Transcriber’s Note
Sidenotes are shown in UPPER-CASE and enclosed in ♦DIAMOND SYMBOLS♦;
italic text is enclosed in _underscores_. Other notes will be found at
the end of this eBook.
HISTORY
OF THE
PENINSULAR WAR.
LONDON:
PRINTED BY THOMAS DAVISON, WHITEFRIARS.
HISTORY
OF THE
PENINSULAR WAR.
“Unto thee
“Let thine own times as an old story be.”
DONNE.
BY ROBERT SOUTHEY, ESQ. LL.D.
POET LAUREATE,
HONORARY MEMBER OF THE ROYAL SPANISH ACADEMY, OF THE
ROYAL SPANISH ACADEMY OF HISTORY, OF THE ROYAL
INSTITUTE OF THE NETHERLANDS, OF THE
CYMMRODORION, OF THE MASSACHUSETTS
HISTORICAL SOCIETY, ETC.
A NEW EDITION.
_IN SIX VOLUMES._
VOL. I.
LONDON:
JOHN MURRAY, ALBEMARLE-STREET.
MDCCCXXVIII.
Ἱστορίας γὰρ ἐὰν ἀφέλῃ τις τὸ διὰ τί, καὶ πῶς, καὶ τίνος χάριν ἐπράχθη,
καὶ τὸ πραχθὲν πότερα εὔλογον ἔσχε τὸ τέλος, τὸ καταλειπόμενον αὐτῆς
ἀγώνισμα μὲν, μάθημα δὲ οὐ γίγνεται· καὶ παραυτίκα μὲν τέρπει, πρὸς δὲ
τὸ μέλλον οὐδὲν ὠφελεῖ τὸ παράπαν.
POLYBIUS, lib. iii. sect. 31.
TO
THE KING.
SIR,
It is with peculiar fitness, as well as pleasure, that I inscribe to
your Majesty a History of the most glorious war recorded in the British
annals.
When the Regency devolved into your hands, the fortunes of our allies
were at the lowest ebb, and neither arts nor efforts were spared for
making the spirit of this country sink with them. At that momentous
crisis every thing depended, under Providence, upon your single
determination; and to that determination Great Britain is beholden for
its triumph, and Europe for its deliverance.
To your Majesty, therefore, this faithful History is offered, as a
portion of the tribute due to a just, magnanimous, and splendid reign,
and as a proof of individual respect and gratitude from
Your Majesty’s
Most dutiful subject and servant,
ROBERT SOUTHEY.
PREFACE.
Eight years have now elapsed since the conclusion of that memorable
war which began upon the coast of Portugal, and was brought to its
triumphant close before the walls of Thoulouse. From the commencement
of that contest I entertained the hope and intention of recording its
events, being fully persuaded that, if this country should perform its
duty as well as the Spaniards and Portugueze would discharge theirs,
the issue would be as glorious as the cause was good. Having therefore
early begun the history, and sedulously pursued it, it would have
been easy for me to have brought it forth while the public, in the
exultation of success, were eager for its details. But I was not so
unmindful of what was due to them and to the subject; and I waited
patiently till, in addition to the means of information which were
within my reach, more materials should be supplied by the publications
of persons who had been engaged in the war, and till time enough had
been allowed for farther consideration and fuller knowledge to correct
or confirm the views and opinions which I had formed upon the events as
they occurred.
I would have waited longer if there had been any reasonable prospect
that the history undertaken by order of the Spanish Government would
have been completed. The single volume which has appeared is written
with great ability; and if it had proceeded farther, I might have
derived more advantage from it than from any, or all other publications
upon the subject. But its progress has been interrupted by the
revolution in Spain; and the aspects in that country are so dark, that
there can be little hope of seeing it resumed.
A list of the printed documents which have been consulted in this
work will be appended to the last volume. For the private sources
of information which have been open to him, the author must content
himself here with making a general acknowledgement. They are such as
might entitle him to assert, that since the publication of Strada’s
Decades, no history composed by one who was not an actor in it, has
appeared with higher claims to authority.
There is a danger in attempting stories of prime importance, lest they
should excite expectations which it is fatal to disappoint, and yet
impossible to fulfil. Great talents have sunk, and lofty reputations
have been wrecked in such attempts. I might well be apprehensive for
my own fortune in the present undertaking, were it not for a belief,
that in the variety of details which this narration contains, in the
importance of its events, in its splendid examples of heroism and
virtue, and, above all, in the moral interest that pervades it, the
reader will find attractions which may compensate for any defects in
the execution of so arduous a work.
KESWICK, July 22, 1822.
CONTENTS.
PAGE
INTRODUCTION 1
CHAPTER I.
Gradual degradation of Spain and Portugal 4
Tyranny of the Church and of the Governments 5, 6
Mal-administration of the laws 6
Disuse of the Cortes 7
Condition of the Nobles 7
Of the army 8
Improvement among the Clergy 9
State of the Religious Orders 11
Improving literature 12
Morals 12
National character unchanged 14
Both countries in a favourable state for improvement 14
Both become dependent upon France 15
Causes and progress of the French Revolution 16
Buonaparte 19
Military power of France 23
The Conscription 23
Change in the constitution and character of the French army 29
Levelling principle of the Revolutionary service 30
Honourable character of the old French army 32
Honour not the principle of despotism 32
Education in the hands of the Clergy before the Revolution 33
The whole system destroyed 35
Public instruction promised by the Revolutionists 36
Talleyrand’s scheme 36
Religion omitted 36
Condorcet’s scheme 36
Religion proscribed 37
Scheme of the National Convention 37
Domestic education proscribed 38
None of these schemes attempted in practice 39
Normal schools 40
Consequences of these visionary schemes 41
Attachment of the Jacobins to Buonaparte 42
A system of education necessary for his views 43
Imperial University 44
Communal Colleges 46
Ecclesiastical schools 47
Lyceums 49
First Catechism 50
Special Military Academies 51
Youths from the conquered countries 51
Moral effect of the Lyceums 52
System of inspection 52
Uniformity of education 53
Effects of the Revolution upon morals 55
Frequency of divorces 55
Obscene publications 56
Gaming-houses established by Government 56
Abolition of primogeniture 57
Degradation of the Church 60
State of Europe 61
England 63
Duke of Portland’s administration 64
The Grenville party 66
The Foxites 67
Attempts to raise a cry for peace 68
Superstition concerning Buonaparte 68
Admirers of the French Revolution 69
Increased expenditure, activity, and wealth 70
Manufacturing system 71
Weakness of the Government 73
Hopes of Buonaparte 74
CHAPTER II.
Conjectures concerning the projects of Buonaparte 76
Rise of D. Manuel de Godoy 79
He is created a Prince for making peace with France 80
Disgraceful terms of that peace 81
Court of Spain not willingly subservient to France 80
Godoy not corrupted by France 82
Disposition to join with the allies before the peace of Tilsit 82
The Prince of Asturias inimical to Godoy 83
Parties in favour of the French 83
Unpopularity of Godoy 85
The French Ambassador advises the Prince to solicit an alliance
with Buonaparte’s family 86
The Prince applies secretly to Buonaparte 87
Buonaparte intends to seize the Peninsula 88
Spanish troops sent to the North of Europe and to Tuscany 88
Condition of the Portugueze Government 89
Portugal required to act against Great Britain 90
Middle course proposed by the Portugueze Court 91
Preparations for occupying Portugal 91
The French and Spanish Ambassadors leave Lisbon 93
Secret treaty of Fontainebleau 93
British residents expelled from Lisbon 96
Edict for the exclusion of British commerce 96
For registering the persons and property of the British 97
The British Minister leaves Lisbon 97
A Russian squadron enters the Tagus 98
Buonaparte endeavours to seize the Royal Family 99
Junot’s proclamation from Alcantara 100
The French enter Portugal 102
Their rapacity upon the march 102
Conduct at Abrantes 103
Representation of the British Ambassador 105
The Prince determines upon removing to Brazil 106
He refuses to let the people and the English fleet defend the
city 107
Embarkation of the Royal Family 109
Regency appointed by the Prince 112
Junot advances rapidly 114
The French enter Lisbon 115
Miserable plight of those who first entered 117
Arrival of the second division 118
Forced loan required 120
A Frenchman added to the Regency 120
Edict for confiscating English goods 121
Use of arms prohibited 121
Pastoral letter of the Cardinal Patriarch 122
Conduct of the Inquisitor General 124
The French flag hoisted 124
Insult at the theatre, and commotion in Lisbon 126
Precautions of the French 128
Regulations concerning English goods 130
Scarcity of corn apprehended 131
Measures for providing the army 132
The Portugueze leave their fields unsown 133
Spaniards under General Carraffa at Porto 134
General Taranco takes the command there 134
Good conduct of the troops 135
Solano at Setubal 135
His schemes for the improvement of society 136
Emigration from Lisbon 138
Falsehoods respecting England 140
Report of the French Minister, M. Champagny, concerning Portugal 141
Second report, indicating intentions against Spain 144
Conscription for 1809 required 145
Threats against England 146
The royal arms of Portugal broken 147
Junot declares that the Portugueze Government is dissolved 148
Junot appointed Governor for the Emperor Napoleon 149
Council of Government formed 150
War-contribution extraordinary 152
Godoy recalls the Spanish troops from Portugal 156
Part of them detained by the French 156
The whole of Portugal under command of the French 157
The flower of the Portugueze army marched into France 157
Discontent of the people 158
Executions at Caldas 159
Conduct of the French Generals 163
State of Lisbon 166
Increase of the Sebastianists 169
Edicts to prevent emigration 174
Special criminal tribunal 176
Measures of police 177
Deputation of Portugueze to Bayonne 179
Letter from the Deputation 180
Junot made Duke of Abrantes 181
He hopes to be made King of Portugal 182
The Juiz do Povo proposes to ask for a King of Buonaparte’s
family 183
Fate of the mover of this scheme 185
CHAPTER III.
Affair of the Escurial 187
Ferdinand accused of plotting to dethrone his father, and
attempting his mother’s life 187
Persons implicated in the charge 188
Ferdinand confesses himself faulty, and intreats forgiveness 189
This affair disgraceful to all parties 189
Not instigated by Buonaparte 190
His conduct 191
Anxiety of Godoy 192
The Queen of Etruria expelled from Tuscany 193
Buonaparte writes to the King of Spain 194
Troops marched into Spain 194
Seizure of Pamplona 195
Seizure of Barcelona 198
Seizure of Monjuic 201
Seizure of St. Sebastians and Figueras 201
Depôts established at Barcelona 202
Alarm of the Spaniards 204
Fears and perplexities of the Spanish Court 205
Measures for protecting the intended emigration 207
Hopes of the Prince’s party 209
Vacillation of the King 210
Insurrection at Aranjuez 211
Abdication of Charles IV. 214
CHAPTER IV.
Ministry formed by Ferdinand 219
Godoy’s property confiscated without a trial 220
Murat enters Spain 222
People of Madrid exhorted to receive the French as friends 223
The French enter Madrid 224
Murat refuses to acknowledge Ferdinand 226
Grouchy made Governor of Madrid 226
Declaration concerning the affair of the Escurial 227
The abdication represented as a voluntary act 227
Charles complains to the French 228
He writes to Buonaparte, intreating him to interfere 230
Letters of the Queen to Murat 231
The Infante D. Carlos sent to meet Buonaparte 234
Ferdinand is urged to go and meet the Emperor 235
The sword of Francis I. restored to the French 236
Alarm of the people 237
Perplexity of Ferdinand and his Ministers 238
Dispatches from Izquierdo 240
The Ministers deceived by these dispatches 243
General Savary arrives at Madrid 244
Ferdinand consents to go 245
He sets out from Madrid 247
Urquijo’s advice to him at Vitoria 249
Ferdinand writes to Buonaparte from Vitoria 252
Buonaparte’s reply 254
Ferdinand is advised to proceed 258
Promises of Savary, and preparations for seizing Ferdinand 259
Ferdinand passes the frontiers 260
Buonaparte receives him with an embrace 261
Ferdinand is required to renounce the throne for himself and
all his family 261
Conversation between Buonaparte and Escoiquez 262
Second conference with Escoiquez 268
Cevallos is required to discuss the terms of the renunciation
with M. Champagny 269
Buonaparte’s declaration to Cevallos 271
Terms proposed to Escoiquez 272
Debates among Ferdinand’s Counsellors 273
Labrador appointed to treat with M. Champagny 274
Ferdinand is prevented from returning 275
Buonaparte sends for Charles and the Queen to Bayonne 277
Godoy released by Murat, and sent to Bayonne 278
He is reinstated as Charles’s Minister 280
Ferdinand’s proposals to his Father 281
Letter from Charles to his Son 282
Ferdinand’s reply 287
Terms upon which he offers to restore the crown 291
Interview between Charles and Ferdinand in presence of
Buonaparte 292
Ferdinand’s renunciation 293
Proclamation of Charles to the Spaniards 294
Charles cedes his rights to Buonaparte 295
Treaty of cession 296
Ferdinand threatened by Buonaparte 298
His act of renunciation 299
The Royal Family sent into France 300
CHAPTER V.
Conduct of Murat towards the Junta of Government 302
The Junta apply to Ferdinand for instructions as to resisting
the French 305
Absurdity of their conduct 306
Agitation of the public mind 307
Orders for sending the Queen of Etruria and the Infante D.
