

and by a combined attack of the central and the southern army to destroy

the Austrians upon the upper Adige, while Jourdan, also in communication

with the centre, drove the Archduke down the Danube upon Vienna. Early in

March the campaign opened. Massena assailed the Austrian positions east of

the head-waters of the Rhine, and forced back the enemy into the heart of

the Grisons. Jourdan crossed the Rhine at Strasburg, and passed the Black

Forest with 40,000 men. His orders were to attack the Archduke Charles,

whatever the Archduke's superiority of force. The French and the Austrian

armies met at Stockach, near the head of the Lake of Constance (March 25).

Overwhelming numbers gave the Archduke a complete victory. Jourdan was not

only stopped in his advance, but forced to retreat beyond the Rhine.

Whatever might be the fortune of the armies of Switzerland and Italy, all

hope of an advance upon Vienna by the Danube was at an end.

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

Freed from the invader's presence, the Austrians now spread themselves over

Baden, up to the gates of Rastadt, where, in spite of the war between

France and Austria, the envoys of the minor German States still continued

their conferences with the French agents. On the 28th of April the French

envoys, now three in number, were required by the Austrians to depart

within twenty-four hours. An escort, for which they applied, was refused.

Scarcely had their carriages passed through the city gates when they were

attacked by a squadron of Austrian hussars. Two of French envoys the French

envoys were murdered; the third left for dead. Whether this frightful

violation of international law was the mere outrage of a drunken soldiery,

as it was represented to be by the Austrian Government; whether it was to

any extent occasioned by superior civil orders, or connected with French

emigrants living in the neighbourhood, remains unknown. Investigations

begun by the Archduke Charles were stopped by the Cabinet, in order that a

more public inquiry might be held by the Diet. This inquiry, however, never

took place. In the year 1804 all papers relating to the Archduke's

investigation were removed by the Government from the military archives.

They have never since been discovered. [71]

[Battle of Magnano, April 5.]

The outburst of wrath with which the French people learnt the fate of their

envoys would have cost Austria dear if Austria had now been the losing

party in the war; but, for the present, everything seemed to turn against

the Republic. Jourdan had scarcely been overthrown in Germany before a

ruinous defeat at Magnano, on the Adige, drove back the army of Italy to

within a few miles of Milan; while Massena, deprived of the fruit of his

own victories by the disasters of his colleagues, had to abandon the

eastern half of Switzerland, and to retire upon the line of the river

Limnat, Lucerne, and the Gothard. Charles now moved from Germany into

Switzerland. Massena fixed his centre at Zürich, and awaited the Archduke's

assault. For five weeks Charles remained inactive: at length, on the 4th of

June, he gave battle. After two days' struggle against greatly superior

forces, Massena was compelled to evacuate Zürich. He retreated, however, no

farther than to the ridge of the Uetliberg, a few miles west of the city;

and here, fortifying his new position, he held obstinately on, while the

Austrians established themselves in the central passes of Switzerland, and

disaster after disaster seemed to be annihilating the French arms in Italy.

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

Suvaroff, at the head of 17,000 Russians, had arrived in Lombardy in the

middle of April. His first battle was fought, and his first victory won, at

the passage of the Adda on the 25th of April. It was followed by the

surrender of Milan and the dissolution of the Cisalpine Republic. Moreau,

who now held the French command, fell back upon Alessandria, intending to

cover both Genoa and Turin; but a sudden movement of Suvaroff brought the

Russians into the Sardinian capital before it was even known to be in

jeopardy. The French general, cut off from the roads over the Alps, threw

himself upon the Apennines above Genoa, and waited for the army which had

occupied Naples, and which, under the command of Macdonald, was now

hurrying to his support, gathering with it on its march the troops that lay

scattered on the south of the Po. Macdonald moved swiftly through central

Italy, and crossed the Apennines above Pistoia in the beginning of June.

His arrival at Modena with 20,000 men threatened to turn the balance in

favour of the French. Suvaroff, aware of his danger, collected all the

troops within reach with the utmost despatch, and pushed eastwards to meet

Macdonald on the Trebbia. Moreau descended from the Apennines in the same

direction; but he had underrated the swiftness of the Russian general; and,

before he had advanced over half the distance, Macdonald was attacked by

Suvaroff on the Trebbia, and overthrown in three days of the most desperate

fighting that had been seen in the war (June 18). [72]

[Naples.]

All southern Italy now rose against the Governments established by the

French. Cardinal Ruffo, with a band of fanatical peasants, known as the

Army of the Faith, made himself master of Apulia and Calabria amid scenes

of savage cruelty, and appeared before Naples, where the lazzaroni were

ready to unite with the hordes of the Faithful in murder and pillage.

Confident of support within the city, and assisted by some English and

Russian vessels in the harbour, Ruffo attacked the suburbs of Naples on the

morning of the 13th of June. Massacre and outrage continued within and

without the city for five days. On the morning of the 19th, the Cardinal

proposed a suspension of arms. It was accepted by the Republicans, who were

in possession of the forts. Negotiations followed. On the 23rd conditions

of peace were signed by Ruffo on behalf of the King of Naples, and by the

representatives of Great Britain and of Russia in guarantee for their

faithful execution. It was agreed that the Republican garrison should march

out with the honours of war; that their persons and property should be

respected; that those who might prefer to leave the country should be

conveyed to Toulon on neutral vessels; and that all who remained at home

should be free from molestation.

