From the Rhine to the Vistula the retreat of the French caused an
outburst of joy. Nationalities and dynasties drew a mighty breath of
relief. Peoples, as well as kings, had warred against French domination
in 1813; and peoples, rather than kings, had been Napoleon’s ruin.
Quickened into life by the French Revolution, Germany had partially
thrown feudalism off; and, whereas in 1807 there had been no such
political factor as a German people, in 1813 it was the all-powerful
element of resistance to Napoleon. The German statesman outlined a
people’s programme, the German pamphleteer and agitator propagated it,
the German poet inspired it, the German pulpit consecrated it, the
German secret society organized it. There was the weapon; Spain had
shown what could be done with it; the kings had but to grasp and use
it. Under its blows, Napoleon’s strength steadily sank.
Inspired by the German spirit, the allied armies rose after each defeat
ready to fight again. Carried away by the current, Napoleon’s German
allies left his ranks and turned their guns upon him. Intimidated by
its power, his trusty officers lost heart, lost nerve, lost judgment.
Buoyed by its confidence, the kings had no fears, and rejected all
compromise. Napoleon was barely across the Rhine before his Rhenish
confederation was a thing of the past, the kingdom of Westphalia a
recollection, Jerome Bonaparte a fugitive without a crown, the Saxon
monarch a prisoner, Holland a revolted province, Polish independence
and the Grand Duchy of Warsaw a vanished dream.
The “Saviors of Europe” had saved it. Napoleon’s “cruel yoke” would vex
Germany no more. To emphasize the fact, the “Saviors” levied upon the
country a tribute of men and money, which just about doubled the weight
of Napoleon’s cruel yoke.
Very heavy had been the hand of France during her ascendency. Very
freely Napoleon had helped himself to such things in Germany as he
needed. Very harshly had he put down all opposition to his will. And
the French officers, imitating their chief, had plundered the land with
insolent disregard of moderation or morality. From Jerome Bonaparte
downward, Napoleon’s representatives in Germany had been, as a rule,
a scandal, a burden, an intolerable offence to German pride, German
patriotism, and German pockets. It was with a furious explosion of
pent-up wrath that Germany at last arose and drove them out.
Who was there to warn the peoples of the European states that they
were blindly beating back the pioneers of progress, blindly combating
the cause of liberalism, blindly doing the work of absolutism and
privilege? Who would have hearkened to such a warning, had there been
those wise enough and brave enough to have spoken? Viewed upon the
surface, the work Napoleon had done could not be separated from his
mode of doing it. The methods were rough, sometimes brutal, always
dictatorial.
People could see this, feel it, and resent it--just as they saw, felt,
and resented his exactions of men, money, and war material. They could
not, or did not, make due allowance for the man’s ultimate purpose.
They could not, or would not, realize how profoundly his code of
laws and his system of administration worked for the final triumph
of liberal principles. They could not, or would not, understand that
there was _then_ no way under heaven by which he could subdue the
forces of feudalism, break the strength of aristocracy, and establish
the equality of all men before the law, other than the method which he
pursued.
So the peoples in their folly made common cause with the kings,
who promised them constitutions, civil and political liberty, and
representative government. In their haste and their zeal, they ran to
arms and laid their treasures at the feet of the kings. In their ardor
and devotion, they marched and fought, endured and persisted, with
an unselfish constancy which no trials, sufferings, or defeats could
vanquish.
They advanced to the attack with fierce shouts of joy; on the retreat
they were not cast down; reverses did not dampen their hopes nor
shake their resolution. When the truce of Pleiswitz was granted, they
welcomed it only as it gave them time to recuperate. When the Congress
of Prague convened, they regarded it with dread, fearing that peace
might be made and Napoleon left part-master of Germany. When the beacon
lights blazed along the heights at midnight of August 10, they were
hailed as slaves might hail the signals of deliverance.
In his _Memoirs_, Metternich relates that when, after the battle of
Leipsic, he entered the palace of the King of Saxony to notify him
of the pleasure of the Allies, the Queen reproached him bitterly for
having deserted Napoleon’s “sacred cause.” Metternich states that he
informed her that he had not come there to argue the question with her.
And yet, if Metternich had any reply to make, then was the time to make
it. The Queen’s side of the case was weaker then than it would ever
be again; Metternich’s stronger. Perfect as may have been the Queen’s
faith, it was beyond her power to pierce the curtain of the years, and
see what lay in the future. Had the spirit of prophecy touched her
lips, she would have been taken for a maniac, for this would have been
her revelation:--
“The promises the kings have made to the people will be broken; the
hope of the patriot will be dashed to the ground; counter-revolution
will set in; and the shadow of absolutism will deepen over the world.