Francisco to Bayonne 308
The Junta deliberate concerning the Infante 309
Agitation of the people of Madrid 310
Departure of the Queen and the Infante 311
Insurrection of the people 312
Defence of the arsenal by Daoiz and Velarde 314
Executions by sentence of a military tribunal 316
The Infante D. Antonio sent to Bayonne 317
Murat claims a place in the Junta 318
Edicts for preserving peace in the capital 318
Circular letter of the Inquisition 320
The Junta discharged from their authority by Charles’s
reassumption 321
Means of resistance authorized by Ferdinand 322
The Junta resolve that they have no longer authority to obey 323
Address from Ferdinand and the Infantes, exhorting the people
to submission 324
Joseph Buonaparte chosen by his brother for King of Spain 327
Addresses from the Junta and Council of Castille to Buonaparte 329
Address from the City of Madrid 330
Assembly of Notables convoked at Bayonne 332
Proclamation of Buonaparte to the Spaniards 332
CHAPTER VI.
General insurrection 334
Deputies from Asturias sent to England 337
Insurrection at Coruña 338
Excesses of the populace 341
Juntas established every where 342
Formation of the Junta of Seville 342
They declare war against France 346
Solano hesitates to co-operate with them 346
He refuses the assistance of the British squadron 348
Solano summons a council of officers 349
They exhort the people not to engage in hostilities with the
French 350
The people insist upon taking arms 352
Solano is advised to withdraw 353
He is murdered by the mob 354
Morla appointed Governor of Cadiz 356
Surrender of the French squadron 358
Massacre at Valencia 362
Punishment of the assassins 368
Duhesme fails in an attempt to occupy Lerida 370
Palafox escapes from Bayonne to Zaragoza 371
Insurrection in that city 373
Palafox made Captain-General of Aragon 374
Jovellanos and Cabarrus at Zaragoza 374
Palafox declares war against France 376
Addresses to the people 378
Proclamation of the Junta of Seville 386
Directions for conducting the war 391
Measures for enrolling the people 394
Appeal to the French soldiers 395
Movements of the French against the insurgents 397
Murat leaves Spain 398
Several Frenchmen poisoned by the wine at Madrid 397
CHAPTER VII.
The Notables assemble at Bayonne 400
Azanza appointed President 401
Urquijo summoned thither 401
He represents the state of Spain to Buonaparte 402
Arrival of Joseph Buonaparte 403
The Notables receive him as King 404
Their address to the Spanish nation 405
Proclamation of the Intrusive King 407
Bishop of Orense’s answer to his summons 408
Buonaparte delivers a constitution to Azanza 411
Speech of Azanza at the opening of their sittings 412
Address of the Notables to King Joseph 413
The Bayonne Constitution 414
Religion 415
The succession 415
Patrimony of the Crown 416
Ministry 417
The Senate 417
Senatorial Junta for the preservation of personal liberty 417
Senatorial Junta of the Liberty of the Press 418
Council of State 419
Cortes 420
The Colonies 423
Judicature 424
Finance 425
Alliance with France 426
Security of persons 426
Limitation of entails 427
Abolition of privileges 427
Time for introducing the Constitution, and for amending it 428
The Nobles and Regulars contend for their respective orders 429
Joseph appoints his Ministers 430
Letter from Ferdinand to the Intruder 432
Joseph presents the Constitution to the Notables 433
Ceremony of accepting it 434
Medals voted in honour of this event 436
Address of thanks to Buonaparte 436
Buonaparte is embarrassed in replying to it 438
Joseph enters Spain 440
Buonaparte returns to Paris 441
CHAPTER VIII.
Feelings of the English people concerning the transactions in
Spain 443
Proceedings in Parliament 445
Mr. Whitbread proposes to negotiate with France 447
Mr. Whitbread speaks in favour of the Spaniards 447
Mr. Whitbread’s letter to Lord Holland 448
Measures of the British Government 451
Movements of the French in Navarre and Old Castille 452
Torquemada burnt 453
General Cuesta attempts at first to quiet the people 453
He takes the national side 454
Evil of his hesitation 454
He is defeated at Cabezon 455
The French enter Valladolid 456
They enter Santander 456
General Lefebvre Desnouettes defeats the Aragonese 456
He marches against Zaragoza 457
Troops sent from Barcelona towards Zaragoza and Valencia 458
General Schwartz marches towards Manresa 459
He is defeated at Bruch, and retreats to Barcelona 460
General Chabran recalled in consequence of Schwartz’s defeat 462
Arbos burnt by the French 462
Chabran defeated at Bruch 463
Duhesme endeavours to secure Gerona 463
Mataro sacked by the French 465
Failure of the attempt on Gerona 465
Figueras relieved by the French 466
Movements of Moncey against Valencia 467
Defeat of the Valencians 468
He approaches the city 468
Preparations for defence 469
The Valencians defeated at Quarte 471
The French repulsed from Valencia 472
Moncey retreats into Castille 473
Movements of the French in Andalusia 473
Dupont defeats the Spaniards at the Bridge of Alcolea 475
Cordoba entered and pillaged by the French 476
Dupont unable to advance 476
He is disappointed of succours from Portugal 477
Reinforcements from Madrid join him 478
Cuesta and Blake advance against the French 479
M. Bessieres defeats them at Rio Seco 480
The way to Madrid opened by this victory 481
Joseph enters Madrid 482
Fears of the Intrusive Government 483
The Council of Castille demur at the oath of allegiance 484
General Cassagne enters Jaen 487
He is compelled to evacuate it, and returns to Baylen 488
Preparations of General Castaños 490
Dupont’s dispatches intercepted 491
Plan for attacking the French 493
Battle of Baylen 494
Surrender of the French army 496
Terms of the surrender 497
Difficulty of executing the terms 500
Correspondence between Dupont and Morla 504
Treatment of the prisoners 508
Rejoicings for the victory 510
Movements of Bessieres after the battle of Rio Seco 511
Correspondence between Bessieres and Blake 512
The French leave Madrid, and retire to Vitoria 514
HISTORY
OF THE
PENINSULAR WAR.
The late war in the Peninsula will be memorable above all of modern
times. It stands alone for the perfidiousness with which the French
commenced it, and the atrocious system upon which they carried it on.
The circumstances of the resistance are not less extraordinary than
those of the aggression, whether we consider the total disorganization
to which the kingdom of Spain was reduced; the inveterate abuses which
had been entailed upon it by the imbecility, misrule, and dotage, of
its old despotism; the inexperience, the weakness, and the errors,
of the successive governments which grew out of the necessities of
the times; or the unexampled patriotism and endurance of the people,
which bore them through these complicated disadvantages. There are few
portions of history from which lessons of such political importance are
to be deduced; none which can more powerfully and permanently excite
the sympathy of mankind, because of the mighty interests at stake. For
this was no common war, of which a breach of treaty, an extension of
frontier, a distant colony, or a disputed succession, serves as the
cause or pretext: it was as direct a contest between the principles of
good and evil as the elder Persians, or the Manicheans, imagined in
their fables: it was for the life or death of national independence,
national spirit, and of all those holy feelings which are comprehended
in the love of our native land. Nor was it for the Peninsula alone that
the war was waged: it was for England and for Europe; for literature
and for liberty; for domestic morals and domestic happiness; for the
vital welfare of the human race. Therefore I have thought that I could
not better fulfil my duties to mankind, and especially to my own
country, nor more fitly employ the leisure wherewith God has blessed
me, nor endeavour in any worthier manner to transmit my name to future
ages, than by composing, with all diligence, the faithful history of
this momentous struggle. To this resolution I have been incited, as
an Englishman, by the noble part which England has borne in these
events; and as an individual, by the previous course of my studies,
which, during the greater part of my life, have been so directed, that
the annals and the literature of Spain and Portugal have become to me
almost as familiar as our own. It is not strange, then, that having
thus, as it were, intellectually naturalized myself in those countries,
I should have watched them with the liveliest interest through their
dreadful trial: and being thus prepared for the task, having some local
knowledge of the scene of action, rich in accumulated materials, and
possessing access to the best and highest sources of information, I
undertake it cheerfully; fully assured that the principles herein to
be inculcated and exemplified are established upon the best and surest
foundation, and that nations can be secure and happy only in proportion
as they adhere to them.
CHAPTER I.
INTRODUCTORY VIEW OF THE STATE OF SPAIN AND PORTUGAL, FRANCE AND
ENGLAND.
♦GRADUAL DEGRADATION OF SPAIN AND PORTUGAL.♦
The history of Spain and Portugal, from the foundation of their
respective monarchies to the middle of the sixteenth century, when
both countries attained their highest point of greatness, is eminently
heroic, for the persevering spirit with which they warred against the
Moors, never ceasing and scarcely breathing from the contest till they
had finally exterminated them; and for the splendour, the extent, and
the importance of their foreign conquests. Both kingdoms had risen
by the same virtues; the same vices brought on the decline of both;
and the history of their decline is not less instructive than that of
their rise. Their external relations have been widely different; but
notwithstanding this difference, and notwithstanding a national enmity,
kept alive rather by old remembrances and mutual pride than by the
frequency of their wars with each other, the Spaniards and Portugueze
have continued to be morally and intellectually one people. They spring
from the same stock; the same intermixture of races has taken place
among them; and their national character has been formed by similar
circumstances of climate, language, manners, and institutions.
The old governments are called free, like all those which the Teutonic
tribes established; but this freedom was little better than a scheme
of graduated tyranny, and the laws upon which it was founded were
only so many privileges which the conquerors reserved or arrogated to
themselves. When the commixture of languages and nations was complete,
and commerce had raised up a class of men who had no existence under
the feudal system, a struggle for political liberty ensued throughout
all the European kingdoms. It was soon terminated in Spain: a good
cause was ruined by the rashness and misconduct of its adherents; and
the scale, after it had been borne down by the sword of the sovereign,
never recovered its equipoise: for the Romish church leagued itself
with the monarchical authority, against whose abuse it had formerly
been the only bulwark; but changing its policy now according to the
times, it consecrated the despotism whereby it was upheld in its own
usurpations. The effects of this double tyranny were not immediately
perceived; but in its inevitable consequences it corrupted and degraded
every thing to which it could extend, ... laws, morals, industry,
literature, science, arts, and arms.
♦TYRANNY OF THE CHURCH.♦
In other countries where absolute monarchy has been established,
and the Romish superstition has triumphed, both have been in some
degree modified by the remains of old institutions, the vicinity of
free states, and the influence of literature and manners. But in
Spain and Portugal almost all traces of the ancient constitution had
been effaced; and as there existed nothing to qualify the spirit of
popery, a memorable example was given of its unmitigated effects. The
experiment of intolerance was tried with as little compunction as in
Japan, and upon a larger scale. Like the Japanese government, the
Inquisition went through with what it began; and though it could not
in like manner secure its victory, by closing the ports and barring
the passes of the Peninsula, it cut off, as much as possible, all
intellectual communication with the rest of the world.
♦DESPOTISM OF THE TWO GOVERNMENTS.♦
The courts of Madrid and Lisbon were as despotic as those of
Constantinople and Ispahan. They did not, indeed, manifest their power
by acts of blood, because the reigning families were not cruel, and
cruelty had ceased to be a characteristic of the times: but with that
cold, callous insensibility to which men are liable, in proportion
as they are removed from the common sympathies of humankind, they
permitted their ministers to dispense at pleasure exile and hopeless
imprisonment, to the rigour and inhumanity of which death itself would
have been mercy. ♦MAL-ADMINISTRATION OF THE LAWS.♦ The laws afforded
no protection, for the will of the minister was above the laws; and
every man who possessed influence at court violated them with impunity,
and procured impunity for all whom he chose to protect. Scarcely did
there exist even an appearance of criminal justice. Quarrels among
the populace were commonly decided by the knife: he who stabbed an
antagonist or an enemy in the street wiped the instrument in his cloak,
and passed on unmolested by the spectators, who never interfered
farther than to call a priest to the dying man. When it happened that
a criminal was thrown into prison, there he remained till it became
necessary to make room for a new set of tenants: the former were then
turned adrift; or, if their crimes had been notorious and frequent,
they were shipped off to some foreign settlement.
♦DISUSE OF THE CORTES.♦
After the triumph of the monarchical power, the Cortes had fallen first
into insignificance, then into disuse[1]. There was no legislative
body; the principle of the government being, that all laws and public
measures of every kind were to proceed from the will and pleasure of
the sovereign. ♦CONDITION OF THE NOBLES.♦ Men of rank, therefore, if
they were not in office, had no share in public business; and their
deplorable education rendered them little fit either to improve or
enjoy a life of perfect leisure. It is said also to have been the
system of both governments, while they yet retained some remains of
perverted policy, to keep the nobles in attendance about the court,
where they might be led into habits of emulous extravagance, which
would render them hungry for emoluments, and thereby dependent upon
the crown. The long-continued moral deterioration of the privileged
classes had produced in many instances a visible physical degeneracy;
and this tendency was increased by those incestuous marriages, common
in both countries, which pride and avarice had introduced, and for
which the sanction of an immoral church was to be purchased.