[Reign of Terror.]

The garrison did not leave the forts that night. On the following morning,

while they were embarking on board the polaccas which were to take them to

Toulon, Nelson's fleet appeared in the Bay of Naples. Nelson declared that

in treating with rebels Cardinal Ruffo had disobeyed the King's orders, and

he pronounced the capitulation null and void. The polaccas, with the

Republicans crowded on board, were attached to the sterns of the English

ships, pending the arrival of King Ferdinand. On the 29th of June, Admiral

Caracciolo, who had taken office under the new Government, and on its fall

had attempted to escape in disguise, was brought a captive before Nelson.

Nelson ordered him to be tried by a Neapolitan court-martial, and, in spite

of his old age, his rank, and his long service to the State, caused him to

be hanged from a Neapolitan ship's yard-arm, and his body to be thrown into

the sea. Some days later, King Ferdinand arrived from Palermo, and Nelson

now handed over all his prisoners to the Bourbon authorities. A reign of

terror followed. Innumerable persons were thrown into prison.

Courts-martial, or commissions administering any law that pleased

themselves, sent the flower of the Neapolitan nation to the scaffold. Above

a hundred sentences of death were carried out in Naples itself:

confiscation, exile, and imprisonment struck down thousands of families. It

was peculiar to the Neapolitan proscriptions that a Government with the

names of religion and right incessantly upon its lips selected for

extermination both among men and women those who were most distinguished in

character, in science, and in letters, whilst it chose for promotion and

enrichment those who were known for deeds of savage violence. The part

borne by Nelson in this work of death has left a stain on his glory which

time cannot efface. [73]

[Austrian designs in Italy.]

[New plan of the War.]

It was on the advance of the Army of Naples under Macdonald that the French

rested their last hope of recovering Lombardy. The battle of the Trebbia

scattered this hope to the winds, and left it only too doubtful whether

France could be saved from invasion. Suvaroff himself was eager to fall

upon Moreau before Macdonald could rally from his defeat, and to drive him

westwards along the coast-road into France. It was a moment when the

fortune of the Republic hung in the scales. Had Suvaroff been permitted to

follow his own counsels, France would probably have seen the remnant of her

Italian armies totally destroyed, and the Russians advancing upon Lyons or

Marseilles. The Republic was saved, as it had been in 1793, by the

dissensions of its enemies. It was not only for the purpose of resisting

French aggression that Austria had renewed the war, but for the purpose of

extending its own dominion in Italy. These designs were concealed from

Russia; they were partially made known by Thugut to the British Ambassador,

under the most stringent obligation to secrecy. On the 17th of August,

1799, Lord Minto acquainted his Government with the intentions of the

Austrian Court. "The Emperor proposes to retain Piedmont, and to take all

that part of Savoy which is important in a military view. I have no doubt

of his intention to keep Nice also, if he gets it, which will make the Var

his boundary with France. The whole territory of the Genoese Republic seems

to be an object of serious speculation ... The Papal Legations will, I am

persuaded, be retained by the Emperor ... I am not yet master of the

designs on Tuscany." [74] This was the sense in which Austria understood

the phrase of defending the rights of Europe against French aggression. It

was not, however, for this that the Czar had sent his army from beyond the

Carpathians. Since the opening of the campaign Suvaroff had been in

perpetual conflict with the military Council of Vienna. [75] Suvaroff was

bent upon a ceaseless pursuit of the enemy; the Austrian Council insisted

upon the reduction of fortresses. What at first appeared as a mere

difference of military opinion appeared in its true political character

when the allied troops entered Piedmont. The Czar desired with his whole

soul to crush the men of the Revolution, and to restore the governments

which France had overthrown. As soon as his troops entered Turin, Suvaroff

proclaimed the restoration of the House of Savoy, and summoned all

Sardinian officers to fight for their King. He was interrupted by a letter

from Vienna requiring him to leave political affairs in the hands of the

Viennese Ministry. [76] The Russians had already done as much in Italy as

the Austrian Cabinet desired them to do, and the first wish of Thugut was

now to free himself from his troublesome ally. Suvaroff raged against the

Austrian Government in every despatch, and tendered his resignation. His

complaints inclined the Czar to accept a new military scheme, which was

supported by the English Government in the hope of terminating the

contention between Suvaroff and the Austrian Council. It was agreed at St.

Petersburg that, as soon as the French armies were destroyed, the reduction

of the Italian fortresses should be left exclusively to the Austrians; and

that Suvaroff, uniting with a new Russian army now not far distant, should

complete the conquest of Switzerland, and then invade France by the Jura,

supported on his right by the Archduke Charles. An attack was to be made at

the same time upon Holland by a combined British and Russian force.

