THE FIRST REVOLT OF NATIONS[24]
[Footnote 24: See Yorck: Napoleon als Feldherr.
Correspondence of Napoleon, vols. 17 and 18. Ducasse: Les
rois freres de Napoleon Ier. Krones: Geschichte Oesterreich im
Zeitalter der franzoesischen Kriege. Pelet: Memoires sur la
guerre de 1809 en Allemagne. Maxwell: Life of Wellington.
Schlesier: Erinnerungen an W. von Humboldt. Arndt: Geist der
Zeit. Fichte: Fichtes Leben.]
The New Role of Spain -- Guerrilla Warfare -- The French Cowed --
The Capitulation of Baylen -- The French Retreat from Spain and
Portugal -- Complaints of King Joseph -- Napoleon's Exasperation
-- Imperialist Sentiment in France -- The Emperor's Determination
-- The Spirit of Prussia -- The Work of Stein -- The Revolution
in Turkey -- Austria's Anxieties -- War Feeling at Vienna --
Napoleon Turns to the Czar -- Alexander's Hesitancy -- Napoleon's
Misrepresentations -- Austria Warned -- Talleyrand and the Czar
-- Napoleon's Allocution at St. Cloud.
Thus far in the history of Europe all politics had been in the main
dynastic. The nations having been consolidated under powerful houses,
it was the reigning family which seemed to constitute the national
entity, not the common institutions, common speech, common faith,
common territory, common aims, and common destiny of the people.
Spain, like Italy, had a clearly marked national domain, and, in spite
of some striking differences, a fairly homogeneous population. It was
fitting and not entirely unnatural that the land of the Inquisition,
the land of ignorance, the land of intolerance, the land, in short,
which had sunk the lowest under absolutism, should begin the
counterrevolution which, checking the excesses of Napoleon and the
French Revolution in their disregard for nationality, ushered into the
world's forum the nation and national sentiment as the strongest force
of the nineteenth century.
This was exactly what happened in Spain. Napoleon's strategy had
laughed at the military formation of Frederick the Great's system; the
guerrillas of Spain laughed at the formations of regular warfare in
any shape. They rose to fight, and dispersed for safety, leaving their
smarting foe unable to strike for lack of a billet. The occasional
successes of the Spanish regulars showed, moreover, that the generals
were not entirely ignorant of Napoleon's own system. When Joseph
entered Madrid the whole land was already in open rebellion, except
where French force compelled a sullen acquiescence in French rule. The
long inactive, sluggish ecclesiastics suddenly seemed to feel the
vigor to resist and the power to lead. They joined the insurgents, and
invoked the orthodoxy of the nation so as to inflame the passions of
the masses against the persecutor of the Pope. Irregular and undefined
as were the elements of the uprising, it was nevertheless essentially
a popular movement; as Napoleon himself later admitted, it was the
people themselves who refused to ratify his new institutions, and who
declared for Ferdinand VII. The sequel furnished ample illustration of
this fact: the mountaineers of Asturias rose in united rebellion; the
inhabitants of Cartagena threw open their arsenals to the volunteers
of the neighborhood; the citizens of Saragossa beat off their
besiegers, while those of Valencia first massacred the French who took
refuge in their citadel, and then repulsed Moncey in a desperate
conflict. When the Spanish leaders ventured into an open battle-field
they were defeated; on the other hand, when they kept the hills and
fought like bandits they were victorious.
So quick and general was the Spanish rising that the various French
army divisions shut themselves up for safety in whatever towns they
could hold: pretending to defy the national guards, who seemed to
spring from the ground without, they were in reality awestricken
before the wrath of the armed citizens within. A quick burst of
Spanish anger, a sharp stab of the Spanish poniard--the frequency of
such incidents began to create a panic among the French boy-soldiers.
The seizure and sack of a city had for years been a traditional
amusement of the grand army, connected in Italy and Germany with
little or no loss of life, and enhanced by the acquisition of enormous
booty. The young conscripts, who had heard the oft-told tale from
their fathers' lips, found to their bitter disappointment that in
Spain a sack meant much bloodshed and little, if any, booty. Sometimes
the tables were more than turned. A French squadron put in at Cadiz to
cooeperate with a force despatched by Napoleon, under pretense of
resisting an invasion threatened by the English, but really for the
purpose of terrorizing southern Spain. The arrival of the troops
having been delayed by the outbreak of rebellion farther north, the
townsfolk of that ancient city rose and seized the fleet. The corpses
of French soldiers, wherever found throughout the country, were
mutilated by the furious Spaniards, and the wounded received no
quarter.