♦CONDITION OF THE ARMY.♦
The armies partook of the general degradation. The forms of military
power existed like the forms of justice: but they resembled the trunk
of a tree, of which the termites have eaten out the timber, and only
the bark remains. There appeared in the yearly almanacks a respectable
list of regiments, and a redundant establishment of officers: but,
brave and capable of endurance as the Portugueze and Spaniards are,
never were there such officers or such armies in any country which has
ranked among civilized nations. Subalterns might be seen waiting behind
a chair in their uniforms, or asking alms in the streets; and the men
were what soldiers necessarily become, when, without acquiring any one
virtue of their profession, its sense of character and of honour, its
regularity, or its habits of restraint, they possess all its license,
and have free scope for the vices which spring up in idleness. Drawn by
lot into a compulsory service, ill-disciplined, and ill-paid, they were
burthensome to the people, without affording any security to the nation.
♦STATE OF RELIGION.♦
The state of religion was something more hopeful, though it is
scarcely possible to imagine any thing more gross than the idolatry,
more impudent than the fables, more monstrous than the mythology of
the Romish church, as it flourished in Spain and Portugal. Wherever
this corrupt church is dominant, there is no medium between blind
credulity and blank, hopeless, utter unbelief: and this miserable
effect tends to the stability of the system which has produced it,
because men who have no religion accommodate themselves to whatever
it may be their interest to profess. The peasantry and the great
mass of the people believed with implicit and intense faith whatever
they were taught. The parochial clergy, differing little from the
people in their manner of life, and having received an education so
nearly worthless that it can scarcely be said to have raised them
above the common level, were for the most part as superstitious and
as ill-informed as their flock. ♦IMPROVEMENT OF THE HIGHER CLERGY.♦
The higher clergy, however, had undergone a gradual and important
change, which had not been brought about by laws or literature, but
by the silent and unperceived influence of the spirit of the times.
While their principle of intolerance remained the same (being inherent
in popery, and inseparable from it), the practice had been greatly
abated; and the _autos-da-fe_, the high festival days of this merciless
idolatry, were at an end: for it was felt and secretly acknowledged,
that these inhuman exhibitions were disgraceful in the eyes of Europe,
and had brought a stain upon the character of the peninsular nations
in other catholic countries, and even in Rome itself. The persecution
of the Jews therefore (which the founder of the Braganzan line would
never have permitted if he had been able to prevent it) ceased; and
the distinction between Old and New Christians had nearly disappeared.
At the same time, an increased intercourse with heretical states, the
power and prosperity of Great Britain, and the estimation in which
the British character is held wherever it is known, had insensibly
diminished, if not the abhorrence in which heresy was held, certainly
the hatred against heretics. Thus the habitual feelings of the clergy
had been modified, and they were no longer made cruel by scenes of
execrable barbarity, which in former times compelled them to harden
their hearts. They became also ashamed of those impostures upon which
so large a portion of their influence had been founded: though they
did not purge their kalendar, they made no additions to it; miraculous
images were no longer discovered: when a grave-digger, in the exercise
of his office, happened to find a corpse in a state of preservation,
no attempt was made to profit by the popular opinion of its sanctity:
miracles became less frequent as they were more scrupulously examined;
and impostures[2], which, half a century ago, would have been
encouraged and adopted, were detected, exposed, and punished. The
higher clergy in both countries were decorous in their lives, and in
some instances exemplary in the highest degree.
♦STATE OF THE RELIGIOUS ORDERS.♦
To the monastic orders the influence of the times had been less
beneficial. There were ages during which those institutions produced
the greatest blessings in Europe; when they kept alive the lamp of
knowledge, mitigated barbarian manners, and carried the light of
Christianity among a race of ferocious conquerors. These uses had long
since gone by; and the dissolution of the Jesuits had extinguished the
missionary spirit which that extraordinary society had provoked in
its rivals, and by which it had itself almost atoned to humanity and
to religion for its own manifold misdeeds. The wealthy orders still
afforded a respectable provision for the younger sons of old or opulent
families; the far more numerous establishments of the mendicants were
more injuriously filled from the lower classes. The peasant who was
ambitious of seeing a son elevated above the rank in which he was born,
destined him for a friar; and he who was too idle to work, or who
wished to escape from military service, took shelter in the habit. The
mendicant orders were indeed a reproach to Catholicism, and a pest to
the countries wherein they existed; they contributed not only to keep
the people ignorant, but to render them profligate. Yet even among the
Franciscans men were found, who, by their irreproachable conduct, their
sincere though misdirected piety, and sometimes by their learning and
industrious lives, preserved the order from the contempt into which
it would otherwise have fallen even among the vulgar. The nunneries
of every description produced nothing but evil, except in those cases
where persons went into them by their own choice, who in Protestant
countries would have been consigned to a Bedlam.
♦IMPROVING LITERATURE.♦
Literature had revived in both kingdoms, and was flourishing,
notwithstanding the restraints which the government and the Inquisition
continued to impose. Few similar institutions have equalled the Royal
Academies of Madrid and Lisbon in the zeal and ability with which they
have brought to light their ancient records, and elucidated the history
and antiquities of their respective countries. There was one most
important subject from which men of letters were compelled to refrain
... the old free constitution: but it met them every where in their
researches; and its restoration was the object of their wishes, if not
of their hopes.
♦MORALS OF THE LOWER CLASSES.♦
The lower classes, who in great cities are every where too generally
depraved, were perhaps peculiarly so in Spain, from the effect of what
may be called their vulgar, rather than their popular, literature. This
had assumed a curious and most pernicious character, arising partly
from the disregard in which ill-executed laws must always be held, and
partly from the faith of the people in the efficacy of absolution. The
ruffian and the bravo were the personages of those ballads which were
strung for sale along dead walls in frequented streets, and vended by
blind hawkers about the country. In these pieces, which, as they were
written by men in low life for readers of their own level, represent
accurately the state of vulgar feeling, the robberies and murders which
the hero commits are described as so many brave exploits performed
in his vocation; and, at the conclusion, he is always delivered over
safely to the priest, but seldom to the hangman. Fables of a like
tendency were not unfrequently chosen by their dramatists for the sake
of flattering some fashionable usage of superstition, such as the
adoration of the cross and the use of the rosary; and the villain who,
in the course of the drama, has perpetrated every imaginable crime, is
exhibited at the catastrophe[3] as a saint by virtue of one of these
redeeming practices. Such works were more widely injurious in their
tendency than any of those which the Inquisition suppressed. They
infected the minds of the people; and the surest course by which a
coxcomb in low life could excite admiration and envy among his compeers
was by appearing habitually to set justice at defiance. It became a
fashion among some of the higher classes in Spain to imitate[4] these
wretches; and, by a stranger and more deplorable perversion of nature,
women were found among those of distinguished rank, who affected the
dress and the manners of the vilest of their sex. No such depravity was
known in Portugal: the court set an example of decorum and morality
there; and as there were fewer large towns, in proportion to the size
of the kingdom, there was consequently less corruption among the people.
♦NATIONAL CHARACTER UNCHANGED.♦
Travellers, forming their hasty estimate from the inhabitants of
sea-ports and great cities, have too generally agreed in reviling the
Portugueze and Spaniards; but if they whose acquaintance with these
nations was merely superficial have been disposed to depreciate and
despise them, others who dwelt among them always became attached to
the people, and bore willing and honourable testimony to the virtues
of the national character. It was indeed remarkable how little this
had partaken of the national decay. The meanest peasant knew that his
country had once been prosperous and powerful; he was familiar with the
names of its heroes; and he spake of the days that were past with a
feeling which was the best omen for those that were to come.
♦BOTH COUNTRIES IN AN IMPROVING STATE.♦
Such was the moral and intellectual state of the peninsular kingdoms
toward the close of the eighteenth century. There was not the slightest
appearance of improvement in the principles of the government or in the
administration of justice; but, if such a disposition had arisen, no
nations could have been in a more favourable state for the views of a
wise minister and an enlightened sovereign. For the whole people were
proudly and devoutly attached to the institutions of their country;
there existed among them neither sects, nor factions, nor jarring
interests; they were one-hearted in all things which regarded their
native land; individuals felt for its honour as warmly as for their
own; and obedience to their sovereign was with them equally a habit
and a principle. In spite of the blind and inveterate despotism of the
government, the mal-administration of the laws, and the degeneracy
of the higher classes, both countries were in a state of slow,
but certain, advancement; of which, increasing commerce, reviving
literature, humaner manners, and mitigated bigotry were unequivocal
indications. In this state they were found when France was visited
by the most tremendous revolution that history has recorded, ... a
revolution which was at once the consequence and the punishment of its
perfidious policy, its licentiousness, and its irreligion.
♦BOTH BECOME SUBSERVIENT TO FRANCE.♦
It was soon seen that this revolution threatened to propagate itself
throughout the whole civilised world. The European governments
combined against it; their views were discordant, their policy was
erroneous, their measures were executed as ill as they were planned:
a master-mind was equally wanting in the cabinet and in the field. In
the hour of trial the Spanish court perceived the inefficiency of its
organized force; and having neither wisdom to understand the strength
of the nation, nor courage and virtue to rely upon it, it concluded a
disastrous war by a dishonourable peace. From that time its councils
were directed by France, and its treasures were at the disposal of
the same domineering ally. A war against England, undertaken upon
the most frivolous pretexts, and ruinous to its interests, was the
direct consequence; and when, after the experimental peace of Amiens,
hostilities were renewed between France and England, Spain had again
to experience the same fatal results of the dependence to which her
cabinet had subjected her. Portugal had purchased peace with less
apparent dishonour, because the terms of the bargain were not divulged;
but there also the government soon found that in such times to be
weak is to be miserable: it was compelled to brook the ostentatious
insolence of the French ambassadors, and to pay large sums for the
continuance of a precarious neutrality whenever France thought proper
to extort them; for the system of Europe had now been overthrown, and
the laws of nations were trampled under foot. A military power, more
formidable than that of Rome in its height of empire, of Zingis, or
of Timour, had been established in France upon the wreck of all her
ancient institutions; and this power was directed by the will of an
individual the most ambitious of the human race, who was intoxicated
with success, and whose heart and conscience were equally callous.
♦CAUSES OF THE FRENCH REVOLUTION.♦
Many causes combined in producing the French revolution: the example
of a licentious court had spread like a pestilence through the
country; impiety was in fashion among the educated classes; and the
most abominable publications were circulated among the ignorant with
as much zeal as if a conspiracy had actually been formed for the
subversion of social order, by removing from mankind all restraints
of morality, of religion, and of decency. Things were in this
condition when France took part in the American war; a measure to
which Louis XVI. reluctantly consented, because he felt in his heart
its injustice, and had perhaps an ominous sentiment of its impolicy.
The seeds of republicanism and revolution were thus imported by the
government itself, and they fell upon a soil which was prepared for
them. Financial difficulties increased; state quacks were called in;
a legislative assembly was convoked in a kingdom where none of the
inhabitants had been trained to legislation; and the fatal error was
committed of uniting the three estates in one chamber, whereby the
whole power was transferred to the commons. There was a generous
feeling at that time abroad, from which much good might have been
educed, had there been ability to have directed it, and if the heart
of the country had not been corrupted. Nothing was heard except the
praises of freedom and liberality, and professions of the most enlarged
and cosmopolitan philanthropy. The regenerated nation even renounced
for the future, all offensive war by a legislative act: they fancied
that the age of political redemption was arrived, and they announced
the Advent of Liberty, with peace on earth, good will towards men.
They themselves seemed to believe that the Millennium of Philosophy
was begun; and so in other countries the young and ardent, and the
old who had learned no lessons from history, believed with them. But
the consequences which Burke predicted from changes introduced with
so much violence, and so little forethought, followed in natural
and rapid succession. ♦PROGRESS OF THE FRENCH REVOLUTION.♦ The
constitutionalists, who had supposed that it is as easy to remodel the
institutions of a great kingdom in practice as in theory, were driven
from the stage by bolder innovators; and these in their turn yielded to
adventurers more profligate and more daring than themselves. Nobility
was abolished; monarchy was overthrown; the church was plundered; the
clergy were proscribed; atheism was proclaimed; the king and queen
were put to death, after a mockery of judicial forms; the dauphin
slowly murdered by systematic ill-usage; a plaster statue of Liberty
was set up in Paris; and in the course of two years more than fifteen
hundred persons were beheaded at the feet of that statue, men and women
indiscriminately. The frenzy spread throughout all France. In the
wholesale butcheries which were reported to the National Convention,
by its agents, as so many triumphs of equality and justice, not less
than eighteen thousand lives were sacrificed by the executioner. It
seemed as if God had abandoned the unhappy nation who had denied Him,
and that they were delivered over, as the severest chastisement, to
the devices of their own hearts. Before this madness was exhausted,
the wretches who had thrust themselves into the government paid the
earthly penalty of their guilty elevation. One faction did justice upon
another: in the same place where dogs had licked the blood of Louis and
his queen, there in succession did they lick the blood of Brissot,
Danton, Hebert, Robespierre, and their respective associates. When the
theorists, the fanatics, and the bolder villains, had perished, a set
of intriguers, who had accommodated themselves in turn to all, came
forward, and divided the spoil; till the unhappy nation, disgusted with
such intrigues, and weary of perpetual changes, acquiesced with joy in
the usurpation of a military adventurer, which promised them stability,
at least, if not repose.