If executed in its original form, this design would have thrown a

formidable army upon France at the side of Franche Comté, where it is least

protected by fortresses. But at the last moment an alteration in the plan

was made at Vienna. The prospect of an Anglo-Russian victory in Holland

again fixed the thoughts of the Austrian Minister upon Belgium, which had

been so lightly abandoned five years before, and which Thugut now hoped to

re-occupy and to barter for Bavaria or some other territory. "The Emperor,"

he wrote, "cannot turn a deaf ear to the appeal of his subjects. He cannot

consent that the Netherlands shall be disposed of without his own

concurrence." [77] The effect of this perverse and mischievous resolution

was that the Archduke Charles received orders to send the greater part of

his army from Switzerland to the Lower Rhine, and to leave only 25,000 men

to support the new Russian division which, under General Korsakoff, was

approaching from the north to meet Suvaroff. The Archduke, as soon as the

new instructions reached him, was filled with the presentiment of disaster,

and warned his Government that in the general displacement of forces an

opportunity would be given to Massena, who was still above Zürich, to

strike a fatal blow. Every despatch that passed between Vienna and St.

Petersburg now increased the Czar's suspicion of Austria. The Pope and the

King of Naples were convinced that Thugut had the same design upon their

own territories which had been shown in his treatment of Piedmont. [78]

They appealed to the Czar for protection. The Czar proposed a European

Congress, at which the Powers might learn one another's real intentions.

The proposal was not accepted by Austria; but, while disclaiming all desire

to despoil the King of Sardinia, the Pope, or the King of Naples, Thugut

admitted that Austria claimed an improvement of its Italian frontier, in

other words, the annexation of a portion of Piedmont, and of the northern

part of the Roman States. The Czar replied that he had taken up arms in

order to check one aggressive Government, and that he should not permit

another to take its place.

[Battle of Novi, Aug. 15.]

For the moment, however, the allied forces continued to co-operate in Italy

against the French army on the Apennines covering Genoa. This army had

received reinforcements, and was now placed under the command of Joubert,

one of the youngest and most spirited of the Republican generals. Joubert

determined to attack the Russians before the fall of Mantua should add the

besieging army to Suvaroff's forces in the field. But the information which

he received from Lombardy misled him. In the second week of August he was

still unaware that Mantua had fallen a fortnight before. He descended from

the mountains to attack Suvaroff at Tortona, with a force about equal to

Suvaroff's own. On reaching Novi he learnt that the army of Mantua was also

before him (Aug. 15). It was too late to retreat; Joubert could only give

to his men the example of Republican spirit and devotion. Suvaroff himself,

with Kray, the conqueror of Mantua, began the attack: the onset of a second

Austrian corps, at the moment when the strength of the Russians was

failing, decided the day. Joubert did not live to witness the close of a

defeat which cost France eleven thousand men. [79]

[Suvaroff goes into Switzerland.]

The allied Governments had so framed their plans that the most overwhelming

victory could produce no result. Instead of entering France, Suvaroff was

compelled to turn back into Switzerland, while the Austrians continued to

besiege the fortresses of Piedmont. In Switzerland Suvaroff had to meet an

enemy who was forewarned of his approach, and who had employed every

resource of military skill and daring to prevent the union of the two

Russian armies now advancing from the south and the north. Before Suvaroff

could leave Italy, a series of admirably-planned attacks had given Massena

the whole network of the central Alpine passes, and closed every avenue of

communication between Suvaroff and the army with which he hoped to

co-operate. The folly of the Austrian Cabinet seconded the French general's

exertions. No sooner had Korsakoff and the new Russian division reached

Schaffhausen than the Archduke Charles, forced by his orders from Vienna,

turned northwards (Sept. 3), leaving the Russians with no support but

Hotze's corps, which was scattered over six cantons. [80] Korsakoff

advanced to Zürich; Massena remained in his old position on the Uetliberg.

It was now that Suvaroff began his march into the Alps, sorely harassed and

delayed by the want of the mountain-teams which the Austrians had promised

him, and filled with the apprehension that Korsakoff would suffer some

irreparable disaster before his own arrival.

[Second Battle of Zürich, Sept. 26.]

Two roads lead from the Italian lakes to central Switzerland; one, starting

from the head of Lago Maggiore and crossing the Gothard, ends on the shore

of Lake Lucerne; the other, crossing the Splügen, runs from the Lake of

Como to Reichenau, in the valley of the Rhine. The Gothard in 1799 was not

practicable for cannon; it was chosen by Suvaroff, however, for his own

advance, with the object of falling upon Massena's rear with the utmost

possible speed. He left Bellinzona on the 21st of September, fought his way

in a desperate fashion through the French outposts that guarded the defiles

of the Gothard, and arrived at Altorf near the Lake of Lucerne. Here it was

discovered that the westward road by which Suvaroff meant to strike upon

the enemy's communications had no existence. Abandoning this design,

Suvaroff made straight for the district where his colleague was encamped,

by a shepherd's path leading north-eastwards across heights of 7,000 feet

to the valley of the Muotta. Over this desolate region the Russians made

their way; and the resolution which brought them as far as the Muotta would

have brought them past every other obstacle to the spot where they were to

meet their countrymen. But the hour was past. While Suvaroff was still

struggling in the mountains, Massena advanced against Zürich, put

Korsakoff's army to total rout, and drove it, with the loss of all its

baggage and of a great part of its artillery, outside the area of

hostilities.

[Retreat of Suvaroff.]