The noble will again put on his boots and his spurs; the peasant will
once more dread the frown of his lord. The king will follow no law but
that of his pleasure; the priest will again avow that Jehovah is a
Tory and a Jesuit. Reactionaries will drive out Napoleon’s Code, and
the revolutionary principles of civil equality. The prisons will be
gorged with liberals; on hundreds of gibbets democrats will rot. The
Inquisition will come again, and the shrieks of the heretic will soothe
the troubled conscience of the orthodox. Constitutions promised to
peoples, and solemnly sworn to by kings, will be coldly set aside, and
the heroes who demanded them will, by way of traitor’s deaths, become
martyrs to liberty.
“Mediævalism will return; statues of the Virgin will weep, or wink, or
sweat; and miracles will refresh the faith of the righteous, bringing
death to the scoffer who too boldly doubts. The press will be gagged,
free speech denied, public assemblies made penal. The Jesuits will
swarm as never before, monasteries and convents fill to overflowing,
church wealth will multiply, and neither priest nor noble will pay
tribute to the state. Clerical papers will demand the gallows for
liberals, clericals will seize the schools, clericals will forbid all
political writings.
“The time will come when the European doctrine will again be proclaimed
that the sovereign has full power over the lives and the property of
his subjects. The time will come when this same Emperor Francis will
publicly admonish the Laybach professors that they are not to teach the
youth of Germany too much:--‘I do not want learned men! I want obedient
men!’
“The time will come when in Bourbon France the work of the Revolution
will be set aside by the stroke of the pen, and absolute government
decreed again. Even in England, free speech attempted at a public
meeting will bring out the troops who will charge upon a mixed and
unarmed multitude, wounding and slaying with a brutality born of
bigoted royalism and class-tyranny. The cry for reform there will
challenge such resistance that Wellington will hold his army ready to
massacre English people.
“The time will come when these three kings--Alexander, Francis, and
Frederick William--will form their Holy Alliance in the interest of
aristocracy, hereditary privilege, clerical tyranny, and absolute
royalty. By force of arms they will crush democracy wherever it
appears; they will bring upon Europe a reign of terror; and the cause
of human progress will seem to be lost forever.
“And as for you, Prince Metternich, the time will come when you will
have been so identified with the oppressors of the people, so well
known as their busy tool, their heartless advocate, their pitiless
executioner, their polished liar, hypocrite, and comprehensive knave,
that a minister of state will proclaim amid universal applause, ‘I sum
up the infamy of the last decades in the name of Metternich!’”
All this might the Queen of Saxony have said to her insolent tormentor;
for all this is literal truth. In the light of history the woman was
right: Napoleon’s was the “sacred cause.”
* * * * *
When the Emperor reached Paris, his situation was as trying as any
mortal was ever called upon to face. Not a legitimate king like
Alexander, Frederick William, or Francis, his power could not rally
from shocks which theirs had so easily survived. Great as had been his
genius for construction, he could not give to his empire the solidity
and sanctity which comes from age. He could create orders of nobility,
and judicial, legislative, and executive systems; he could erect a
throne, establish a dynasty, and surround it with a court; but he could
not so consecrate it with the mysterious benediction of time that it
would defy adversity, and stand of its own strength amid storms which
levelled all around it.
The great Frederick and the small Frederick William remained the centre
of Prussian hopes, Prussian loyalty, Prussian efforts even when Berlin
was in the hands of the enemy, the army scattered in defeat, and the
King almost a fugitive. Prussia, in all her battles, fought for the
King; in her defeats, mourned with the King; in her resurrection from
disaster, rallied round the King.
Austria had done the same. Her Emperor Francis had as little real
manhood in him as any potentate that ever complacently repeated the
formula of “God and I.” He was weak in war and in peace; in the head,
empty; in the heart, waxy and cold; in the spirit, selfish, false,
cowardly, and unscrupulous. Yet when this man’s unprovoked attacks
upon Napoleon had brought Austria to her shame and sorrow,--cities
burnt, fields wasted, armies destroyed, woe in every house for lives
lost in battle,--Austria knew no rallying-point other than Francis;
and when the poor creature came back to Vienna, after Napoleon had
granted him peace, all classes met him with admiration, love, loyalty,
and enthusiasm. Napoleon, returning to France victorious, was not more
joyously acclaimed by the French than was this defeated and despoiled
Francis applauded in Vienna.
The one was a legitimate king, the other was not. On the side of
Francis and the Fredericks were time, training, habit, and system.