At the end of May, Murat was in Madrid as commander-in-chief, with
Moncey as his lieutenant; he had thirty thousand troops. Junot was in
Portugal with twenty-five thousand. Bessieres had twenty-five thousand
more, half in Old Castile under himself, half in Aragon under Verdier.
Duhesme commanded the thirteen thousand who were in Catalonia; Dupont
stood on the Tagus near Toledo with twenty-four thousand more. In the
first weeks of June four different skirmishes occurred between the
French regulars and the insurgents in different parts of the country.
Verdier at Logrono on the sixth, Frere in Segovia on the seventh,
Lefebvre at Tudela on the eighth, and Lasalle near Valladolid on the
twelfth, had all dispersed the hordes opposed to them. By the middle
of the month a regular advance was ordered. It took the form of
dispersion for the sake of complete occupation. While Lefebvre laid
siege to Saragossa, Moncey started for Valencia with ten thousand
soldiers, Dupont for Andalusia with nine thousand, and Bessieres's
division was distributed throughout Castile up to the walls of
Santander, which closed its gates and prepared for resistance. Owing
to the defiant attitude and desperate courage of the people, every one
of these movements was unsuccessful, each failing in its own special
purpose. Cordova was captured, but it had almost instantly to be
abandoned. At once Napoleon changed his carefully studied but futile
strategy, and determined to concentrate the scattered columns on the
critical point, wherever it might be. By this time Palafox and others
of the Spanish leaders had shown great ability as generals. The danger
now was that a Spanish army would seize Madrid, and thither the French
army must betake itself. On July fourteenth Bessieres successfully
overwhelmed the opposition made at Medina de Rio Seco by the Spaniards
under La Cuesta and the Irish general Blake. The only corps left
exposed was that of Dupont, to whom reinforcements had been promptly
despatched; but the Spaniards under Castanos caught his army, now
twenty-five thousand strong, in the mountain pass of La Carolina,
among the Sierra Morena mountains, and on July twenty-first forced
him to capitulate at Baylen, where his whole corps laid down their
arms.
This was an awful blow, for Madrid was thereby rendered untenable. The
Emperor gave orders to retreat behind the Duero, and directed
Bessieres to keep open the connection with Junot by way of Valladolid.
In fact, he began to appreciate his task, for he warned his generals
against any system of cordons in dealing with such an enemy, useful as
a string of posts might be in checking smugglers; and besides this
change of plan, there were indications that he would himself soon take
charge in Spain. There was need of this, for his generals and
boy-soldiers did not stop to hold the Duero; evacuating Madrid, they
never halted until they were behind the Ebro, in what they considered
a kind of French borderland. The siege of Saragossa was abandoned, and
Duhesme evacuated Catalonia. Junot's situation was thus rendered most
precarious, for when Wellesley landed early in August with fourteen
thousand English troops, and found that the junta of Corunna had no
need of him, he promptly advanced against the invaders of Portugal.
Having driven in the French outposts on the seventeenth, four days
later he attacked and defeated Junot at Vimeiro. At the very height of
the contest, when victory seemed already secure, Burrard, a superior
officer, arrived to assume command. This reduced Wellesley to the rank
of an adviser, and, his advice not being taken, Junot escaped to the
strong position of Cintra, whence, although entirely cut off from his
base in Spain, he was able to dictate his own terms of surrender. He
and all his troops had a free return by sea to France, but Portugal
was to be evacuated.
Napoleon was at St. Cloud, near Paris, when the news of this disaster
arrived. To some extent he was already aware of the situation. He knew
that the Spaniards would not keep any stipulations they made,
claiming that no faith was due to a hostile army which had entered
their country under the guise of allies--an army, moreover, which
stole the sacred vessels from the sanctuaries of their churches, and
would not keep its promise to restore them. The letters of Joseph, who
was now utterly disenchanted, had for some time been but one string of
bitter complaints. He had asked the Emperor whether an end could not
be made to the organized pillage of the churches, and had told him
that the movement in Spain was as irrepressible as that of the French
Revolution, emphasizing his hopelessness by the suggestion that if
France had raised a million soldiers, Spain could probably raise at
least half as many. He said, too, that men talked openly of
assassinating him; that he had no friends but the scoundrels, the
honest men and patriots being on the other side. "My generals," was
the Emperor's comment on this querulousness, "are a parcel of
post-inspectors; the Ebro is nothing but a line; we must resume the
offensive at Tudela." "I have a spot there," he said, pointing with
his finger at his uniform. To calm his brother's fears, he replied
that the whole Spanish matter had been arranged long before with
Russia; that Europe recognized the change as an accomplished fact; and
that the priests and monks were at the bottom of all the trouble,
stirring up sedition, and acting for the greedy Inquisition. "There is
no question of death, but of life and victory; you shall have both....