The first rumours of the catastrophe reached Suvaroff on the Muotta; he

still pushed on eastwards, and, though almost without ammunition, overthrew

a corps commanded by Massena in person, and cleared the road over the

Pragel at the point of the bayonet, arriving in Glarus on the 1st of

October. Here the full extent of Korsakoff's disaster was made known to

him. To advance or to fall back was ruin. It only remained for Suvaroff's

army to make its escape across a wild and snow-covered mountain-tract into

the valley of the Rhine, where the river flows below the northern heights

of the Grisons. This exploit crowned a campaign which filled Europe with

astonishment. The Alpine traveller of to-day turns with some distrust from

narratives which characterise with every epithet of horror and dismay

scenes which are the delight of our age; but the retreat of Suvaroff's

army, a starving, footsore multitude, over what was then an untrodden

wilderness of rock, and through fresh-fallen autumn snow two feet deep, had

little in common with the boldest feats of Alpine hardihood. [81] It was

achieved with loss and suffering; it brought the army from a position of

the utmost danger into one of security; but it was followed by no renewed

attack. Proposals for a combination between Suvaroff and the Archduke

Charles resulted only in mutual taunts and menaces. The co-operation of

Russia in the war was at an end. The French remained masters of the whole

of the Swiss territory that they had lost since the beginning of the

campaign.

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

In the summer months of 1799 the Czar had relieved his irritation against

Austria by framing in concert with the British Cabinet the plan for a joint

expedition against Holland. It was agreed that 25,000 English and 17,000

Russian troops, brought from the Baltic in British ships, should attack the

French in the Batavian Republic, and raise an insurrection on behalf of the

exiled Stadtholder. Throughout July the Kentish coast-towns were alive with

the bustle of war; and on the 13th of August the first English division,

numbering 12,000 men, set sail from Deal under the command of Sir Ralph

Abercromby. After tossing off the Dutch coast for a fortnight, the troops

landed at the promontory of the Helder. A Dutch corps was defeated on the

sand-hills, and the English captured the fort of the Helder, commanding the

Texel anchorage. Immediately afterwards a movement in favour of the

Stadtholder broke out among the officers of the Dutch fleet. The captains

hoisted the Orange flag, and brought their ships over to the English.

This was the first and the last result of the expedition. The Russian

contingent and a second English division reached Holland in the middle of

September, and with them came the Duke of York, who now took the command

out of the hands of Abercromby. On the other side reinforcements daily

arrived from France, until the enemy's troops, led by General Brune, were

equal in strength to the invaders. A battle fought at Alkmaar on the 19th

of September gave the Allies some partial successes and no permanent

advantage; and on the 3rd of October the Duke of York gained one of those

so-called victories which result in the retreat of the conquerors. Never

were there so many good reasons for a bad conclusion. The Russians moved

too fast or too slow; the ditches set at nought the rules of strategy; it

was discovered that the climate of Holland was unfavourable to health, and

that the Dutch had not the slightest inclination to get back their

Stadtholder. The result of a series of mischances, every one of which would

have been foreseen by an average midshipman in Nelson's fleet, or an

average sergeant in Massena's army, was that York had to purchase a retreat

for the allied forces at a price equivalent to an unconditional surrender.

He was allowed to re-embark on consideration that Great Britain restored to

the French 8,000 French and Dutch prisoners, and handed over in perfect

repair all the military works which our own soldiers had erected at the

Helder. Bitter complaints were raised among the Russian officers against

York's conduct of the expedition. He was accused of sacrificing the Russian

regiments in battle, and of courting a general defeat in order not to

expose his own men. The accusation was groundless. Where York was,

treachery or bad faith was superfluous. York in command, the feeblest enemy

became invincible. Incompetence among the hereditary chiefs of the English

army had become part of the order of nature. The Ministry, when taxed with

failure, obstinately shut their eyes to the true cause of the disaster.

Parliament was reminded that defeat was the most probable conclusion of any

military operations that we might undertake, and that England ought not to

expect success when Prussia and Austria had so long met only with

misfortune. Under the command of Nelson, English sailors were indeed

manifesting that kind of superiority to the seamen of other nations which

the hunter possesses over his prey; yet this gave no reason why foresight

and daring should count for anything ashore. If the nation wished to see

its soldiers undefeated, it must keep them at home to defend their country.

Even among the Opposition no voice was raised to protest against the system

which sacrificed English life and military honour to the dignity of the

Royal Family. The collapse of the Anglo-Russian expedition was viewed with

more equanimity in England than in Russia. The Czar dismissed his

unfortunate generals. York returned home, to run horses at Newmarket, to

job commissions with his mistress, and to earn his column at St. James's

Park.

[Unpopularity of the Directory.]

[Plans of Siéyès 1799.]