♦CHARACTER OF NAPOLEON BUONAPARTE.♦
The revolution had given the government absolute command over the
whole physical force of France; and this prodigious power was now at
the disposal of an individual unchecked by any restraint, and subject
to no responsibility. Perhaps it would not have been possible to
have selected among the whole human race any other man, to whom it
would have been so dangerous to commit this awful charge. Napoleon
Buonaparte possessed all the qualities which are required to form a
perfect tyrant. His military genius was of the highest order; his
talents were of the most imposing kind; his ambition insatiable; his
heart impenetrable: he was without honour, without veracity, without
conscience; looking for no world beyond the present, and determined
to make this world his own, at whatever cost. The military executions
committed in Italy by his orders had shown his contempt for the
established usages of war, the law of nations, and the common feelings
of humanity: the suppression of the Papal government, the usurpation
of the Venetian states, and the seizure of Malta, had proved that
neither submissiveness nor treaties afforded any protection against
this fit agent of a rapacious and unprincipled democracy. ♦HIS CRIMES
IN EGYPT AND SYRIA.♦ But it was during the Egyptian expedition that
the whole atrocity of his character was displayed. He landed in Egypt,
proclaiming that he was the friend of the Grand Seignior, and that the
French were true Mussulmen, who honoured Mahommed and the Koran. His
first act was to storm a city belonging to the Grand Seignior, which he
never summoned to surrender, and which was incapable of defence. The
butchery was continued for some hours after the resistance had ceased.
The very perpetrators of this carnage have related that they put to
death old and young, men, women, and children, in the mosques, whither
these unoffending and helpless wretches had fled to implore protection
from God and from their prophet; and they have avowed that this was
done deliberately, for the purpose of astonishing the people. Thus it
was that Buonaparte commenced his career in Egypt. He left Alexandria,
exclaiming, “The Virtues are on our side! Glory to Allah,” he said;
“there is no other God but God: Mahommed is his prophet, and I am his
friend.” He proclaimed to the Egyptians that Destiny directed all his
operations, and had decreed from the beginning of the world, that after
beating down the Cross, he should come into that country to fulfil the
task assigned him; and he called upon them to enjoy the blessings of a
system, in which the wisest and the most virtuous were to govern, and
the people were to be happy. It is literally true, that the Egyptian
mothers mutilated or killed their daughters, to save them from the
brutality of his troops; and that wherever the French moved, a flock of
kites and vultures followed, sure of the repast which these purveyors
every where provided for them. Their general entered Syria, took Jaffa
by assault, and issued a proclamation upon its capture, professing that
he would be “clement and merciful, after the example of God.” Four
days after the capture, and after that profession of clemency had been
made, he drew out his prisoners, some three thousand in number, and
had them deliberately slaughtered. A whole division of his army was
employed in this massacre; and when their cartridges were exhausted,
they finished the work with the bayonet and the sword, dragging away
those who had expired, in order to get at the living, who, in the
hope of escaping death, had endeavoured to hide themselves under the
bodies of the dead. To complete this monster’s character, it was only
needful that he should show himself as inhuman toward his own soldiers
as his prisoners; and that it might be complete in all parts, this
proof of his disposition was not wanting. When Sir Sidney Smith and
Captain Wright, then Sir Sidney’s lieutenant, compelled him to raise
the siege of Acre, the sick and wounded in his army were more than he
had means of removing: any other general would have recommended them to
the humanity of an English enemy; but this would have been humiliating
to Buonaparte, and therefore poison was administered to them by his
orders.
♦OPPORTUNITY OF REDEEMING HIS CHARACTER AT THE PEACE OF AMIENS.♦
Yet this man, like Augustus, had an opportunity of earthly redemption
afforded him; and, while he fabricated for himself a splendid fortune,
might have deserved the gratitude of Europe, not only in the existing
generation, but through after ages. When he had attained the supreme
authority, he might have restored the Bourbons in France, and taken
Italy for his own reward: an arrangement, for which no fresh act of
injustice would have been required; which none whom it offended would
have been able to oppose; and which, more than any other conceivable
alteration in the state of Christendom, might have tended to the
general good. Here was an object worthy of ambition, and a richer prize
than military ambition had ever yet achieved: so great would have been
the public benefit; so signal and durable the individual glory. Even
if, incapable as he was of aiming at such true greatness, he could have
contented himself with the situation in which he was recognized by the
peace of Amiens, and have borne his faculties meekly in that unexampled
elevation, the world is charitable to all extremes of fortune, and
would have forgiven his former crimes; which, public and notorious as
they were, were loudly denied by his advocates, and already disbelieved
by his infatuated admirers. But the heart of Napoleon Buonaparte was
evil; he regarded his fellow-creatures merely as instruments for
gratifying his desire of empire, ... pieces with which he played
the game of war: in the presumptuousness of his power he set man at
defiance, and in his philosophy God was left out of the account.
Unhappily, the internal circumstances of France accorded but too well
in all things with the disposition and the views of its autocrat.
♦MILITARY POWER OF FRANCE.♦
The revolutionary governments, through all their changes, had steadily
pursued the favourite object of placing the military establishment of
the country upon the most formidable footing, and thereby enabling
France to give laws to the rest of Europe. During the first years,
immense armies were filled with enthusiastic volunteers; and before
that spirit exhausted itself, provision was made for permanently
supporting so disproportionate a force by means of the conscription.
The conscription originated in Prussia, when Prussia was under a
mere military despotism; it was now carried to its utmost extent in
France. The law declared that every Frenchman was a soldier, and bound
to defend his country; but the principle of general law which the
latter clause of the sentence announces served to introduce a code,
whereby the whole youth of France were placed at the disposal of the
government, to be sent whithersoever its ambitious projects might
extend, ... to the sands of Egypt, or the snows of Moscovy. A view of
this system will equally elucidate the strength, the resources, and the
character, of the French government during these disastrous years.
♦SYSTEM OF MILITARY CONSCRIPTION.♦
Under the new arrangement of its territory, France was divided into
departments, districts, cantons, and municipalities. The departments
were governed by a prefect, and a council of prefecture; the districts
by a sub-prefect and his council; the cantons and municipalities by a
mayor and town-court; to which were added, on the part of the general
government, a commissary of police, and his adjuncts. There was also
a military division of the country into thirty districts, each under
a general of division, with a long establishment of commissaries,
inspectors, and military police-officers. On a certain day in every
year, notice was given in every municipality that all men, between the
ages of twenty and twenty-five, should within eight days appear at the
town-house, and enrol their names: if any individual failed, not he
alone, but his family also, were subject to a criminal prosecution. The
names of the absent were to be enrolled by their nearest relations, and
concealment was thus rendered impossible: the man who was not in his
usual domicile being doubly registered; as an absentee in one place,
and as a temporary sojourner in another. From these registers the
returns for the conscription were prepared in five lists, according
to age, and the names in each were carefully arranged according to
seniority. The civil officers by whom these lists were formed were
responsible for any omission; and, as a farther precaution, every
village and every house was visited at stated and at unexpected times,
publicly and secretly. After such preparations, the machine was easily
put in motion. The war-minister gave notice what number of men were
required; the senate voted them from the conscripts of that year which
was next in course, and the prefects were ordered to provide their
contingents: they called upon the sub-prefects; these again upon the
municipalities; and within sixteen days from the date of the prefect’s
orders, the ballot took place. Tickets, numbered to the amount of
all who were upon the list, were put into the urn, and the men were
registered in the order of the numbers which they had drawn. The
first numbers, up to the sum required, were for immediate service;
the others were to be called upon in sequence, in case of necessity
only: but, under Buonaparte, that necessity always existed. They were
marched off under military escort, and distributed among the artillery,
cuirassiers, dragoons, infantry, or sappers and miners, according to
their stature and bodily strength.
♦EXEMPTIONS.♦
The infirmities which might be pleaded as exemptions were severely
scrutinized, and were determined by the law with critical inhumanity:
inveterate asthma, habitual spitting of blood, and incipient
consumption only entitled the sufferer to a provisional dispensation.
Men who were incapable of enduring the fatigues of war, or who might
be more useful to the state in pursuing their own employments or their
studies, were allowed to provide substitutes or purchase an exemption
by the payment of three hundred francs; but this was an early law, and
it is not likely that the pecuniary alternative was ever accepted when
the waste of men became excessive. ♦SUBSTITUTES.♦ The substitute was
required to be a Frenchman, between twenty-five and forty years of age
(and therefore not liable to the conscription), not below five feet
one, of a strong constitution, and in robust health. In addition to his
own name, he was to take that of the person for whom he served, and by
that name he was to be known in the army: the principal was still upon
the list, and subject to be called upon if his representative deserted
or withdrew; nor could he obtain a definitive exemption unless he
produced proof that the substitute had either been killed or disabled
in service, or had served the full time which the laws required; during
war the term was indefinite, in peace it was fixed at five years.
During the latter years of Buonaparte’s government men who could be
admitted as substitutes were necessarily so rare, that their price rose
from two hundred to a thousand Napoleons.
♦PUNISHMENTS FOR EVADING THE CONSCRIPTION.♦
No constituted authority, no branch of the civil or military
administration, might retain in its service a conscript who was called
upon in his turn. No Frenchman, being, or having been, liable to the
conscription, could hold any public office, or receive any public
salary, or exercise public rights, or receive a legacy, or inherit
property, unless he produced a certificate that he had conformed to the
law, and either was actually in service, or had obtained his dismissal,
or was legally exempted, or that his services had not been required.
They who failed to join the army within the time prescribed were
deprived of their civil rights, a circular description of their persons
was sent to all the chiefs of the _gendarmerie_ throughout the empire,
and they were pursued as deserters. Eleven depôts were appointed, where
these refractory conscripts were disciplined in an uniform of disgrace,
with the hair cut close: they were employed upon the fortifications,
or in other hard labour, for which they received no additional pay
or rations. This, however, was thought too lenient when the emperor’s
expenditure of men became more lavish, and it was then decreed that
such offenders were to be punished as if they had actually deserted.
♦PUNISHMENTS FOR DESERTION.♦ A deserter was condemned to a fine of
fifteen hundred francs, chargeable upon whatever property might fall
to him at any future time, if he was not able to pay it immediately.
In addition to this fine, the punishment for the simple offence of
deserting into the interior was three years’ labour upon the public
works. The culprits wore a particular uniform, and were allowed shoes;
their heads were shaved every eighth day, and they were not permitted
either to shave their beards or to cut them. Their rations were the
soldiers’ bread, rice, or dry pulse; their pay half that of a common
labourer; and of this a third was withheld till they should have served
out their time, a third was deducted for their expenses, and the
remainder was all which they had for purchasing better food than their
miserable allowance. He who had deserted from the army, or a frontier
place, or in a direction toward the enemy, or with a companion, or who
had scaled ramparts in effecting his escape, was sentenced to public
labour for ten years, with a bullet of eight pounds weight fastened
to him by a chain eight feet long. He was to work eight hours a day
during five months, ten during the better part of the year, and to
be chained in prison all the rest of the time: he wore wooden shoes,
and an uniform differing both in colour and fashion from that of the
troops; his mustachios, as well as his head, were shaved every eight
days; his beard was never shaved, nor shorn, nor shortened; his rations
and pay were like those of the common deserters, because, indeed,
life could not be supported upon less. The punishment of death, which
was inflicted upon those who had deserted to the enemy, and in other
aggravated cases, was mercy when compared to this.
♦EFFECT OF THIS SYSTEM.♦
By the operation of this system the French were made a military nation,
a change equally inconsistent with their own welfare and with the
safety and independence of the surrounding states. Beginning at first
with all men between the ages of twenty and twenty-five, enrolling
the whole rising generation afterwards as they attained to manhood,
and retaining all who were embodied as long as their services were
required, in other words, as long as they were capable of serving,
... the government had thus brought within its disposal every man who
was capable of bearing arms; and this was the tremendous power which
Buonaparte found already organized to his heart’s desire when he
assumed the supreme authority. Such power might have kindled ambition
in an ordinary mind; no wonder then that the most ambitious of the
human race, when he saw himself in possession of it, supposed universal
empire to be within his reach. His supply of men might well appear
inexhaustible: there was neither difficulty nor expense in raising
them; he had only to say what number he required, and the rest was mere
matter of routine. ♦WAR MADE TO SUPPORT ITSELF.♦ After his armies
had once passed the frontier, there was no cost in maintaining them;
war was made to support itself. This system also had been matured for
him by his republican predecessors. The contributions which he levied
upon conquered or dependent states discharged the soldiers’ pay: in an
ally’s country their subsistence was expected as a proof of alliance;
in an enemy’s it was taken as the right of war. And the perfection
of the French commissariat was admired and extolled in England as a
masterpiece of arrangement by the blind admirers of France, who either
did not or would not perceive how easy the duties of that department
were made, when every demand was enforced by military power, and
nothing was paid for.
