The young Republic found itself beset by the old governments of Europe.
Because the Revolution proclaimed a new gospel, because it asserted the
divine right of the people to govern themselves, because it made war
upon caste and privilege, because it asserted the equal right of every
citizen to take his share in the benefits as well as the burdens of
society, because it threatened the tyranny of both Church and State, it
was hated with intense bitterness by the kings, the high-priests, and
the aristocracy of Europe.
In 1793 the first great league was formed to crush it, and to restore
the Old Order in France. The strong member of this combination against
human progress was Great Britain. Rendered secure from attack by her
ocean girdle and her invincible fleets, she nevertheless dreaded what
were called “French principles.” In these principles she saw everything
to dread; for they were most insidious, and few were the men of the
masses who, having learned what the new doctrine was, did not embrace
it.
The common man, the average man, the full-grown man, the man who had
not been stunted by the Orthodox pedagogue or priest, could not listen
to the creed of the French republicans without feeling in his heart of
hearts that it offered to the world an escape from the system which
then enslaved it. Into Great Britain, in Germany, in Italy, in the
Netherlands, in Russia itself, the shock with which the Old Order had
fallen in France sent its vibrations--tremors which made the kings,
princes, and privileged who dwelt in the upper stories of the social
fabric quake with terror for the safety of the entire building.
The controlling man in England was William Pitt, able, proud,
cold, ambitious. Personally honest, his policy sounded the deepest
depravities of statecraft. Under his administration India was looted,
ravaged, enslaved; Ireland coerced and dragooned; France outlawed
because she dared to kill a king and call into life a republic; Europe
bribed to a generation of war; freedom of thought, and speech, and
conduct denied, and the cause of feudalism given a new lease of life.
The aims and ends of this man’s statesmanship were eternally bad; his
methods would have warmed the heart of a Jesuit. He would not stoop to
base deeds himself, would not speak the deliberately false word, would
not convey the bribe, would not manufacture counterfeit money, would
not arm the assassin, would not burn cities nor massacre innocent women
and children. No, no!--he belonged to what Lord Wolseley complacently
calls “the highest type of English gentleman,” and his lofty soul
would not permit him to do things like these himself. He would not
corrupt Irish politicians to vote for the Union; but he would supply
Castlereagh with the money from which the bribes were paid. He would
not himself debauch editor or pamphleteer to slander a political foe,
and deceive the British nation; but he supplied funds to those who
did. Nor would he have put daggers into the hands of fanatics that
they might do murder; but he protected and aided in England those who
did. Not a political criminal himself, he used criminals and garnered
the harvest of their crimes. Not himself capable of political theft,
he countenanced the political thief, approved his success, and as a
receiver of stolen goods, knowing them to have been stolen, haughtily
added huge gains to his political wealth.
The same lofty-minded minister who had debauched Ireland--an enemy to
Irish independence--made war upon free speech and political liberty in
England, and exhausted the resources of diplomacy and force to stamp
out the revolutionary movement of France. Under his sanction, his
emissaries attacked the French Republic by forging and counterfeiting
her paper currency; by arming her factions the one against the other;
by corrupting her trusted leaders; by nerving the hand of the assassin
when the corruptionist could not prevail. That London harbored the
Bourbon and his paid assassin was due to the influence of William Pitt.
That the Bourbon could land on the French coast the emissaries who came
to rouse Vendeans to revolt, or to murder Bonaparte in Paris, was due
to the position of William Pitt.
To the same eminent statesman was due the fact that for a whole
generation British newspapers were so filled with falsehoods against
France and Napoleon that an Englishman could not know the truth without
leaving his country to hear it. To the same cause was due the league
after league of Europe against France, which, beginning in 1793,
reunited and renewed the struggle as often as opportunity offered until
France was crushed, and the hands upon the clock of human progress put
back a hundred years.
Without England, the coalitions against republican France would have
had trifling results. It was England which furnished inexhaustible
supplies of money; England which scoured the ocean with her fleets and
maintained the blockade.
There had been a time when the French Revolution was not unpopular in
Great Britain. This was when the reform movement was under the control
of leaders who proclaimed their purpose to be to model the monarchy
in France upon that of England. So long as professions of this sort
were made, there was nothing to awaken distrust in staid, conservative
England. Even aristocracy loves a fettered king. But when more radical
men wrested leadership from the constitutionals, and boldly declared
that the work of reform must strike deeper, must destroy feudalism
root and branch, must consign a corpulent Church to the poverty whose
beauties it preached, the lords and the bishops of Great Britain
realized that the time had come when they must legislate, preach, pray,
and fight against inovations which, if successful in France, would
inevitably cross the narrow Channel.