It was at this moment, when the tide of military success was already

turning in favour of the Republic, that the revolution took place which

made Bonaparte absolute ruler of France. Since the attack of the Government

upon the Royalists in Fructidor, 1797, the Directory and the factions had

come no nearer to a system of mutual concession, or to a peaceful

acquiescence in the will of a parliamentary majority. The Directory,

assailed both by the extreme Jacobins and by the Constitutionalists, was

still strong enough to crush each party in its turn. The elections of 1798,

which strengthened the Jacobins, were annulled with as little scruple as

the Royalist elections in the preceding year; it was only when defeat in

Germany and Italy had brought the Government into universal discredit that

the Constitutionalist party, fortified by the return of a large majority in

the elections of 1799, dared to turn the attack upon the Directors

themselves. The excitement of foreign conquest had hitherto shielded the

abuses of Government from criticism; but when Italy was lost, when generals

and soldiers found themselves without pay, without clothes, without

reinforcements, one general outcry arose against the Directory, and the

nation resolved to have done with a Government whose outrages and

extortions had led to nothing but military ruin. The disasters of France in

the spring of 1799, which resulted from the failure of the Government to

raise the armies to their proper strength, were not in reality connected

with the defects of the Constitution. They were caused in part by the

shameless jobbery of individual members of the Administration, in part by

the absence of any agency, like that of the Conventional Commissioners of

1793, to enforce the control of the central Government over the local

authorities, left isolated and independent by the changes of 1789. Faults

enough belonged, however, to the existing political order; and the

Constitutionalists, who now for the second time found themselves with a

majority in the Councils, were not disposed to prolong a system which from

the first had turned their majorities into derision. A party grew up around

the Abbé Siéyès intent upon some change which should give France a

government really representing its best elements. What the change was to be

few could say; but it was known that Siéyès, who had taken a leading part

in 1789, and had condemned the Constitution of 1795 from the moment when it

was sketched, had elaborated a scheme which he considered exempt from every

error that had vitiated its predecessors. As the first step to reform,

Siéyès himself was elected to a Directorship then falling vacant. Barras

attached himself to Siéyès; the three remaining Directors, who were

Jacobins and popular in Paris, were forced to surrender their seats. Siéyès

now only needed a soldier to carry out his plans. His first thought had

turned on Joubert, but Joubert was killed at Novi. Moreau scrupled to raise

his hand against the law; Bernadotte, a general distinguished both in war

and in administration, declined to play a secondary part. Nor in fact was

the support of Siéyès indispensable to any popular and ambitious soldier

who was prepared to attack the Government. Siéyès and his friends offered

the alliance of a party weighty in character and antecedents; but there

were other well-known names and powerful interests at the command of an

enterprising leader, and all France awaited the downfall of a Government

whose action had resulted only in disorder at home and defeat abroad.

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

Such was the political situation when, in the summer of 1799, Bonaparte,

baffled in an attack upon the Syrian fortress of St. Jean d'Acre, returned

to Egypt, and received the first tidings from Europe which had reached him

since the outbreak of the war. He saw that his opportunity had arrived. He

determined to leave his army, whose ultimate failure was inevitable, and to

offer to France in his own person that sovereignty of genius and strength

for which the whole nation was longing. On the 7th of October a despatch

from Bonaparte was read in the Council of Five Hundred, announcing a

victory over the Turks at Aboukir. It brought the first news that had been

received for many months from the army of Egypt; it excited an outburst of

joyous enthusiasm for the general and the army whom a hated Government was

believed to have sent into exile; it recalled that succession of victories

which had been unchecked by a single defeat, and that Peace which had given

France a dominion wider than any that her Kings had won. While every

thought was turned upon Bonaparte, the French nation suddenly heard that

Bonaparte himself had landed on the coast of Provence. "I was sitting that

day," says Béranger in his autobiography, "in our reading-room with thirty

or forty other persons. Suddenly the news was brought in that Bonaparte had

returned from Egypt. At the words, every man in the room started to his

feet and burst into one long shout of joy." The emotion portrayed by

Béranger was that of the whole of France. Almost everything that now

darkens the early fame of Bonaparte was then unknown. His falsities, his

cold, unpitying heart were familiar only to accomplices and distant

sufferers; even his most flagrant wrongs, such as the destruction of

Venice, were excused by a political necessity, or disguised as acts of

righteous chastisement. The hopes, the imagination of France saw in

Bonaparte the young, unsullied, irresistible hero of the Republic. His fame

had risen throughout a crisis which had destroyed all confidence in others.

The stale placemen of the factions sank into insignificance by his side;

even sincere Republicans, who feared the rule of a soldier, confessed that

it is not always given to a nation to choose the mode of its own

deliverance. From the moment that Bonaparte landed at Fréjus, he was master

of France.

[Conspiracy of Siéyès and Bonaparte.]

Siéyès saw that Bonaparte, and no one else, was the man through whom he

could overthrow the existing Constitution. [82] So little sympathy existed,

however, between Siéyès and the soldier to whom he now offered his support,

that Bonaparte only accepted Siéyès' project after satisfying himself that

neither Barras nor Bernadotte would help him to supreme power. Once

convinced of this, Bonaparte closed with Siéyès' offers. It was agreed that

Siéyès and his friend Ducos should resign their Directorships, and that the

three remaining Directors should be driven from office. The Assemblies, or

any part of them favourable to the plot, were to appoint a Triumvirate

composed of Bonaparte, Siéyès, and Ducos, for the purpose of drawing up a

new Constitution. In the new Constitution it was understood, though without

any definite arrangement, that Bonaparte and Siéyès were to be the leading

figures. The Council of Ancients was in great part in league with the

conspirators: the only obstacle likely to hinder the success of the plot

was a rising of the Parisian populace. As a precaution against attack, it

was determined to transfer the meeting of the Councils to St. Cloud.