Germans were born into the system, educated to it, practised in it, and
died out of it--to be succeeded by generations who knew nothing but to
follow in the footsteps of those that had gone before.
In France the old order had been overthrown and the new had not so
completely identified itself with Napoleon that he could exert the
tremendous force which antiquity and custom lend to institutions.
Nevertheless, the truth seems to be that in his last struggles Napoleon
had the masses with him. Had he made a direct appeal to the peasantry
and to the workmen of the cities, there is every reason to believe
that he could have enrolled a million men. The population in France
was not at a standstill then as it is now. It was steadily on the
increase; and it was fairly prosperous, and fairly contented. The
Emperor had given special attention to agriculture and manufactures. In
every possible way he had encouraged both, and his efforts had borne
fruit. He had not increased the taxes, he had not burdened the State
with loans, he had not issued paper money, he had not even changed the
conscription laws. In some of his campaigns he had called for recruits
before they were legally due; but, as the Senate had sanctioned the
call, the nation had acquiesced. It is true that men and boys had
dodged the enrolling officers, and that the numbers of those who defied
and resisted the conscriptions had increased to many thousands; but the
meaning of this was nothing more than that the people were tired of
distant wars.
A pledge from the Emperor that soldiers should not be sent out of
France would apparently have rallied to him the full military support
of the nation. But Napoleon could not get his own consent to arm the
peasants and the artisans. Both in 1814 and in 1815 that one chance of
salvation was offered to him; in each year he rejected it.
The awful scenes of the Revolution which he had witnessed had left him
the legacy of morbid dread of mobs. The soldier who could gaze stolidly
upon the frightful rout at Leipsic, where men were perishing in the
wild storm of battle by the tens of thousands, could never free himself
from the recollection of the Parisian rabble which had slaughtered a
few hundreds. At Moscow he refused to arm the serfs against their
masters; in France he as deliberately rejected all proposals to appeal
to the lower orders to support his throne.
The secret is revealed by his question, “Who can tell me what spirit
will animate these men?” He feared for his dynasty, dreading a republic
in which free elections would control the choice of the executive.
But while the mass of the French people remained loyal to Napoleon,
the upper classes were divided. There had always been a leaven of
royalism in the land, and Napoleon himself had immensely strengthened
its influence. Bringing back the émigrés, restoring hereditary estates,
creating orders of nobility anew, and establishing royal forms, he
had been educating the country up to monarchy as no one else could
have done--had been “making up the bed for the Bourbons.” The ancient
nobility, as a rule, had secretly scorned him as a Corsican parvenu,
even while crowding his antechambers and loading themselves with his
favors. Now that reverses had commenced, their eyes began to turn to
their old masters, the Bourbons, and the hopes of a restoration and a
counter-revolution began to take distinct shape in Paris itself.
To the royalists, also, went the support of a large number of the
rich--men who resented the income tax of twenty-five per cent, which
Napoleon at this time felt it necessary to impose upon them. Another
grudge, they, the rich, had against him: he would not allow them to
loot his treasury, as the rich were doing in England. Nor would he
grant exemptions from any sort of public burden, special privilege
being in his eyes a thing utterly abominable. Hence, such men as the
great banker Laffitte were not his friends.
There was another element of opposition which made itself felt at this
crisis. There were various contractors, and other public employees,
who had taken advantage of the decline of Napoleon’s power to plunder,
embezzle, and cheat. The Emperor was on the track of numbers of these
men, and in his wrath had sworn to bring them to judgment. “Never will
I pardon those who squander public funds!” These men moved in upper
circles, and had many social, political, and financial allies. Dreading
punishment if Napoleon held his throne, they became active partisans
of the Bourbon restoration. Even his old schoolmate, Bourrienne, his
private secretary of many years, betrayed him shamelessly. The Emperor
had detected the fact that Bourrienne had been using his official
position for private gain, and had dismissed him; but on account of old
association had softened the fall by appointing him Consul at Hamburg.
At this place Bourrienne amassed a fortune by violating the Continental
system, and he now hated the man he had betrayed, and from whom he
feared punishment. This was but one case among hundreds.
Then, there was the Talleyrand, Fouché, Rémusat, Abbé Louis, Abbé
Montesquieu, Duc de Dalberg sort. Talleyrand had been enriched,
ennobled, imperially pampered, but never trusted. Napoleon had borne
with his venalities and treacheries until men marvelled at his
forbearance. This minister of France was in the pay of Austria, of
Russia, of England, of any foe of France who could pay the price.