All the machinery of repression was put to work. Books were written
against the Revolution, and paid for by pensions drawn from the common
treasury. Sermons were preached against the Revolution, and paid for
in salaries drawn from the State funds. Parliament was set in motion
to enact rigorously oppressive laws, and courts were set in motion to
enforce the statutes. The political system in England might be ever
so bad, but the people should not discuss it. Public meetings became
criminal; public reading rooms, unlicensed, were criminal. By the
plain letter of the law of Christian England, if any citizen opened
his house or room “for the purpose of reading books, or pamphlets,
or newspapers,” such citizen became a criminal and such house “a
disorderly house.” Before the citizen could permit others to use his
books for pay, he must secure the approval and the license of bigoted
Tory officials. No public meeting at all could be held unless a notice
of such meeting signed by a householder, and stating the object of the
meeting, should be inserted in a newspaper at least five days previous
to the meeting. And even then the Tory justice of the peace was
empowered to break up the meeting and imprison the persons attending
it, if he thought the language held by the speaker of the meeting was
calculated to bring the King or the government into contempt. Not even
in the open fields could any lecture, speech, or debate be had without
a license from a Tory official.
The government spy, the paid informer, went abroad, searching,
listening, reporting, persecuting, and prosecuting. No privacy was
sacred, no individual rights were respected, terrorism became a system.
Paine’s _Rights of Man_ threw the upper classes into convulsions; his
_Common Sense_ became a hideous nightmare. Men were arrested like
felons, tried like felons, punished like felons for reading pamphlets
and books which are now such commonplace exponents of democracy that
they are well-nigh forgotten. It was a time of misrule, of class
legislation, of misery among the masses. It was a time when the laborer
had almost no rights, almost no opportunities, almost no inducement
to live, beyond the animal instinct which preserves the brute. It was
a time when the landlord was almost absolute master of land and man;
when the nobleman controlled the King, the House of Lords, and the
House of Commons. It was a time when a duke might send half a dozen of
his retainers to take seats in Parliament, or when he might advertise
the seats for sale and knock them down to the highest bidder. It was
a time when a close corporation of hereditary aristocrats controlled
England like a private estate, taxed her people, dictated her laws,
ruled her domestic and foreign policies, and made war or peace
according to their own good pleasure. It was a time when it might have
been said of most English towns as the town-crier reported to his Tory
masters in reference to the village of Bolton--that he had diligently
searched the place and had found in it neither _The Rights of Man_ nor
_Common Sense_.
There was one class which shared with the nobles the control of
English national policies, and this was that of the great merchants
and manufacturers. The exporter, The Prince of Trade, was a power
behind the throne, and in foreign affairs his selfish greed dominated
England’s policy.
This governing class, as Napoleon said, looked upon the public, the
people, as a milch cow; the only interest which they had in the cow was
that it should not go dry. Offices, dignities, salaries, were handed
down from sire to son. By hereditary right the government, its purse
and its sword, belonged to these noble creatures whose merit frequently
consisted solely in being the sons of their sires. To fill the ships
which fought for the supremacy of this oligarchy, press-gangs prowled
about the streets on the hunt for victims. Poor men, common laborers,
and people of the lowlier sort were pounced upon by these press gangs,
and forcibly carried off to that “hell on earth,” a British man-of-war
of a century ago. One instance is recorded of a groom coming from the
church where he had just been married, and who was snatched from the
arms of his frantic bride and borne off--to return after many years to
seek for a wife long since dead, in a neighborhood where he had long
been forgotten.
In the army and in the fleet soldiers and sailors were lashed like dogs
to keep them under; and it was no uncommon thing for the victims to die
from the effects of the brutal beating.
Considering all these things, the reader will understand why England
made such determined war upon republican France. Against that country
she launched armies and fleets, bribed kings and ministers, subsidized
coalitions, straining every nerve year in and year out to put the
Bourbons back on the throne, and to stay the advance of democracy. She
temporarily succeeded. Her selfish King, nobles, and clericals held
their grip, and postponed the day of reform. But the delay was dearly
bought. The statesmanship of Pitt, Canning, Castlereagh, and Burke
strewed Europe with dead men, and loaded nations with appalling debts.
Upon land and sea, in almost every clime, men of almost every race were
armed, enraged, and set to killing each other in order that the same
few might continue to milk the cow.
In forming an opinion about Napoleon, it must be remembered that
when he first came upon the scene he found these conditions already
in existence,--Europe in league against republican France. With the
creation of those conditions he had had nothing to do. Not his was
the beginning of the Revolution; not his the execution of Louis XVI.;
not his the quarrel with England. If Great Britain and her allies
afterward concentrated all their abuse, hatred, and hostility upon him,
it was because he had become France; he had become, as Pitt himself
said, “the child and champion of democracy”; he had become as Toryism
throughout the world said, the “embodiment of the French Revolution.”
This is the great basic truth of Napoleon’s relations with Europe; and
if we overlook it, we utterly fail to understand his career. In an
evil hour for France, as well as for him, the allied kings succeeded
in making the French forget her past. It was not till the Bourbons
had returned to France, to Spain, to Italy; it was not till feudalism
had returned to Germany with its privilege, its abuses, its stick for
the soldier, its rack and wheel for the civilian; it was not till
Metternich and his Holy Alliance had smashed with iron heel every
struggle for popular rights on the Continent; it was not till Napoleon,
dead at St. Helena, was remembered in vivid contrast to the soulless
despots who succeeded him, that liberalism, not only in France, but
throughout the world, realized how exceeding great had been the folly
of the French when they allowed the kings to divorce the cause of
Napoleon from that of the French people.