Bonaparte had secured the support of almost all the generals and troops in

Paris. His brother Lucien, now President of the Council of Five Hundred,

hoped to paralyse the action of his own Assembly, in which the conspirators

were in the minority.

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

Early on the morning of the 9th of November (18 Brumaire), a crowd of

generals and officers met before Bonaparte's house. At the same moment a

portion of the Council of Ancients assembled, and passed a decree which

adjourned the session to St. Cloud, and conferred on Bonaparte the command

over all the troops in Paris. The decree was carried to Bonaparte's house

and read to the military throng, who acknowledged it by brandishing their

swords. Bonaparte then ordered the troops to their posts, received the

resignation of Barras, and arrested the two remaining Directors in the

Luxembourg. During the night there was great agitation in Paris. The arrest

of the two Directors and the display of military force revealed the true

nature of the conspiracy, and excited men to resistance who had hitherto

seen no great cause for alarm. The Councils met at St. Cloud at two on the

next day. The Ancients were ready for what was coming; the Five Hundred

refused to listen to Bonaparte's accomplices, and took the oath of fidelity

to the Constitution. Bonaparte himself entered the Council of Ancients, and

in violent, confused language declared that he had come to save the

Republic from unseen dangers. He then left the Assembly, and entered the

Chamber of the Five Hundred, escorted by armed grenadiers. A roar of

indignation greeted the appearance of the bayonets. The members rushed in a

mass upon Bonaparte, and drove him out of the hall. His brother now left

the President's chair and joined the soldiers outside, whom he harangued in

the character of President of the Assembly. The soldiers, hitherto

wavering, were assured by Lucien's civil authority and his treacherous

eloquence. The drums beat; the word of command was given; and the last free

representatives of France struggled through doorways and windows before the

levelled and advancing bayonets.

[Siéyès' plan of Constitution.]

The Constitution which Siéyès hoped now to impose upon France had been

elaborated by its author at the close of the Reign of Terror. Designed at

that epoch, it bore the trace of all those apprehensions which gave shape

to the Constitution of 1795. The statutory outrages of 1793, the Royalist

reaction shown in the events of Vendémiaire, were the perils from which

both Siéyès and the legislators of 1795 endeavoured to guard the future of

France. It had become clear that a popular election might at any moment

return a royalist majority to the Assembly: the Constitution of 1795

averted this danger by prolonging the power of the Conventionalists; Siéyès

overcame it by extinguishing popular election altogether. He gave to the

nation no right but that of selecting half a million persons who should be

eligible to offices in the Communes, and who should themselves elect a

smaller body of fifty thousand, eligible to offices in the Departments. The

fifty thousand were in their turn to choose five thousand, who should be

eligible to places in the Government and the Legislature. The actual

appointments were to be made, however, not by the electors, but by the

Executive. With the irrational multitude thus deprived of the power to

bring back its old oppressors, priests, royalists, and nobles might safely

do their worst. By way of still further precaution, Siéyès proposed that

every Frenchman who had been elected to the Legislature since 1789 should

be inscribed for ten years among the privileged five thousand.

Such were the safeguards provided against a Bourbonist reaction. To guard

against a recurrence of those evils which France had suffered from the

precipitate votes of a single Assembly, Siéyès broke up the legislature

into as many chambers as there are stages in the passing of a law. The

first chamber, or Council of State, was to give shape to measures suggested

by the Executive; a second chamber, known as the Tribunate, was to discuss

the measures so framed, and ascertain the objections to which they were

liable; the third chamber, known as the Legislative Body, was to decide in

silence for or against the measures, after hearing an argument between

representatives of the Council and of the Tribunate. As a last impregnable

bulwark against Jacobins and Bourbonists alike, Siéyès created a Senate

whose members should hold office for life, and be empowered to annul every

law in which the Chambers might infringe upon the Constitution.

It only remained to invent an Executive. In the other parts of his

Constitution, Siéyès had borrowed from Rome, from Greece, and from Venice;

in his Executive he improved upon the political theories of Great Britain.

He proposed that the Government should consist of two Consuls and a Great

Elector; the Elector, like an English king, appointing and dismissing the

Consuls, but taking no active part in the administration himself. The

Consuls were to be respectively restricted to the affairs of peace and of

war. Grotesque under every aspect, the Constitution of Siéyès was really

calculated to effect in all points but one the end which he had in view.

His object was to terminate the convulsions of France by depriving every

element in the State of the power to create sudden change. The members of

his body politic, a Council that could only draft, a Tribunate that could

only discuss, a Legislature that could only vote, Yes or No, were impotent

for mischief; and the nation itself ceased to have a political existence as

soon as it had selected its half-million notables.

[Siéyès and Bonaparte.]

So far, nothing could have better suited the views of Bonaparte; and up to

this point Bonaparte quietly accepted Siéyès' plan. But the general had his

own scheme for what was to follow. Siéyès might apportion the act of

deliberation among debating societies and dumb juries to the full extent of

his own ingenuity; but the moment that he applied his disintegrating method

to the Executive, Bonaparte swept away the flimsy reasoner, and set in the

midst of his edifice of shadows the reality of an absolute personal rule.