It was probably he who sold to England the secret of Tilsit. It was
certainly he who conspired with the Czar against Napoleon, and took a
bribe from Austria every time she needed mercy from France. It was he
who extorted tribute from Napoleon’s allies at the same time that he
sold state secrets to Napoleon’s foes. Denounced and dismissed, and
then employed again, this man was ripe for a greater betrayal than he
had yet made, and he now believed that the opportunity was close at
hand.
Fouché, also, had been Napoleon’s minister, Napoleon’s Duke of Otranto.
Dabbling in conspiracies of all sorts, and venturing upon a direct
intrigue with England, Napoleon had disgraced him, instead of having
him shot. Needing him again, the Emperor had reëmployed him, thereby
affording another rancorous foe his chance to strike when the time
should come.
In the army there was the same grand division of sentiment,--the rank
and file being devoted to Napoleon, the officers divided.
The marshals were tired of war, there being nothing further in it
for them. They had been lifted as high as they could go; they had
been enriched to satiety; their fame was established. Why should they
continue to fight? Were they never to be left in peace? What was the
good of having wealth if they were never to enjoy it?
The marshals were human; their grumblings and growlings most natural.
They honestly believed that peace depended upon the Emperor alone, that
he only had to stretch forth his hand to get it.
He himself knew better; but it almost maddened him to realize that so
few understood this as he did.
“Peace! peace!” he cried impatiently, to Berthier the goose. “You
miserable----! Don’t you know that I want peace more than any one? How
am I to get it? The more I concede, the more they demand!”
This brings us squarely to the question: Did the Allies, in good faith,
offer Napoleon peace, and did he recklessly refuse it?
Then and afterward he contended that he had done everything in his
power to secure honorable terms. Almost with his dying breath he
repeated this statement at St. Helena. What is the truth about it?
Let any one who wishes to know, study the _Memoirs_ of the period; let
him further study the despatches and treaties of the Allies; let him
give due weight to the influence upon these Allies of the Bourbons,
the ancient nobility, the higher priests of the Catholic Church, the
dynastic prejudices of the allied kings, and the intense personal
hatreds of such powerful counsellors of kings as Pozzo di Borgo, Stein,
Bernadotte, Castlereagh, and Talleyrand. In addition to this, let such
a student consider how the Allies violated the armistice of Pleiswitz,
the capitulations of Dantzic and Dresden, the treaties they made with
Napoleon in 1812, and that which they made with him at his abdication
in 1814.
Let such a student furthermore consider that these Allies not only
broke the treaty they made with Napoleon in 1814, but likewise violated
the pledges which they had made to their own peoples in drawing them
into the war.
If, after the study of these evidences of the bad faith of the Allies,
there still remains doubt, the _Memoirs_ of Metternich will remove
it--if it be removable.
The world knows that the only avowed purpose of the Allies was to
liberate Europe by driving Napoleon back beyond the Rhine, and that
this end had now been attained. Hence, if the real objects the Allies
had in view were those which had been made public, why should not
the war have ceased? Europe was free, Napoleon’s empire shattered,
nothing remained to him but France--why should the Allies follow him
there? It was necessary to hoodwink the world upon this point, and it
was Metternich’s task to do it;--for the allied kings were determined
to invade France and put an end to Napoleon’s political existence.
Metternich avows this himself; yet he persuaded them to make to
Napoleon the celebrated Frankfort Proposals. All the world knows that
the allied kings, with an apparent excess of magnanimity, offered
even then to come to such terms with Napoleon as would have left him
in possession of the France of 1792, a larger realm than the greatest
of Bourbon kings had ever ruled. What the world did not know was that
these Frankfort Proposals were not sincere, and were made for effect
only. It was necessary to the Allies to cover their own designs, to
justify their departure from the declarations of 1813, to create the
impression that they themselves favored peace while Napoleon persisted
in war. Succeeding in this, they would cut the ground from under his
feet, divide the French, and deprive him of enthusiastic and united
national support. With profound policy and duplicity, they sought to
create in France itself the impression that Napoleon was the only
obstacle to peace, and that their efforts were aimed at him, and not
at France, her institutions, her principles, or her glory. Not for a
moment was France given cause to suspect that the Bourbons were to be
forced upon her, and the great work of the Revolution partially undone.
Not for a moment was she allowed to realize that offers of peace to
Napoleon were deceptive--intended only to embarrass him and to divide
his people. Yet Metternich himself admits that the Frankfort Proposals
were made for effect--not only admits it, but takes credit for it. He
states that he was compelled to exert all his influence with the allied
sovereigns to secure their consent to these proposals, and that he
overcame their resistance, as he had overcome Alexander’s in 1813, by
assuring them that the offers would come to nothing.