♦FORMER CONSTITUTION OF THE FRENCH ARMY.♦
When Louis XVI. began his unhappy reign, the French army was still
constituted upon a feudal principle which had been well adapted to the
circumstances of later times. The corps were divided into proprietary
companies, the captains of which, receiving pay proportionate to the
required expenditure, provided every thing for the men, and raised
them among their own vassals. The system was liable to abuse, but it
had great advantages: for if the captain should act upon no worthier
motive than mere selfishness, it was his interest to be careful of
his men, lest he should incur the expense of recruiting them; and it
might reasonably be expected that he would treat them kindly to prevent
desertion, and that he would spare no means for keeping them in health
or restoring them in sickness. But there were better principles brought
into action: the character both of the captain and of the men, in their
native place, depended upon what each should report of the other; the
men also knew that their fidelity would not be forgotten when their
services were over, and that, if they fell, their good conduct would be
remembered to the benefit of their family. Both parties were always in
the presence of that little world, to the opinion of which they were
more immediately amenable, and from which applause or condemnation
would most sensibly affect them; and local and hereditary attachments,
with all their strength and endurance, were thus brought into the
service of the state. ♦CHANGE INTRODUCED BY M. DE ST. GERMAINE.♦ The
system was abolished when M. de St. Germaine was minister at war, for
the sake of some sordid speculations upon clothing and victualling the
troops. Subalterns, who were learning their profession, and acquiring
the love and confidence of the soldiers, were disbanded as a sacrifice
to the prevailing fashion of economical reform: at the same time the
penal discipline of the Germans was introduced, ... a poor substitution
for the old bonds of feeling which had been thus rudely broken; and
while all that was useful in the feudal constitution of the army was
discarded, the worst part was retained by an order that no person
should hold a commission unless he could prove the nobility of his
family for four generations.
♦LEVELLING PRINCIPLE OF THE REVOLUTIONARY SERVICE.♦
The republicans naturally went into the other extreme; and Buonaparte
retained in his army the levelling principle which the revolution
had introduced, because it is as congenial to a despotism as to a
democracy. No Frenchman could be made an officer (except in the
artillery and engineers) till he had served three years as a private
or sub-officer, unless he signalized himself in action. Perhaps the
conscription, in its full extent, could never have been established
without such a regulation. It rendered the military service less odious
to the common people, who saw the children of the higher classes
thus placed upon a level with themselves, and who were deceived into
an opinion that merit was the only means of promotion: it brought
also into the ranks a degree of intelligence and ambition not to
be found there in armies which are differently composed; and those
qualities were a security for discipline and perfect obedience under
circumstances in which ordinary troops might have become impatient of
continual privations. But it may well be doubted, on the other hand,
whether the officers derived any important advantage from being trained
in the ranks; and there can be no doubt that any such advantage would
be dearly purchased by the degradation to which they were exposed; for,
while the soldiery were materially improved by the mixture of wellborn
men who looked for promotion, these persons themselves were more
materially injured by the inevitable effects of a system which levelled
nothing so effectually as it did the manners, the moral feeling, and
the sense of honour.
♦HONOURABLE CHARACTER OF THE OLD FRENCH ARMY.♦
The policy of the old French government had often been detestably
perfidious, and yet French history abounds with examples of high
chivalrous sentiment; and nowhere were men to be found more sensible of
what was due to their king, their country, and themselves, more alive
to the sense of national and individual honour, than in the old French
army. A fatal change was produced by the revolution. At a time when
all persons of high birth were objects of persecution or suspicion,
men from the lowest occupations were hurried into the highest posts
in the army. Many of them were possessed of great military talents,
and there were some few who in every respect proved worthy of their
fortune. But there were others who never cast the slough of their old
habits: no service was too bloody or too base for such agents; and,
without feeling shame for the employment, or compunction for the crime,
they were ready to obey their remorseless master in whatever he might
command, ... the individual murders of Palm and the Duc d’Enghein,
or the wholesale massacres of Jaffa and of Madrid, and those other
atrocious actions in Portugal and Spain, of which this history records
the progress and the punishment.
♦HONOUR NOT THE PRINCIPLE OF DESPOTISM.♦
It was observed by Montesquieu, that honour, which is the moving and
preserving principle of monarchy, is not, and cannot be, the principle
of despotism. Little did he apprehend how soon the state of his own
country would exemplify the maxim. Among military bodies, honour had
hitherto supplied, however imperfectly, yet in some degree, the place
of a higher and nobler principle: but under the tyranny of Buonaparte,
while his measures tended directly, as if they had been so designed,
to subvert this feeling (already weakened by the false philosophy of
the age), there remained nothing in its stead except that natural
goodness, and that innate sense of rectitude, which, in certain happy
natures, can never be totally extinguished, but which, in the vast
majority of mankind, are easily deadened and destroyed. The humaner
studies, whereby the manners and the minds of men are softened, and the
sacred precepts whereby they are purified and exalted and enlightened,
had been the one neglected, and the other proscribed, during the
revolution; and a generation had grown up, without literature, without
morals, and without religion.
♦EDUCATION IN THE HANDS OF THE CLERGY BEFORE THE REVOLUTION.♦
Education had been chiefly in the hands of the Jesuits till the
extinction of that famous company, the most active, the most
intriguing, but in later times the most useful and the most calumniated
of the monastic orders. After their dissolution, the system was
continued upon the same plan, though perhaps with inferior ability, and
the colleges were every where conducted by the clergy, either secular
or regular. The massacre of St. Bartholomew’s day, and the _dragonades_
of Louis XIV., are crimes always to be remembered with unabating and
unqualified detestation. Even at a later time it was evinced, in the
shocking tragedies at Rouen and Thoulouse, that the same spirit existed
in the French church, and was ready to blaze out. These execrable
things were known over Europe; but it was not so generally known,
that in the service of that same church which had dishonoured itself,
and outraged human nature, by these actions, many thousand ministers
were continually employed in training the young, visiting the sick,
relieving the poor, consoling the penitent, and reclaiming the sinner;
uninfluenced by love of gain, hope of applause or of advancement, or
any worldly motive; but patiently and dutifully devoting themselves in
obscurity to the service of their fellow-creatures and their God. The
knowledge of their virtues was confined to the little sphere wherein
their painful and meritorious lives were passed; and the world knew
them not, till they were hunted out by the atheistical persecution, and
were found to endure wrongs, insults, outrages, exiles, and death, with
the meekness of Christians, and the heroism of martyrs.
♦GENERALLY DIFFUSED IN FRANCE.♦
Under these teachers, the doctrines of Christianity, according to the
Romish church, and the duties of Christianity, wherein all churches are
agreed, were the first things inculcated, as being the first things
needful. Errors of doctrine, though of tremendous importance when men
are actuated by blind zeal, are, among the quiet and humble-minded
part of mankind, latent principles which produce no evil, unless some
unhappy circumstance calls them into action: but the moral influence
of religion is felt in the whole tenour of public and of private life.
There were endowed schools and colleges, before the revolution, in
every part of France, chiefly under the direction of persons who
acted from motives of duty and conscience, rather than of worldly
interest. The French court, in the midst of its own licentiousness,
understood the importance of training up the people in a faith which
tended to make them good subjects, and therefore it had provided[5] for
this great object from a sense of policy, if from no better impulse.
♦THE WHOLE SYSTEM OF EDUCATION DESTROYED BY THE REVOLUTION.♦ The
reformers, in the natural course of political insanity, plundered the
church before the revolutionists overthrew the throne. The Constituent
Assembly followed up this act of iniquity by requiring from the clergy
an oath, which they knew the greater part must conscientiously refuse
to take. The whole system of education throughout France was thus
subverted, before the work of proscription and massacre began; and, to
complete the wreck, the National Convention, by one sweeping decree,
suppressed all colleges and faculties of theology, medicine, arts, and
jurisprudence, throughout the republic.
♦PUBLIC INSTRUCTION PROMISED BY THE REVOLUTIONISTS.♦
Public instruction, however, had been one of the first blessings
which were promised under the new order of things; and accordingly
plan after plan was pompously announced, as short-lived constitutions
and short-sighted legislators succeeded one another. ♦TALLEYRAND’S
SCHEME.♦ The Constituent Assembly promised an establishment of primary
schools in the chief place of every canton; secondary ones in the
capital of every district; department schools in the capitals of these
larger divisions; and, finally, an Institute in the metropolis: the
whole under a Commission of Public Instruction. Public tuition was
not to begin before the age of six; till which time, it was said,
mothers might be trusted to put in practice the immortal lessons
of the author of Emilius: and girls were left wholly to their
parents. ♦RELIGION OMITTED.♦ Religion made no part of the scheme[6];
and instead of teaching children faith, hope, and charity, their
duties toward God and man, the Declaration of Rights was to be cast
into a catechism for their use. This plan, which was the work of
Talleyrand, was thrown aside when the Constituent Assembly, having
completed, as they supposed, the work of demolition, made way for
the Legislative Assembly, which was to erect a new edifice from the
ruins. ♦CONDORCET’S SCHEME.♦ A second project was then presented by
Condorcet. ♦RELIGION PROSCRIBED.♦ Revealed religion was, of course,
proscribed from his scheme; and the miserable sophist said that this
proscription ought to be extended to what is called natural religion
also, because the theistic philosophers were no better agreed than
the theologians in their notions of God, and of his moral relations
to mankind. All prejudices, he said, ought now to disappear; and
therefore it must now be affirmed that the study of the ancient
languages would be more injurious than useful. The physical sciences
were the basis of his plan; and he advised that scientific lessons
should be given in public weekly lectures, and that the miracles of
Elijah and St. Januarius should be exhibited, in order to cure the
people of superstition. A time, he said, undoubtedly would come,
when all establishments for instruction would be useless: however,
as they were necessary at present, girls as well as boys were to be
received in the public schools. ♦SCHEME OF THE NATIONAL CONVENTION.♦
The orators of the National Convention went farther: they maintained,
that domestic education was incompatible with liberty; that the holy
doctrine of equality would have been proclaimed in vain if there were
any difference of education between the rich and the poor; that, of
all inequalities, the inequality of knowledge was the most fatal; and
that every thing which elevated one man above another in the scale of
intellect was studiously to be destroyed. All children, therefore, of
both sexes, ... the boys from the age of five till that of twelve,
the girls from five to eleven, ... ought to be educated in common at
the expense of the republic; there was room enough for lodging them
all in the palaces and castles of the emigrants; the boys should be
employed in tilling the earth, in manufactures, or in picking stones
upon the highways; hospitals were to be annexed to the schools, where
the children were in rotation to wait upon the sick and the aged;
and they were never to hear of religion. One democratic legislator
proposed, that those parents who chose to have their children educated
at home should be vigilantly observed; and if it were discovered that
they brought them up in principles contrary to liberty, that a process
should be instituted, and the children taken from them, and sent to
the houses of equality. This implied some choice on the part of the
parents, though it would have made the choice a cruel mockery: but it
was contended that liberty could not exist if domestic education were
tolerated; ♦DOMESTIC EDUCATION PROSCRIBED.♦ and when the clause was
proposed that parents _might_ send their children to these schools,
it was carried as an amendment that they _must_ send them, because
it was time to establish the great principle, that children belong
to the republic more than to their parents. This, said one of their
blasphemous declaimers, would complete the Gospel of Equality! It was
even maintained, that education ought to commence before birth; and the
philosophical statesmen of regenerated France were called upon to form
rules for women during the time of gestation, and to enact laws for
midwives and for nurses[7]!
♦NONE OF THESE SCHEMES ATTEMPTED IN PRACTICE.♦
Follies and schemes like these were discussed by the National
Convention in the intervals between their acts of confiscation and
blood; and to this intolerable tyranny the fanatics of liberty and
equality designed to subject the people in the dearest and holiest
relations of domestic life! But proscriptions and executions succeeded
so rapidly, that the various projectors were swept off before their
projects could be attempted in practice; till at length, when the
remaining members of that nefarious assembly, after the death of
Robespierre, had acquired some feeling of personal safety, the
Normal Schools were established, in which the art of teaching was
to be taught. ♦NORMAL SCHOOLS.♦ And now, it was proclaimed, the
regeneration of the human mind would be effected; now, for the first
time upon earth, Nature, Truth, Reason, and Philosophy would have
their seminary! The most eminent men in talents and science were to
be professors in this institution; from all parts of the republic
the most promising subjects were to be selected by the constituted
authorities, and sent to the metropolis as pupils: and when they
should have completed the course of human knowledge, the disciples of
these great masters, thoroughly imbued with the lessons which they
had received, were to return to their respective places of abode, and
repeat them throughout the land, which would thus, in its remotest
parts, receive light from Paris, as from the focus of intellectual
illumination. Fourteen hundred young men were in fact brought from the
country; and, that nothing might be lost to mankind, the conferences
in which universal instruction was to be communicated were minuted
in short-hand. So notable a plan excited great enthusiasm in Paris;
it soon excited as much ridicule: in the course of three months both
pupils and professors discovered in how absurd a situation they were
placed; it was acknowledged in the National Convention that the scheme
had altogether failed; and thus ended what was properly called the
organized quackery of the Normal Schools[8].
♦CONSEQUENCES OF THESE VISIONARY SCHEMES.♦
Meantime the irrecoverable years were passing on, and the rising
generation was sacrificed to the crude theories and ridiculous
experiments of sophists in power; men whose ignorance might deserve
compassion, if their absurdity did not provoke indignation as well
as contempt, and their presumptuous wickedness call for unmingled
abhorrence. When the subject was renewed under the consular government,
the frightful consequences had become too plain to be dissembled. A
view of the moral and religious state of France was drawn up from
official reports which were sent in from every department, and it
was acknowledged that the children throughout the republic had been
left to run wild in idleness during the whole preceding course of
the revolution. ♦ANALYSE DES PRÒCES VÉRBAUX, QUOTED BY PORTALIS.
L. GOLDSMITH, RECUEIL, T. I. P. 282.♦ “They are without the idea of
a God,” said the Report, “without a notion of right and wrong. The
barbarous manners which have thus arisen have produced a ferocious
people, and we cannot but groan over the evils which threaten the
present generation and the future.”