The phantom Elector, and the Consuls who were to be the Elector's

tenants-at-will, corresponded very little to the power which France desired

to see at its head. "Was there ever anything so ridiculous?" cried

Bonaparte. "What man of spirit could accept such a post?" It was in vain

that Siéyès had so nicely set the balance. His theories gave to France only

the pageants which disguised the extinction of the nation beneath a single

will: the frame of executive government which the country received in 1799

was that which Bonaparte deduced from the conception of an absolute central

power. The First Consul summed up all executive authority in his own

person. By his side there were set two colleagues whose only function was

to advise. A Council of State placed the highest skill and experience in

France at the disposal of the chief magistrate, without infringing upon his

sovereignty. All offices, both in the Ministries of State and in the

provinces, were filled by the nominees of the First Consul. No law could be

proposed but at his desire.

[Contrast of the Institutions of 1791 and 1799.]

[Centralisation of 1799.]

The institutions given to France by the National Assembly of 1789 and those

given to it in the Consulate exhibited a direct contrast seldom found

outside the region of abstract terms. Local customs, survivals of earlier

law, such as soften the difference between England and the various

democracies of the United States, had no place in the sharp-cut types in

which the political order of France was recast in 1791 and 1799. The

Constituent Assembly had cleared the field before it began to reconstruct.

Its reconstruction was based upon the Rights of Man, identified with the

principle of local self-government by popular election. It deduced a system

of communal administration so completely independent that France was

described by foreign critics as partitioned into 40,000 republics; and the

criticism was justified when, in 1793, it was found necessary to create a

new central Government, and to send commissioners from the capital into the

provinces. In the Constitution of 1791, judges, bishops, officers of the

National Guard, were all alike subjected to popular election; the Minister

of War could scarcely move a regiment from one village to another without

the leave of the mayor of the commune. In the Constitution of 1799 all

authority was derived from the head of the State. A system of

centralisation came into force with which France under her kings had

nothing to compare. All that had once served as a check upon monarchical

power, the legal Parliaments, the Provincial Estates of Brittany and

Languedoc, the rights of lay and ecclesiastical corporations, had vanished

away. In the place of the motley of privileges that had tempered the

Bourbon monarchy, in the place of the popular Assemblies of the Revolution,

there sprang up a series of magistracies as regular and as absolute as the

orders of military rank. [83] Where, under the Constitution of 1791, a body

of local representatives had met to conduct the business of the Department,

there was now a Préfet, appointed by the First Consul, absolute, like the

First Consul himself, and assisted only by the advice of a nominated

council, which met for one fortnight in the year. In subordination to the

Préfet, an officer and similar council transacted the local business of the

Arrondissement. Even the 40,000 Maires with their communal councils were

all appointed directly or indirectly by the Chief of the State. There

existed in France no authority that could repair a village bridge, or light

the streets of a town, but such as owed its appointment to the central

Government. Nor was the power of the First Consul limited to the

administration. With the exception of the lowest and the highest members of

the judicature, he nominated all judges, and transferred them at his

pleasure to inferior or superior posts.

Such was the system which, based to a great extent upon the preferences of

the French people, fixed even more deeply in the national character the

willingness to depend upon an omnipresent, all-directing power. Through its

rational order, its regularity, its command of the highest science and

experience, this system of government could not fail to confer great and

rapid benefits upon the country. It has usually been viewed by the French

themselves as one of the finest creations of political wisdom. In

comparison with the self-government which then and long afterwards existed

in England, the centralisation of France had all the superiority of

progress and intelligence over torpor and self-contradiction. Yet a heavy,

an incalculable price is paid by every nation which for the sake of

administrative efficiency abandons its local liberties, and all that is

bound up with their enjoyment. No practice in the exercise of public right

armed a later generation of Frenchmen against the audacity of a common

usurper: no immortality of youth secured the institutions framed by

Napoleon against the weakness and corruption which at some period undermine

all despotisms. The historian who has exhausted every term of praise upon

the political system of the Consulate lived to declare, as Chief of the

State himself, that the first need of France was the decentralisation of

power. [84]

[State policy of Bonaparte.]

After ten years of disquiet, it was impossible that any Government could be

more welcome to the French nation than one which proclaimed itself the

representative, not of party or of opinion, but of France itself. No

section of the nation had won a triumph in the establishment of the

Consulate; no section had suffered a defeat. In his own elevation Bonaparte

announced the close of civil conflict. A Government had arisen which

summoned all to its service which would employ all, reward all, reconcile

all. The earliest measures of the First Consul exhibited the policy of

reconciliation by which he hoped to rally the whole of France to his side.

The law of hostages, under which hundreds of families were confined in

retaliation for local Royalist disturbances, was repealed, and Bonaparte

himself went to announce their liberty to the prisoners in the Temple.