I may find in Spain the Pillars of Hercules, but not the limits of my
power." True to his old principles, Napoleon refused to "call off the
thieves," as Joseph besought him, and declared that, according to the
laws of war, when a town was captured under arms pillage was
justifiable.
These were all brave words, but the Emperor was in the last stage of
exasperation. The letters he wrote at the time betray something of the
unutterable pain he felt. No one but himself could really know the
difference to him: his glory was smirched, his Oriental plans and his
scheme for peace with England were indefinitely postponed, his
impatient ally was again put off, while Austria and Prussia were
encouraged to revolt. Was the vast structure he had so laboriously
erected now to fall in one crash at his feet? The news of Junot's
surrender was further embittered by the receipt of information that
the Spanish troops under General La Romana, which had slyly been
posted first in Hamburg, and then sent to Denmark as Bernadotte's
advance-guard, had at last revolted, and were embarking on English
ships for home in order to join the movement of national redemption.
By this disaster the demonstration against Sweden promised to the Czar
was made impossible. This accumulation of misfortunes--defeat before
Valencia, defeat before Saragossa, disaster and surrender at Baylen,
disaster and disgrace at Vimeiro, retreat from Madrid, desertion of
the Duero as a line of defense, exchange of the offensive for a weak
defensive, and loss of the whole Iberian peninsula except the strip
behind the Ebro--all this was shameful and hard to bear. Nevertheless,
under favorable conditions the situation might have been retrieved.
The conditions, however, were most unfavorable. The example and
success of Spain were daily giving new comfort to Napoleon's enemies
both in France and abroad.
For the present, however, France might be trusted. The people as a
whole had become imperial to the core. The republicans and royalists
were so diminished in numbers, and so silenced by the censorship, that
they were virtually impotent. The real ability of the country was no
longer in retreat, but in the public service; the administration,
both financial and judicial, had every appearance of solidity, and the
industrial conditions were so steadily improving that the most
enterprising and intelligent merchants began to have faith in the
ultimate success of the Continental System as a means of securing a
European monopoly to French manufactures and commerce. The perfect
centralization of France kept the provinces in such close touch with
Paris that there was no open expression of discontent in any part of
the country. The people were not well informed as to the facts, and
they were slow to apprehend the significance of what they learned. By
this time the Emperor was France, and whatever he did must be well
done. The gradual infusion of the military spirit into the masses had
made them passive and obedient. There had been, they knew, some
unpleasant troubles beyond the Pyrenees, but the season was not over,
and before winter the Emperor's discipline would no doubt be
successful. The grand army now pouring out of Germany across France
into Spain evidently meant serious business, but there could be no
doubt of the result.
The court remained solemn and dull in its weary round of ceremony. The
moving spirit was now occupied elsewhere, and his constant
absent-mindedness made the whole structure meaningless; for it was an
open secret that the soft grace and beseeching eyes, the graceful and
willowy form, the exquisite taste and winning ways of Josephine would
avail her no longer. The little nephew, Hortense's son and Napoleon's
darling, his intended heir, was dead; Joseph had only daughters, and
there being no male successor to the throne, reasons of state made a
divorce inevitable.[25] The deference of others to the Empress and her
condescension to them were but a mockery, the reality of her power
having vanished. In this vain show the Emperor moved more dark and
mysterious than ever. It was his will that nothing should be changed,
and every courtier played his part as well as possible, the two
leading actors playing theirs superbly. There was an outward display
of confidence and kindness between them, which sometimes may have been
real; there were quarrels, explanations, and reconciliations--a
momentary return at times to old affection: but the resultant of the
conflicting forces was such as to destroy conjugal trust and create
general disquietude.
[Footnote 25: Masson: Josephine repudiee. Welschinger, La
divorce de Napoleon.]