♦ATTACHMENT OF THE JACOBINES TO BUONAPARTE.♦
It suited the views of Buonaparte that his government should hold
this language while he was negotiating the _Concordat_, for the sake
of obtaining the papal sanction to his authority. Perhaps he was then
hesitating whether to take the right hand way or the left; whether
to build up again the ruined institutions of France, strengthen the
throne on which he had resolved to take his seat by an alliance with
the altar; and in restoring to the kingdom all that it was possible
to restore while he retained the sovereignty to himself, engraft upon
the new dynasty those principles which had given to the old its surest
strength when it was strongest, and a splendour, of which no change
of fortune could deprive it. Two parties would be equally opposed to
this, the Jacobines and the Royalists. The latter it was impossible
to conciliate: they would have stood by the crown even if it were
hanging upon a bush; but their allegiance being founded upon principle
and feeling, ... upon the sense of honour and of duty, ... would not
follow the crown when it was transferred by violence and injustice
from one head to another. He found the Jacobines more practicable.
They indeed had many sympathies with Buonaparte: he favoured that
irreligion to which they were fanatically attached, because it at
once flattered their vanity and indulged their vices; his schemes of
conquest offered a wide field for their ambition and their avarice:
and what fitter agents could he desire than men who were troubled
with no scruples of conscience or of honour; whom no turpitude could
make ashamed; who shrunk from no crimes, and were shocked by no
atrocities? Thus Buonaparte judged concerning them, and he reasoned
rightly. The Jacobines both at home and abroad became his most devoted
and obsequious adherents: they served him in England as partizans and
advocates, denying or extenuating his crimes, justifying his measures,
magnifying his power, and reviling his opponents; on the Continent they
co-operated with him by secret or open treason, as occasion offered; in
France they laid aside in his behalf that hatred to monarchy which they
had not only professed but sworn, and swearing allegiance to a military
despotism, gave that despotism their willing and zealous support.
♦A SYSTEM OF EDUCATION NECESSARY FOR HIS VIEWS.♦
Such persons were still a minority in France; but their activity, their
arts, and their audacity supplied the want of numbers. It was essential
to his views that a succession of such men should be provided, and that
the French nation should by the sure process of education be moulded to
his will, and made to receive the stamp of his iron institutions. Many
of the clergy, when the proscription which had driven them from their
country was removed, had opened schools on their return from exile,
as the readiest means of obtaining a maintenance for themselves and
of performing their Christian duties. Their success was incompatible
with Buonaparte’s policy: he wanted not a moral and a religious[9],
but a military people. After some preparatory attempts, all tending to
the same object, the Imperial University was established; ... a name
which, it was admitted, had altogether a different signification from
what it bore under the old order of things. The legitimate principle
was proclaimed, that the direction of public education belongs to
the state; the intolerant one was deduced and put in practice,
that therefore a monopoly of education should be vested in the new
establishment.
♦IMPERIAL UNIVERSITY.♦
At the head of this University there was a Grand Master, for whom
Buonaparte, indulging in such things his own taste as well as that of
the French people, appointed a splendid costume; his civil-list was
150,000 francs, and he had the power of nominating to all the inferior
appointments, ... an enormous influence, if it had been intended that
he should be any thing more than the mere organ of the Emperor’s will.
There were under him a chancellor, a treasurer, with salaries of 15,000
francs each; ten counsellors for life, twenty counsellors in ordinary,
the former with salaries of 10, the latter of 6,000 francs; and thirty
inspectors general, whose salary was 6,000 also, and whose travelling
expenses were paid. Next in rank were the Rectors of Academies: this
too was an old word with a new signification. There were to be as many
Academies in the empire as there were courts of appeal. Each Rector
had an establishment for his inferior jurisdiction analogous to that
of the Grand Master; his salary was 6,000 francs, with 3,000 for his
official expenses, and the additional emolument which he derived as
Dean of the Faculties. He ranked with the Bishop of the diocese;
and the rivalry which this pretension occasioned was in no degree
mitigated by the spirit in which the Imperial University was founded
and administered. The Faculties, or Schools of Theology, Jurisprudence,
Medicine, Physical Sciences, and Literature, were under the Rector’s
authority, as were the Lyceums, Colleges, _Institutions_, _Pensions_,
and even the Primary Schools, which were not considered as beneath
the cognizance of the University, although the government had taken
care that even these should not be under the direction of the clergy,
having committed them to the superintendence of a certain number of
inhabitants, among whom the parochial priest had only a single voice.
All seminaries, therefore, of every kind belonged to the University,
and contributed in no small degree to its revenues. For it was not only
required that every person who opened a _Pension_ or _Institution_
must be a graduate, but also that he must take out a brevet from the
Grand Master, the price of which varied from 200 to 600 francs, and
which was to be renewed at the same cost every ten years. Besides these
decennial droits, a fourth part of the same sum was exacted annually;
and a tax was levied upon the pupils of five per cent. upon what they
paid to the master. It was the purpose of the government to discourage
these schools, which, as being mostly in the hands of the clergy, were
nowise congenial with the principles and views of Buonaparte: therefore
they were thus heavily taxed; and lest they should be supported in
spite of all discouragement, a decree was issued, declaring that the
Lyceums might at any time fill up their numbers by taking from the
nearest _Pensions_ or _Institutions_ as many pupils above the age of
nine as would complete their complement. The precise effect of this
iniquitous decree was, that exactly in proportion as any particular
Lyceum was known to be ill conducted, and as parents were unwilling
to entrust their children there, it became impossible for any better
seminary to exist in its neighbourhood.
♦COMMUNAL COLLEGES.♦
There were two other kind of seminaries which it was in like manner
the intention of the Imperial government to destroy by indirect means,
... the Communal Colleges and the Ecclesiastical Schools. More than
four hundred of the former had been founded at the expense of their
respective _communes_, as soon as any hope appeared that a settled
order of things might be maintained in France. But because every thing
far and near was regulated by the new despotism, the money which they
levied upon themselves for this purpose went, like other imposts,
to the capital: and was thrown into a common fund, from whence an
allowance to each particular college was made, not according to its
necessary expenditure, but according to the pleasure of the minister
to whom the distribution was confided. Thus the design of starving the
colleges, and rendering the _communes_ weary of a voluntary tax from
which no benefit was derived, was in most cases easily effected; and
where the inhabitants of a town, being more desirous of supporting
such an establishment, supplied the deficiency of the fund by fresh
subscriptions, the University interfered, to harass and disgust
them by means contradictory in appearance, but tending to the same
end. Being vested with authority over the Regents, it appointed and
superseded them at pleasure, removing to the Lyceums those who had
deserved the confidence of the neighbourhood, and supplying their
place by incompetent and worthless adventurers; it forced upon the
colleges professors of sciences which were not taught there, or it
forbade them to pursue the same branches of education if they were
teaching them with success. Very few of these establishments, and those
only in the remotest provinces, escaped the effects of this insidious
hostility. ♦ECCLESIASTICAL SCHOOLS.♦ The Ecclesiastical Schools had
been instituted as seminaries for the priesthood by the Bishops, and
were founded and supported by contributions. Some were placed in
cities where they were under the Bishop’s immediate inspection, and
became especial objects of his care; others were fixed in the country,
that they might be removed from the corruption of great towns. The
children of the poor who appeared by their talents and disposition to
be fit subjects for the ministry, were educated there gratuitously;
those of the wealthy for a moderate payment. The Romish clergy have
always understood that where religious feeling exists, money is
never wanting for religious purposes. Poor as Buonaparte had left
the Gallican church, large buildings were now bought or erected for
these seminaries, and furnished and supported with a liberality which
manifested that in the provinces at least there was more religion than
suited the wishes of the imperial government. Effectual means therefore
were pursued for degrading and destroying them. It was decreed that
not more than one should be allowed in a department, and that that one
must be in a large town where there should be a Lyceum: all others
were to be shut up within a fortnight after the promulgation of the
law, and their property, moveable and immoveable, applied to the use
of the University. The pupils were compelled to attend the Lyceums,
and go through the same course of mathematical studies as if they had
been designed for the army; they were not allowed to keep the church
festivals as holidays, although they wore the habit of ecclesiastical
students, and their masters were ranked below those of the meanest
boarding-school. The object of the government in thus mortifying the
teachers would be defeated by the wise policy of the Romish church,
which has taught its ministers to regard every act of humiliation as
adding to their stock of merits; the design of disgusting the students
with their profession, by the contempt to which they were exposed in
what were essentially military academies, and of unfitting them for
their intended profession by an intercourse with military pupils, was
likely to be more successful.
♦LYCEUMS.♦
It was through the Lyceums more than any other of his institutions
that Buonaparte expected to perpetuate the new order of things: in
these academies it was, that, by a system such as a Jesuit might have
devised for the use of a Mamaluke Bey, he trained up the youth of
France to become men after his own heart. It was laid down as a maxim
by the government that all public education ought to be regulated
upon the principles of military discipline, not on those of civil or
ecclesiastical police. In the Lyceums, therefore, the pupils were
distributed not in forms, or classes, but in companies, each having its
serjeant and its corporal; and an officer-instructor, as he was called,
taught the use of arms to all above twelve years of age, and drilled
them in military manœuvres. He was present to superintend all their
movements, which were so many evolutions, or marches. The punishments
in use were arrest and imprisonment; and for their meals, their
studies, their lessons, their sports, prayers, mass, going to bed, and
getting up, signal was given by beat of drum. ♦FIRST CATECHISM.♦ The
youth who were thus trained up in military habits had been taught, in
their first catechism, that they owed to their Emperor Napoleon love,
respect, obedience, fidelity, military services, and the contributions
required for the preservation and defence of the empire, and of his
throne: that God, who creates empires and disposes of them according
to his will, had, by endowing Napoleon with a profusion of gifts as
well in peace as in war, made him the minister of his power, and his
image upon earth: to honour and serve the Emperor was therefore the
same thing as to honour and serve God; and they who violated their duty
towards him, would resist the order which God himself had established,
and render themselves worthy of eternal damnation. The religious
sanction which was thus given to his authority had its full effect in
childhood, and when this feeling lost its influence, devotion to the
Emperor had become a habit which every thing around them contributed
to confirm and strengthen. There were 150 exhibitions, or burses,
appointed for every Lyceum: twenty were of sufficient amount to cover
the whole expense of the boys’ education and maintenance; the others
were called half or three-quarter burses, and the relatives of those
who obtained them made up the sum which was deficient. The money
for these foundations was of course drawn from the public taxes: a
third part was even raised by an extra and specific impost upon the
respective _communes_. But in the eyes of the pupils every thing flowed
from the Emperor himself: he was their immediate benefactor, as well as
their future and sure patron; and they looked to him with gratitude
and hope at an age when these generous feelings are the strongest.
♦SPECIAL MILITARY ACADEMIES.♦ Two hundred and fifty chosen youths were
transferred every year to the special military academies, where they
were supported by the state; and from whence the army was supplied with
a succession of young men, thoroughly educated for their profession,
and thoroughly attached to the Emperor Napoleon. Others were appointed
to such civil offices as they seemed best qualified to fill, and they
carried with them the same attachment to revolutionary principles, and
to the person of Buonaparte. This was not all. Buonaparte, far-sighted
when not blinded by vanity, or dazzled by ambition, made use of the
Lyceums to assist in securing his conquests. ♦YOUTHS FROM THE CONQUERED
COUNTRIES.♦ Two thousand four hundred youths, chosen from the foreign
territories which had been annexed to France, were educated in these
academies at the public expense. This measure, said Fourcroy (by whom
the scheme of the University was framed), was so congenial with the
times, that its advantages would be perceived by all who were capable
of understanding the existing circumstances. The inhabitants, he said,
who spake a language of their own, and were accustomed to their own
institutions, must relinquish their old usages, and adopt those of
their new country: they had not the means at home of giving their
children the education, the manners, and the character, which were to
identify them with the French. What more advantageous destiny could
be prepared for them than that which the new system offered? and what
more efficacious resource could be given to the government, which had
nothing more at heart than to bind these new citizens to the French
empire?... Bound to it, indeed, they would thus be; the youths by the
effect of the education which they received; the parents because the
children were hostages for their forced allegiance.
♦MORAL EFFECT OF THE LYCEUMS.♦
Thus was the scheme of the Lyceums well suited both to the foreign
and domestic policy of Buonaparte. The tone of morals which prevailed
in these academies is said to have been not less congenial to his
purposes. If, indeed, in happier countries, and where the intention is
that better principles should be carefully inculcated, schools still
are places where good dispositions incur some danger of contamination,
and where evil ones have their worst propensities nurtured, and forced
as if in a hotbed, what was to be expected from a system of education
planned and directed by men who had grown up during the revolution, or
who had taken part in it, and gone through the course of its crimes,
... its agents, or its creatures? A thorough corruption, under the
appearance of that regularity which military order produced; a cold
irreligion, with which the youths went through the external practices
of devotion as they went through the drill; a calculating spirit
of insubordination, never breaking out but in concerted movements;
speculating selfishness, premature ambition, ferocious manners; ...
♦GENIE DE LA REVOLUTION. T. 1. 392.♦ these were to be expected, and by
these, it is said, the Lyceums were characterised.