Great numbers of names were struck off the list of the emigrants, and the

road to pardon was subsequently opened to all who had not actually served

against their country. In the selection of his officers of State, Bonaparte

showed the same desire to win men of all parties. Cambacérès, a regicide,

was made Second Consul; Lebrun, an old official of Louis XVI., became his

colleague. In the Ministries, in the Senate, and in the Council of State

the nation saw men of proved ability chosen from all callings in life and

from all political ranks. No Government of France had counted among its

members so many names eminent for capacity and experience. One quality

alone was indispensable, a readiness to serve and to obey. In that

intellectual greatness which made the combination of all the forces of

France a familiar thought in Bonaparte's mind, there was none of the moral

generosity which could pardon opposition to himself, or tolerate energy

acting under other auspices than his own. He desired to see authority in

the best hands; he sought talent and promoted it, but on the understanding

that it took its direction from himself. Outside this limit ability was his

enemy, not his friend; and what could not be caressed or promoted was

treated with tyrannical injustice. While Bonaparte boasted of the career

that he had thrown open to talent, he suppressed the whole of the

independent journalism of Paris, and banished Mme. de Stael, whose guests

continued to converse, when they might not write, about liberty. Equally

partial, equally calculated, was Bonaparte's indulgence towards the ancient

enemies of the Revolution, the Royalists and the priests. He felt nothing

of the old hatred of Paris towards the Vendean noble and the superstitious

Breton; he offered his friendship to the stubborn Breton race, whose

loyalty and piety he appreciated as good qualities in subjects; but failing

their submission, he instructed his generals in the west of France to burn

down their villages, and to set a price upon the heads of their chiefs.

Justice, tolerance, good faith, were things which had no being for

Bonaparte outside the circle of his instruments and allies.

[France ceases to excite democracy abroad, but promotes equality under

monarchical systems.]

[Effect of Bonaparte's autocracy outside France.]

In the foreign relations of France it was not possible for the most

unscrupulous will to carry aggression farther than it had been already

carried; yet the elevation of Bonaparte deeply affected the fortunes of all

those States whose lot depended upon France. It was not only that a mind

accustomed to regard all human things as objects for its own disposal now

directed an irresistible military force, but from the day when France

submitted to Bonaparte, the political changes accompanying the advance of

the French armies took a different character. Belgium and Holland, the

Rhine Provinces, the Cisalpine, the Roman, and the Parthenopean Republics,

had all received, under whatever circumstances of wrong, at least the forms

of popular sovereignty. The reality of power may have belonged to French

generals and commissioners; but, however insincerely uttered, the call to

freedom excited hopes and aspirations which were not insincere themselves.

The Italian festivals of emancipation, the trees of liberty, the rhetoric

of patriotic assemblies, had betrayed little enough of the instinct for

self-government; but they marked a separation from the past; and the period

between the years 1796 and 1799 was in fact the birth-time of those hopes

which have since been realised in the freedom and the unity of Italy. So

long as France had her own tumultuous assemblies, her elections in the

village and in the county-town, it was impossible for her to form republics

beyond the Alps without introducing at least some germ of republican

organisation and spirit. But when all power was concentrated in a single

man, when the spoken and the written word became an offence against the

State, when the commotion of the old municipalities was succeeded by the

silence and the discipline of a body of clerks working round their chief,

then the advance of French influence ceased to mean the support of popular

forces against the Governments. The form which Bonaparte had given to

France was the form which he intended for the clients of France. Hence in

those communities which directly received the impress of the Consulate, as

in Bavaria and the minor German States, authority, instead of being

overthrown, was greatly strengthened. Bonaparte carried beyond the Rhine

that portion of the spirit of the Revolution which he accepted at home, the

suppression of privilege, the extinction of feudal rights, the reduction of

all ranks to equality before the law, and the admission of all to the

public service. But this levelling of the social order in the client-states

of France, and the establishment of system and unity in the place of

obsolete privilege, cleared the way not for the supremacy of the people,

but for the supremacy of the Crown. The power which was taken away from

corporations, from knights, and from ecclesiastics, was given, not to a

popular Representative, but to Cabinet Ministers and officials ranged after

the model of the official hierarchy of France. What the French had in the

first epoch of their Revolution endeavoured to impart to Europe--the spirit

of liberty and self-government--they had now renounced themselves. The

belief in popular right, which made the difference between the changes of

1789 and those attempted by the Emperor Joseph, sank in the storms of the

Revolution.

[Bonaparte legislates in the spirit of the reforming monarchs of the 18th

century.]

Yet the statesmanship of Bonaparte, if it repelled the liberal and

disinterested sentiment of 1789, was no mere cunning of a Corsican soldier,

or exploit of mediæval genius born outside its age. Subject to the fullest

gratification of his own most despotic or most malignant impulse, Bonaparte

carried into his creations the ideas upon which the greatest European

innovators before the French Revolution had based their work. What

Frederick and Joseph had accomplished, or failed to accomplish, was

realised in Western Germany when its Sovereigns became the clients of the

First Consul. Bonaparte was no child of the French Revolution; he was the

last and the greatest of the autocratic legislators who worked in an unfree

age. Under his rule France lost what had seemed to be most its own; it most

powerfully advanced the forms of progress common to itself and the rest of

Europe. Bonaparte raised no population to liberty: in extinguishing

privilege and abolishing the legal distinctions of birth, in levelling all

personal and corporate authority beneath the single rule of the State, he

prepared the way for a rational freedom, when, at a later day, the

Government of the State should itself become the representative of the

nation's will.