When Napoleon looked abroad he saw nothing to reassure him, and
everything to create alarm. In Prussia there was a regeneration such
as was comparable only to a new birth. The old military monarchy,
under which the land had been repressed like an armed camp by its
sovereigns, was gone forever. The Tugendbund, that "band of virtue"
already mentioned, had ramified to the farthest borders; partizan
warfare was abandoned; piety, dignity, purity, courage, and the power
of organization were filling the land. The presence of the French
could not quench the new spirit, but instead it added fuel to the
flames of national hatred. Patriotic conventicles and every other form
of secret meeting were held. Scharnhorst went steadily on with the
training and reform of the army, while Stein, with a noble devotion,
and under an unsympathetic master, was working to perfect his new
administrative system. The churches were filled, and the hearers
understood every allusion in the glowing sermons addressed to them by
a devoted and patriotic clergy; schools, colleges, and universities
swarmed with students, whose youthful zeal found every encouragement
in the instruction of their teachers, which combined two qualities not
always found united in teaching, being at the same time thoroughly
scientific and highly stimulating.
At last, in August, Napoleon, who had looked and listened with deep
interest, read with his own eyes in one of Stein's intercepted letters
that the minister and his colleagues were aiming at a national
uprising, not of Prussia alone, but of all Germany. The illustrious
statesman, having emancipated the Prussian people, and having seen the
reform of the whole political organism in that great land, was
proceeding to extend his beneficent influence throughout all Germany.
In September Napoleon demanded Stein's dismissal, and enforced the
demand by sequestrating Frederick William's Westphalian estates,
threatening at the same time to continue the French occupation of
Prussia indefinitely. There was apparently no alternative, for the
country, although rejuvenated, had no allies, and could not fight
alone. Stein, therefore, resigned after an eventful ministry of about
a year, in which he had prepared the way for every one of the changes
which ultimately reconstructed Prussia.
The two movements which in Spain and Germany menaced Napoleon's
prestige were national; there were two others, which, if not that,
may, by a stretch of definition, be called at least dynastic. The
first was a revolution in Constantinople. The Sultan Mustapha IV had
been from the beginning a feeble creature of the soldiers, who, after
overthrowing Selim, had set him on the throne. Before long he became
the contemptible tool of an irresponsible robber gang known as the
"yamacks," who, under the guise of militia, held the Turkish capital
in terror. The situation in Constantinople had finally grown
unendurable even to the Turks, and the Pasha of Rustchuk appeared at
the gates of the city to restore Selim III, who was still a captive in
the Seraglio. When the doors of that sacred inclosure were forced
open, the first object seen was the body of the murdered sovereign,
killed by Mustapha in the belief that he himself was now the sole
available survivor of Othman's line. But the soldiers ransacked the
palace, and dragged from his concealment the young prince Mahmud,
second of the name, and destined to be a great reformer. Him they
proclaimed Sultan and set upon the throne, appointing their leader
grand vizir. The new government was devoted to reform, contemptuous of
French influence, and determined to repress the evils which seemed to
have ruined its predecessor. This severity was more than the
licentious capital would endure. At once every element of discontent
burst forth again,--the janizaries, the Ulema, or doctors of the
sacred law, and the people,--some mistrusting one thing, others
another, all alike unwilling to obey any master but their own will.
Disintegration of what little administrative organization there still
was, seemed imminent. The Turkish generals on the Danube began to make
light of the armistice or truce of Slobozia, Napoleon's one reliance
in his Eastern designs; they actually set in motion their troops, and
prepared to take the offensive against Russia. This was in the hope
that, before asking a separate peace from the Czar or returning to
seize the leadership at Constantinople, they might secure some
military prestige as a working capital. The whole outlook seemed to
foretell the extinction of French influence with the Porte and a crash
in the Orient before Napoleon was ready to take advantage of it.
But the events of Bayonne had been productive of greater alarm to the
house of Austria than to any other power. In the humiliation of the
Hohenzollerns, Napoleon had the sanction of conquest, though, in view
of Prussia's rising strength, it was now commonly said that he had
done too much or too little. While in weakening that nation he had
rudely lopped the strength of an old French ally, yet he had not
destroyed it, and he had exercised what all Europe still admitted to
be a right--that of superior force. Austria, on the other hand, had
been an old and inveterate rival of France in the race for territorial
extension. Napoleon's treatment of her after Austerlitz had been
bitter, but the Hapsburgs could not plead former friendship. Here,
however, was a new development in Napoleonic ambition. The successive
announcements that minor ruling dynasties had ceased to reign had all
been made with the partial justification of either conquest or general
expediency, or, as in most cases, of both. The Spanish Bourbons had
been the Emperor's most obsequious and useful allies, obeying his
behests without a question: for their degradation there was no plea
either of expediency or of a right secured by conquest. The extinction
of what still ranked as a great royal house was accomplished by
chicane, was due to a boundless ambition, and was rendered utterly
abhorrent to all divine-right dynasties by the specious pretext of
reform under which it was accomplished. This gave Francis food for
reflection.