♦SYSTEM OF INSPECTION.♦
The _Proviseurs_ (or masters), the censors, and the teachers in the
Lyceums and Colleges (which latter were regarded as secondary schools),
were bound to celibacy: the professors might marry, but in that case
they were not allowed to lodge within the precincts, nor might any
woman enter there. Every academy had one or two inspectors, whose
business it was from time to time to visit all the Lyceums and inferior
schools within their respective districts, and see that the rules of
the University were strictly observed; and lest this examination should
be carelessly or unfaithfully performed, there were from twenty to
thirty general inspectors. The members of the University were bound
each to inform the Grand Master and his officers of any thing contrary
to the rules, which might occur within their knowledge: they were bound
to obey him in whatever he might command for the Emperor’s service;
and whosoever was expelled, or left the University without a letter of
dismission, became thereby incapable of holding any civil employment.
The pupils were not permitted to correspond with any persons except
their parents, or persons acting for their parents; and all letters
which they received or wrote passed through the hands of the censor.
♦UNIFORMITY OF EDUCATION.♦
The University was one of Buonaparte’s favourite plans: it well
exemplifies his precipitate temper and his thorough despotism. In
the edict which erected it, the Napoleonic dynasty was styled the
conservator of the liberal ideas which the French constitutions had
announced; ... that very edict was an act for enforcing uniformity
of education throughout the empire! All persons who were previously
employed in tuition were by this act incorporated as members of the
University, without their consent, and bound to all its regulations:
they were compelled to change the course of instruction to which they
had been accustomed, and to follow a prescribed form, whether they
approved it or not: they were subjected to the inquisitorial visits
of the inspectors, and to the arbitrary power of the Grand Master:
they were heavily taxed for the support of this system, and ultimately
were to be sacrificed to it; for it was the declared intention of
government gradually to diminish the number of their schools till they
should all be shut up, for the purpose of multiplying the Lyceums.
The insolent injustice of such a measure would produce disgust and
consequent neglect in many instances, the suddenness of the change
would occasion disorder and confusion in all; and the itinerant
inspectors were less likely to amend what was amiss, than to act in a
vexatious spirit of interference, or with corrupt connivance, according
as the views and temper of the individual inclined him to the one abuse
or to the other. Except the miserable schoolmasters who were pressed
into the University, its other members were taken from such persons
hanging loose upon society as had interest enough to obtain the better
appointments, or were forlorn enough to accept the worst. Yet from
some thousands of men, not prepared by previous habitudes and studies,
not selected for the fitness of their acquirements, their talents,
or their disposition to the course of life in which they were to be
placed, but brought together by the drag-net of despotism, Buonaparte
expected and demanded that singleness of purpose, that totality of
interests, that subserviency of all the parts to the whole, that
disciplined unanimity which had existed among the Jesuits, and was the
perfection of their consummate system. But the great object of his
policy was answered; the youth of France were brought up in military
habits; they were taught from their earliest boyhood to look to him for
patronage, and to consider their own advancement as connected with the
prosperity and permanence of his empire: if the moral and religious
part of their education was worse than neglected, it mattered not, or
rather it accorded with his views and wishes; they were then fitter
instruments for the work in which they were to be employed.
♦EFFECTS OF THE REVOLUTION UPON MORALS.♦
The revolution had seared the feelings and hardened the hearts of
a light-minded people: this was the natural effect of its horrors
and of the ruin which it had spread[10]. That immorality which a
succession of vicious courts had encouraged by their example, was
released by the revolution from all restraints of law and of external
decorum. ♦FREQUENCY OF DIVORCES.♦ The religious sanction of marriage
was destroyed, and the unbounded facility of divorce rendered the
civil ceremony a mere form, which was no longer binding than till one
of the parties might choose to throw off the engagement. ♦OBSCENE
PUBLICATIONS.♦ The literature of France, always, to the disgrace of the
nation, more licentious than that of any other country, became, under
the perfect freedom of the press, obscene to a degree too loathsome for
expression; the arts were prostituted to the same devilish purpose;
and the line of distinction between vice and virtue, which can never
be too strongly marked, was as completely effaced in general practice
as in the theories of those sophists who have laboured to corrupt
their fellow-creatures. Such things were beneath the consideration of
a legislature which arrogated to itself the praise of philosophical
liberality; or, rather, they accorded with the views of that foul
philosophy, which, regarding man as a mere material machine, would
degrade him to the condition of the beasts that perish. Gambling,
also, which every government that regards the welfare of its subjects
endeavours to check by salutary laws, was encouraged by authority in
France. ♦GAMING-HOUSES ESTABLISHED BY GOVERNMENT.♦ Every week two or
three lotteries were drawn, in which the poorest of the poor were
tempted to engage, there being shares as low as sixpence. Nor must it
be supposed that this measure was defended upon the specious ground
that governments ought to regulate the vices which they cannot prevent,
and therefore may allowably make them conducive to the advantage of
the state. The French government legalized this vice in its fullest
extent, took to itself a monopoly of the gaming-houses, farmed them at
one time, and afterwards administered them by agents of its own. This
profligate measure originated with the Directory, and was continued by
Buonaparte: whatever tended to make men prodigal and desperate accorded
with the spirit of his system, and under that system every thing tended
to that effect.
♦ABOLITION OF PRIMOGENITURE.♦
Of all the previous measures of the revolutionists there was none
which more entirely suited his views than the abolition of the law
of primogeniture; that law, which perhaps, next to the institution
of marriage, has produced more good, moral and political, than any
other act of human legislation. The revolutionists were not mistaken
when they believed that that structure of social order which it was
their determination to destroy rested upon this basis; and they were
too short-sighted to perceive that in breaking it up they were acting
as pioneers to prepare the way for despotism. Buonaparte was thus
enabled to surround himself with an aristocracy of his own making, who
possessed no natural influence in the country, who represented none
of its interests, who had no inheritance of honour to maintain and to
bequeath, but were his mere creatures and dependents. In this respect
the government of France under the Emperor Napoleon was assimilated
to the barbarous despotisms of Persia and Turkey: and this was the
direct consequence of a measure, which was intended to secure and
perpetuate the triumph of liberty and equality! But it was not the
only consequence: the evil extended throughout the whole middle class
of society. The best motive whereby men are induced to labour for the
accumulation of wealth, the motive by which a propensity, mean in
itself, is exalted and refined, was removed when the hope of building
up a family was taken away. Mansions would not be erected, and domains
ornamented and improved, when, upon the death of the proprietor, the
estates were to be divided. There no longer existed the same means for
that liberal expenditure which called forth ingenuity, encouraged the
arts, and afforded employment to useful industry in all its branches.
Properties were broken down, which in former times enabled the father
to set his younger children fairly forward in the world, and the heads
of families to assist their relatives, ... from pride sometimes, if a
kindlier principle were wanting. And as estates by this levelling act
were divided into smaller and smaller portions at every descent, more
adventurers were thrown upon the public with less parental aid. The
political system of the revolutionists, like their godless philosophy,
looked to the present alone, deriving no wisdom from the past, and
having for the future neither care nor hope.
♦BARBARIZING EFFECTS OF THIS MEASURE.♦
The growth of that middle order was thus prevented in which the
strength of civil society mainly consists; which is the most
favourable to the developement of our intellectual faculties, and to
the improvement of our moral nature; to knowledge, and contentment,
and virtue; to public freedom, individual happiness, and general
prosperity. No measure could more certainly tend to perpetuate
barbarous institutions than one by which property was thus divided in
every generation: and the state of things among the Huns and Tartars
of old scarcely operated more exclusively to form a military people
than all the circumstances of France under its military Emperor.
The conscription was as indiscriminate as the plague, and less to
be averted by any human means: it mattered not what might be the
inclinations of the youth, nor what the wishes, principles, and
feelings of the parents; he must take the chance of the lot, and as
Buonaparte became more eager in his ambition and more prodigal in his
expenditure of life, there was scarcely a chance of escaping from it.
The chief object of education was to train up the boys in military
habits and propensities; and the military was the only profession which
offered any thing to their hopes. Commerce had been almost destroyed,
less by the maritime war than by the tyranny of Buonaparte, who, in
the vain desire of ruining Great Britain, cared not what injury he
brought upon his own subjects and his dependent states. Few persons
would engage in the study of the liberal professions, because it was
not in their free choice to follow them. The official business of the
state no longer offered, as in former times, a sure and honourable
path to promotion and public esteem; it was reduced to the wretched
art of doing whatever the Emperor required, supplying immediate wants
by temporary shifts, enforcing oppressive edicts, defending acts of
perfidy, inhumanity, and flagrant wrong, and promoting a system
of despotism and delusion by all the aids of systematic falsehood.
♦DEGRADATION OF THE CHURCH.♦ And the Church was in a state of
degradation as complete as that to which Julian would have reduced it;
it had been stripped of its respectability as well as of its wealth.
Buonaparte had hardly condescended to treat its re-establishment as
any thing more than a mere matter of expediency: and when the Pope was
brought to Paris for the purpose of crowning a man who had publicly
professed himself an enemy to the Cross, the ceremonies of his
reception were performed in a spirit of mockery which it was scarcely
attempted to conceal. The Bishops of the new establishment, indeed,
were not wanting in endeavours to deserve the Emperor’s favour; they
uttered their maledictions against England, as Balaam would fain have
done against the Israelites; and in strains of blasphemous adulation
they addressed Buonaparte as one whom the Lord had brought out of the
land of Egypt to be the man of his own right hand, the Cyrus whom God
had chosen for the accomplishment of his inscrutable designs in regard
to the nations of the earth, the Christ of providence, the lion of
the tribe of Judah! But if this impious flattery gratified the tyrant
to whom it was addressed, it contributed still farther to degrade the
clerical character in public estimation. The constitutional clergy
were regarded as little better than schismatics by those persons who
retained a rooted attachment to the religion of their fathers: hence,
in the interior, the churches were deserted by the devout as well as
by the infidel; and they who were near enough the frontier went to
partake of the ordinances and receive confirmation, from a foreign
clergy, because they had no reverence for their own. Public opinion
being so decidedly against the national priests, and their stipends
precarious in all places, and at the best barely sufficient for a
decent maintenance, it followed, as a natural consequence, that a
supply of ministers for the service of the altar could not be found.
Thus while the laws made every youth look to a military life as the
probable allotment of destiny from which he could not escape, the
circumstances of France were such as to take away all desire for any
other profession.
♦STATE OF EUROPE.♦
At the head of a nation whose whole activity and talents were
thus directed to war as the only pursuit, Buonaparte had realised
those schemes of ambition which Louis XIV. had been prevented from
accomplishing by Marlborough’s consummate abilities as a statesman
and a general. He had effected all, and more than all that Louis had
designed. The Austrian Netherlands, and all the German states as far
as the Rhine, were annexed to France, and the European powers who were
most injured and endangered by this usurpation acquiesced in it with
hopeless submission. Beyond the Rhine the French were in possession of
many strong places, which gave them access into the heart of Germany.
Buonaparte was King of Italy, as well as Emperor of France. One of his
brothers had been made King of Holland, a second King of Naples, and a
third King of Westphalia, all in immediate dependence upon him as the
head and founder of the Napoleonic dynasty. The Holy German Empire,
... the Empire, as by a prouder and exclusive title it claimed to be
called, ... that venerable and mighty body of which the complicated
confusion had hitherto, so it was boasted, been divinely preserved,
was dissolved by the defection of its members, and the abdication of
its chief. The secondary, and all the inferior powers of which it had
been composed, had contracted under the name of the Confederation of
the Rhine, federatively and individually an alliance with the Emperor
Napoleon, offensive and defensive, whereby they were virtually rendered
so many feuds of France: the force which they were to bring into the
field was determined; and to enable them to raise their respective
contingents, the conscription was introduced into these states, as the
accompanying curse of French alliance. This Confederacy was extended
from Bavaria and the frontiers of Switzerland, to the banks of the
Elbe. Switzerland acknowledged Buonaparte as its protector, and
continued in peace, with something of the appearance, but little of the
reality of independence, till it should suit his purpose to assume the
sovereignty without disguise. Prussia, beaten, humbled and dismembered,
seemed to exist only by his sufferance. Austria, after three struggles
against revolutionary France, each more lamentably misconducted and
more disastrous than the last, divorced from the empire, despoiled
of the Netherlands, the Brisgaw, the Frickthal, the Vorarlberg, the
Tyrol, and all its Italian territories, had no other consolation in
the ignominious peace to which it had been forced than that of seeing
the house of Brandenburg soon afterwards reduced to a state of greater
humiliation. Denmark was in alliance with France, the government rather
than the nation co-operating heartily with Buonaparte. Sweden, with
an insane king, and a discontented people, maintained against him a
war which was little more than nominal. Russia, the only country which
seemed secure in its distance, its strength, and the unanimity of its
inhabitants, ... the only continental state to which the rest of Europe
might have looked as to a conservative power, ... Russia appeared to
be dazzled by Buonaparte’s glory, duped by his insidious talents, and
blindly subservient to his ambition. Spain was entirely subject to his
control, its troops and its treasures were more at the disposal of the
French government than of its own. Portugal had hitherto been suffered
to remain neutral, because Buonaparte from time to time extorted large
sums from the Court as the price of its neutrality, and because the
produce of the Spanish mines found their way safely through the British
cruisers, under the Portugueze flag. England alone perseveringly
opposed the projects of this ambitious conqueror, and prevented the
possibility of his accomplishing that scheme of universal dominion,
which had it not been for her interference he believed to be within his
reach.