In the territorial expansion of Rome her victims were first conquered,
then made dependent allies, then at last destroyed, and their lands
turned into Roman provinces. It appeared as if this, too, were, in
general, Napoleon's policy; but in some cases he showed himself quite
willing to dispense with any intermediary stage and marched direct to
his goal. Austria, already irritated by the disposition made of
Etruria and by the treatment of the Pope, could endure the suspense as
to her own fate no longer. Her new military system was complete, her
armies were reorganized and reequipped, her administration was well
ordered, her generals and statesmen were alike confident. The Emperor
of the French had shown quite the same impatience with Austria in
July as with Prussia in September, admonishing both to observe the
Continental System with strictness; but his warning produced no effect
at Vienna. On the contrary, the Viennese newspapers took a belligerent
tone, and called for war; English goods poured in through the harbor
of Triest; communications between the ministry at London and the
cabinet at Vienna became more frequent and regular; the nation
supported its monarch and assumed a warlike attitude. The disasters in
Spain tied Napoleon's hands, and he did nothing in a military way
except to call Davout from Poland into Silesia, and to strengthen
Mortier in Franconia.
With the inconsistency of the highest greatness, Napoleon changed his
whole political campaign in the twinkling of an eye, as he so often
did his military ones. During the long months since the interview at
Tilsit, Alexander had been kept in an agony of uncertainty, deprived
of real French cooeperation in regard either to Sweden or to Turkey,
and actually menaced by the continued occupation of Prussia and the
fortification of the strategic points in the duchy of Warsaw.
Caulaincourt had found his mission of dissimulation and
procrastination most difficult, partly by reason of Pozzo di Borgo's
influence, partly because the conquest of Muscovite society was a task
hitherto unknown to French arts, and experience had to be dearly
bought. In this latter work his success was very moderate, but he
became unconsciously an intimate friend and adviser of the Czar. This
displeased Napoleon, who promptly recalled him to his senses by a
warning that he must not forget that he was a Frenchman. Caulaincourt
bravely repelled the insinuation, but the correspondence of Napoleon
both with him and with the Czar became so voluminous that the Emperor
was virtually his own ambassador.
The contents of these letters were partly personal and friendly;
partly promissory, in preparation for what was about to be done at
Bayonne; partly preliminary to the second interview between the two
emperors, which had been mentioned at Tilsit and often discussed since
then. But so far there was not the slightest change of front, no
substantial fulfilment of the vague promises, no cooeperation; the
world was still under the system of Tilsit in the union of Russia and
France--a union so far represented by the will of Napoleon. The events
at Bayonne deeply affected Alexander. His ally knew they would, and on
July tenth he wrote a long letter to St. Petersburg, lamely justifying
his conduct. But, after all, the Czar cared little for ancient
European dynasties, and, recovering from the first shock, he began to
make sport of a king "who had nothing further to live for than his
Louise and his Emmanuel," and then took a firm stand in approval of
his ally's course. The French and Russian ministers had now completed
their scheme for the partition of Turkey, and the Czar finally and
unconditionally assented to the second meeting with the Emperor.
But before the details of the all-important interview could be
arranged there was much to be done; in particular, Austria must be
held in check. An English vessel had arrived at Triest with a
deputation of Spanish insurgents who offered the throne of their
country to the Archduke Charles. The armaments of Francis grew
stronger day by day. No one could hold the Hapsburg empire in check
except the Czar. Even amid the exhausting labors of Bayonne, Napoleon
remembered this, and thought of the East, reorganizing his fleet in
preparation for cooeperation with that of Russia, and commanding
reports to be made on the geography and military history of Persia.
After the loss of Baylen, of which he learned in the first days of
August, his ingenuity did not desert him, in spite of his heavy
heart. A swift courier was despatched on the fifth, with a letter
dated back to July twenty-first, and written as if in ignorance of
events in Spain. He was enjoined to outrun the ordinary news-carriers,
in order that, reaching St. Petersburg before them, he might present
as an offering of friendship to Alexander the promise of a virtual
evacuation of Prussia--even, in certain contingencies, of Warsaw.
Twenty-four hours later another messenger was despatched, conveying
the bad news in the mildest form, and expressing as the Emperor's
greatest concern a hope that the Russian squadron which had been sent
to Lisbon would escape, as he had reassuring news from its commander.
It mattered not to him that this was untrue; the end was gained, and
the real significance of Baylen was thereby largely concealed from the
Czar, or at least the impression made on him by the news was weakened.
Waiting for these communications to produce their effect, the Emperor
forwarded a formal remonstrance to Vienna, in his own name, against
Austria's warlike attitude, and two weeks later categorically demanded
a similar step from the Czar, opening out once more the vista of
indefinite aggrandizement for Russia in the East if only the European
conflagration were not rekindled. The Czar was charmed by the promises
of Napoleon, but when it came to a menacing remonstrance with Austria
he hesitated. The anti-French party in Russia were now repeating, like
parrots, first, Spain is annihilated, then Austria, then we ourselves.
Moreover, as Alexander himself felt, arrangements like those of Tilsit
are but too easily overset by unforeseen circumstances, and in such an
event what would Europe be without the Hapsburgs? In the end a feeble
hint, backed up by a weak menace, was sent to Vienna. Peace, wrote
the Czar, is the best policy for Austria. "May not the peace of
Tilsit, which I made, carry some obligations with it?" The warning
produced a momentary impression in the city on the Danube.[26]
[Footnote 26: See Vandal, Vol. I, Chapitre Preliminaire.]
In this short interval every preparation was hastened for the
interview which had now become indispensable to both parties. Napoleon
had only one object--to draw the alliance closer in the eyes of all
Europe for the conservation of his prestige. Alexander had
several--the mitigation of Prussia's bondage, the successful
occupation of Finland, and, what was the real bond of the alliance,
the partition of Turkey. This was substantially what the Czar had been
promised at Tilsit, but he had not yet obtained a single item of the
list then agreed upon. In spite of Caulaincourt's caresses and
Napoleon's cajoling, he was now in a determined humor, and meant to
demand the fulfilment of his ally's engagement, not from good will,
but from necessity. Talleyrand, wearied to distraction by the dull
life of Valencay and the charge of the Spanish princes, had determined
to regain his diplomatic power, and now began, by the agency of his
many devoted friends in Paris, an extensive course of preparation for
a return to public life and to influence. Through semi-official
channels the Czar was informed that France, drunk with victory and
conquest, now looked to his wisdom for protection from the further
ambitions of her fiery ruler. Before long Alexander's own agents began
to confirm this statement. The French nation, at least the reasonable
portion of it, they said, was weary of Napoleon's imperial policy. If
this were true, Spain and Austria might be used to hold France in
check while Russia should work her will on the Danube. No matter now
if her ally were faithless: compliance could be forced from his
weakness.
This disposition had been partly foreseen by Napoleon; he was informed
by Caulaincourt how steadily it was crystallizing into a fixed
determination. To the observer the moment seemed critical, but the
great adventurer was still able to ride the storm. Whence the impulse
came is not easily determined, but he turned to Talleyrand as an agent
likely to be useful in such complications. The intriguer came forward
promptly, and, receiving the Caulaincourt despatches, together with a
verbal explanation from the Emperor, was quickly in readiness for the
duty of counselor, to which he was called. Napoleon himself assumed a
lofty tone. On August fifteenth he held a levee at St. Cloud to which
all the representatives of foreign powers were summoned; those of
Russia and Austria stood near together. Again, as on the famous
occasion before the rupture of the peace of Amiens, he uttered a
public allocution in the form of a conversation; this time it was with
Metternich, the Austrian ambassador, and he was calmer and more
courtly. Reproaching the Emperor of Austria with ingratitude, he
announced his political policy; to wit, that Russia would hold Austria
in check, while he and Alexander divided the East between them without
reference to Francis, unless the latter should disarm and recognize
Joseph as king of Spain. Tolstoi remained frigid throughout the long
harangue. It was he who had declared and repeated that eventually
Napoleon, having humbled Austria, would attack Russia. A fortnight
earlier, in an interview with the stern old Russian, the Emperor had
asseverated the contrary, but to no effect: Tolstoi had shown no
symptoms of faith or conviction. The address to Metternich was,
therefore, a second string to Napoleon's bow in case he should fail at
Erfurt to win Alexander. His general mien was undaunted and his tone
loftier than ever. The tenor of his private conversation with
Metternich and others was that he would rest content with what he had.
Spain would no longer be a danger in the rear, Austria and Russia
would be his allies, sharing in the mastery of the world, and England,
the irreconcilable enemy of them all, would be finally reduced to
ignominious surrender by the loss of her means of subsistence.