♦STATE OF ENGLAND.♦
The situation of England in the year 1807 was more extraordinary than
any that is exhibited in the history of former times. After a war,
which with the short interval of the peace of Amiens had continued
fifteen years, and at the commencement of which all Europe had been
leagued with her against revolutionary France, her last reliance upon
the continental governments had failed; most of her former allies were
leagued against her, and it was manifest that the few states which
still preserved a semblance of neutrality, would soon in like manner
be compelled into a confederacy with France. The French army and the
English navy, two more tremendous powers than old times had ever
seen, were opposed to each other without the possibility of coming in
conflict. Masters as the French were on the continent, all thoughts
of attacking them by land were at an end, and neither they nor their
allies dared show their flag upon the sea. England could not in any way
lessen the power of France, neither could France subdue, nor in any way
weaken England. The threat of invasion had been laid aside: it had been
seriously intended by Buonaparte, but the spirit with which the English
people flew to arms intimidated him, and his gun-boats were left to
rot in the harbours where with so much cost and care they had been
collected. Secured against any such evil by our fleets, and still more
by our internal strength, we were carrying on the war equally without
fear and without hope.
♦DUKE OF PORTLAND’S ADMINISTRATION.♦
The state of our home politics was not less remarkable. For the first
time Great Britain was under an administration without a name; its
ostensible head the Duke of Portland never appeared in parliament,
and was neither spoken of, nor thought of by the public. He deserves,
however, an honourable memorial in British history, for having accepted
office in a time of peculiar and extreme difficulty, and thereby
enabled the King to form a ministry whose opinions were in unison
with his own principles and feelings, and with the wishes and true
interests of his people. The other ministers held their places less
by their own strength than by the weakness of their opponents, for
of all administrations, that to which they had succeeded had been
the most unpopular. From their want of influence in the country, the
powerful families being mostly with the opposition, it was thought
that they depended too much upon the personal favour of the sovereign,
and were more literally the King’s servants than is consistent with
the spirit of the constitution. Their talents had not been put fairly
to the proof, and the nation had not as yet learned to appreciate
the cool clear judgement of Lord Hawkesbury, the finished oratory
of Mr. Canning, and the activity and intrepidity of Mr. Percival,
always ready and always right-minded. While Pitt and Fox were living,
every man believed either in one or in the other; one party was
perfectly satisfied that all the measures of the minister were right,
and the other as confidently expected that notwithstanding the evil
consequences of his mispolicy and his misfortunes, the country was to
be saved as soon as their political redeemer came into power. From
this comfortable state, wherein faith supplied the place of reason,
they were disturbed by the death of both these leaders, neither of
whom left a successor, but both exaggerated reputations. It became
the general complaint that there was no man or set of men in whom
the nation had any confidence. Some persons apprehended from this a
dangerous indifference in the public toward parliament itself. Others
hoped that as the people were weary of factious debates, parliament
would no longer be made a theatre of faction, but that measures would
be discussed with a view to the common weal, and no longer solely with
reference to the party by which they were brought forward.
The opposition consisted of the most heterogeneous and discordant
materials. The Grenville party had a just view of the dangers of the
country, and a right feeling for its honour. They were sincerely
attached to the monarchy, to the Church of England, and to the existing
constitution of the state: therefore they steadily and manfully
resisted the measures of pretended reform which were brought forward
sometimes by mistaken, sometimes by designing men, as leading with sure
tendency to a mob-government, and all its certain horrors. They knew
also that hopeless as the war might seem, it was our safest position,
and that peace could not be made without disgrace and imminent danger,
so long as the continent of Europe was under the control of France.
But while they thus entirely agreed with the government in the
fundamental principles of its policy foreign and domestic, they opposed
it in all the details of administration with a factious animosity,
which seemed to show how deeply they resented their dismissal from
power: and thus they lost with the nation much of that weight which
they must otherwise have possessed by reason of their acknowledged
ability, their constitutional principles, and their high personal
character. Still, however, they were regarded with a certain degree of
respect, which was not the case with the remains of Mr. Fox’s party.
♦THE FOXITES.♦ The Foxites, from the beginning of the war, through all
its changes had uniformly taken part against their country; consistent
in this and in nothing else, they had always sided with the enemy,
pleading his cause, palliating his crimes, extolling his wisdom,
magnifying his power, vilifying and accusing their own government,
depreciating its resources, impeding its measures, insulting its
allies, calling for disclosures which no government ought to make, and
forcing them sometimes from the weakness and the mistaken liberality
of their opponents. Buonaparte, as Washington had done before him,
relied upon their zeal and virulence; and they by their speeches and
writings served him more effectually upon the continent and in France
itself, than all the manifestoes of his ministers, and the diatribes
of his own press. In future ages it will be thought a strange and
almost incredible anomaly in politics, that there should have existed
in the legislature of any country a regular party, organised and
acknowledged as such, whose business it was to obstruct the proceedings
of government, and render it by every possible means contemptible and
odious to the people; a party always in semi-alliance with the enemy,
who in times of difficulty and danger prophesied nothing but failure,
disgrace, and ruin; and whose systematic course of conduct, if it had
been intended to bring about the fulfilment of their predictions, could
not have been more exactly adapted to that object.
♦ATTEMPTS TO RAISE A CRY FOR PEACE.♦
The Foxites, before they were admitted into office, had pertinaciously
insisted upon the practicability and ease of making peace; this opinion
could not be maintained while they were in power, and their dismission
was at this time so recent, that it could not as yet decently be
resumed. Attempts, however, to raise a popular cry for peace were
made by certain manufacturers whose trade was at a stand: they were
assisted by many of those persons who in strict adherence to the
phraseology as well as the principles of the puritans, call themselves
religious professors, and by some other conscientious but inconsistent
men, who while they admit that the necessity of war must be allowed
in just cases, exclaim in all cases against the practice, setting
their compassionate feelings in array against reason, and against the
manlier virtues. ♦SUPERSTITION CONCERNING BUONAPARTE.♦ A superstition
concerning Buonaparte was mingled with this womanish sensibility.
They who had not lost sight of his enormities doubted whether he were
the Beast, whose number they contrived to discover in his name; ... or
Antichrist himself. Others whom he had in some degree conciliated by
his various aggressions upon the papal power, forgave him his crimes
because the Whore of Babylon happened to be among those whom he had
plundered: they rather imagined him to be the Man upon the White Horse.
In this, however, they were all agreed, that Providence had appointed
him for some great[11] work: and it was an easy conclusion for those
whose weak heads and warm imaginations looked no further, that it must
be unavailing, if not impious, to oppose him.
♦ADMIRERS OF THE FRENCH REVOLUTION.♦
This was a pitiable delusion: but more extraordinary was the weakness
of those, who having been the friends of France at the commencement
of the revolution, when they believed that the cause of liberty was
implicated in her success, looked with complacency now upon the
progress which oppression was making in the world, because France was
the oppressor. They had turned their faces toward the east, in the
morning, to worship the rising sun, and now when it was evening they
were looking eastward still, obstinately affirming that still the sun
was there. Time had passed on; circumstances were changed; nothing
remained stationary except their understandings; and because they
had been incapable of deriving wisdom from experience, they called
themselves consistent; and because they were opposed in every thing to
the views of their government, the hopes of their countrymen, and the
honour and interest of their country, they arrogated to themselves the
exclusive praise of patriotism! But the persons who from these various
views and feelings united in calling for peace, were insignificant in
number, and government had never at any time more certainly acted with
the full concurrence of the nation, than in carrying on the war against
Buonaparte.
♦INCREASED EXPENDITURE, ACTIVITY, AND WEALTH.♦
Heavy burthens had been incurred during this long and arduous contest.
At the commencement of the year 1807, the annual expenditure was not
less than seventy-two millions, and the national debt amounted to six
hundred and twenty-seven. But hitherto the prosperity of the country
had kept pace with its exertions. The wheels of the machine seemed
rather to move more freely than to be impeded by the weight which was
laid upon them; and the war created means for supporting its enormous
demands, by the enterprise which it called into action, and the money
which it put in circulation. All the manufactures connected with the
numerous branches of the naval and military service were in full
activity. Agricultural industry also received an impulse such as had
never before been experienced; for the English being excluded from the
Baltic, and holding relations of doubtful amity with the United States
of America, were fain to depend upon themselves for produce, and the
emergency produced commensurate exertions throughout the kingdom. The
country banks supplied a currency without which these exertions could
not have been made; every where wastes were brought into cultivation;
and the agricultural labourers being every where employed at high
wages, contributed by their increased expenditure to extend the
prosperity of which they partook.
♦MANUFACTURING SYSTEM.♦
Other circumstances, connected with the progress of society, and
leading beyond all doubt to the most perilous crisis which society has
ever yet undergone, conduced at this time mainly to the service of
the state, and enabled the government to raise a revenue and support
fleets and armies upon a scale which even in the last generation
could not have been contemplated as possible. As the drunkard derives
a pleasurable sensation, and an immediate excitement from strong
liquors which by their sure effect are producing organic derangement,
incurable disease, and death, so the manufacturing system contributed
at this time to the national wealth and strength, while it was
poisoning the vitals of the commonwealth. Carried as it now appeared to
be by mechanical ingenuity and power to its utmost extent, it enabled
our merchants to supply the world with manufactured goods, and at so
low a price, that the most severe enactments, enforced by the most
vigilant precautions, could not exclude them from the continental
markets. In vain did Buonaparte shut the ports of Europe against the
British flag, thinking that by destroying that part of our revenue
which is derived from foreign trade, he should cut the sinews of our
strength; in vain did the American government co-operate with him by
its non-importation acts; British goods still found their way every
where, and the books of the custom-house proved a continual increase in
our exports; while the internal commerce of the country (nine-elevenths
of the whole), and that with Ireland and our foreign possessions (a
large proportion of the remaining parts), flourished beyond all former
example. The manufacturing system supplied the war with men as well
as means; the necessity for hands in agriculture also being greatly
diminished by improved modes of labour, and by the use of agricultural
machines, we were enabled without violence or difficulty to maintain
in arms a force scarcely inferior in numbers to that of the enemy with
all their fivefold superiority of population. And thus the country
was prevented from feeling the evil of that forced population which
the manufacturing system and the poor laws had produced, and of the
prevailing custom of educating youths of the middle rank for stations
higher than that in which they were born, or had means to support.
♦WEAKNESS OF THE GOVERNMENT.♦
In resources therefore for maintaining war, the British government
had never been so strong: and so far as Buonaparte reckoned upon our
financial difficulties, and the want of men to resist him whenever
and wherever he should bring his overwhelming force against us, he
deceived himself, as much as when he supposed it possible to intimidate
the British nation. But he reckoned also upon the weakness of our
government, the aid which would be given him by a licentious press,
and the progress of those insane opinions which lead to revolution
and ruin. His councils were directed by a single will steadily to
one end; and whatever he undertook was vigorously pursued, and with
means proportioned to the object so as to render success certain, as
far as depended upon well-concerted plans, adequate preparations, and
military strength. But the constitution of a British cabinet, in which
contrarious opinions are reconciled by concessions and compromises,
seemed in time of war to insure vacillation and weakness. The whole
conduct of the war had confirmed him in this judgement, which the
history of all our wars since the days of Marlborough exemplifies.
Every administration, this like the last, and the last like that before
it, treading one after another in the same sheep-track of fatuity,
proceeded without system, and with no other views than such as the
chance and changes of the hour presented. Setting sail before the wind
from whatever quarter it happened to blow, they steered a driftless
course, though the shallows lay full before them. The same tardiness,
the same indecision, the same half measures, the same waste of men and
money in nugatory expeditions, had characterized them all. Moreover
the government itself had been weakened by the concessions which
faction, ever active and ever alert, had extorted from a series of
feeble ministers during this long reign. At a time when discontent was
at its height at the close of the American war, the House of Commons
passed a resolution that the power of the Crown had increased, was
increasing, and ought to be diminished; a resolution that carried with
it its own refutation, being itself a decisive proof of the weakness
of the government under which and against which it was passed. More
than once had a ministry been forced upon the King in opposition to
his own principles of policy, and his personal feelings. That which
had happened might again happen; changes, always possible in a country
which was governed so little by system, and so much by popular opinion,
might again force the Whigs into power: ♦HOPES OF BUONAPARTE.♦ and
under their ascendancy Buonaparte might reasonably expect to conclude
a peace. With all the ports of the continent at his command he could
build ships in any number, but it was only during peace that sailors
could be trained to man them; a few years of peace would suffice for
this, and then he might meet us on the seas with a superiority of
force which would give him the power of landing an army at any time
upon our shores. For this reason and for this alone, he was sincerely
desirous of making peace with England, being the surest means by
which he could hope to bring about the overthrow of this hated and
otherwise invulnerable enemy. But while the war continued that enemy
could do him no farther hurt, he was at leisure to continue his system
of aggrandizement; wherever there was no sea to intervene, there was
nothing to withstand him. His projects even in the fullest extent of
their ambition were thought feasible by the public, who throughout
Europe were dazzled by his success: his power appeared irresistible;
and his empire was supposed by all persons to be firmly established,
except by those who having a firm reliance upon the moral order of the
world, believed that the triumph of evil principles could only endure
for a time, and that no system can be permanent which is founded upon
irreligion, injustice, and violence.