THE EMPIRE AT ITS HEIGHT
Napoleon's star had now risen to its zenith. After his marriage with a
daughter of the most ancient of continental dynasties, nothing seemed
lacking to his splendour. He had humbled Pope and Emperor alike:
Germany crouched at his feet: France, Italy, and the Confederation of
the Rhine gratefully acknowledged the benefits of his vigorous sway:
the Czar was still following the lead given at Erfurt: Sweden had
succumbed to the pressure of the two Emperors: and Turkey survived
only because it did not yet suit Napoleon to shear her asunder: he
must first complete the commercial ruin of England and drive
Wellington into the sea. Then events would at last be ripe for the
oriental schemes which the Spanish Rising had postponed.
He might well hope that England's strength was running out: near the
close of 1810 the three per cent. consols sank to sixty-five, and the
declared bankruptcies averaged 250 a month. The failure of the
Walcheren expedition had led to terrible loss of men and treasure, and
had clouded over the reputation of her leaders. After mutual
recriminations Canning and Castlereagh resigned office and fought a
duel. Shortly afterwards the Premier, the Duke of Portland, fell ill
and resigned: his place was taken by Mr. Perceval, a man whose sole
recommendation for the post was his conscientious Toryism and powers
of dull plodding. Ruled by an ill-assorted Ministry and a King whose
reason was now hopelessly overclouded, weakened by the strangling grip
of the Continental System, England seemed on the verge of ruin; and,
encouraged alike by the factious conduct of our parliamentary
Opposition and by Soult's recent conquest of Andalusia, Napoleon bent
himself to the final grapple by extending his coast system, and by
sending Masséna and his choicest troops into Spain to drive the
leopards into the sea.
The limits of our space prevent any description of the ensuing
campaign of Torres Vedras; and we must refer our readers to the ample
canvas of Napier if they would realize the sagacity of Wellington in
constructing to the north of Lisbon that mighty _tête de pont_ for the
Sea Power against Masséna's veteran army. After dealing the staggering
blow of Busaco at that presumptuous Marshal, our great leader fell
back, through a tract which he swept bare of supplies, on this sure
bulwark, and there watched the French host of some 65,000 men waste
away amidst the miseries of hunger and the rains and diseases of
autumn. At length, in November, Masséna drew off to positions near
Santarem, where he awaited the succour which Napoleon ordered Soult to
bring. It was in vain: Soult, puffed up by his triumphs in Andalusia,
was resolved to play his own game and reduce Badajoz; he won his point
but marred the campaign; and, at last, foiled by Wellington's skilful
tactics, Masséna beat a retreat northwards out of Portugal after
losing some 35,000 men (March, 1811). Wellington's success bore an
immeasurable harvest of results. The unmanly whinings of the English
Opposition were stilled; the replies of the Czar to Napoleon's demands
grew firmer; and the patriots of the Peninsula stiffened their backs
in a resistance so stubborn, albeit unskilful, that 370,000 French
troops utterly failed to keep Wellington in check, and to stamp out
the national defence in the summer of 1811.
In truth, Napoleon had exasperated the Spaniards no less than their
_soi disant_ king, by a series of provocations extending over the year
1810. On the plea that Spain must herself meet the expenses of the
war, he erected the four northern provinces into commands for French
generals, who were independent of his brother's authority and levied
all the taxes over that vast area (February). On May 29th he withdrew
Burgos and Valladolid from Joseph's control, and divided the greater
part of Spain for military and administrative purposes into districts
that were French satrapies in all but name. The decree was doubly
disastrous: it gave free play to the feuds of the French chiefs; and
it seemed to the Spaniards to foreshadow a speedy partition of Spain.
The surmise was correct. Napoleon intended to unite to France the
lands between the Pyrenees and the Ebro. Indeed, in his conception,
the conquest of Portugal was mainly desirable because it would provide
his brother with an indemnity in the west for the loss of his northern
provinces. Joseph's protests against such a partition of the land,
which Napoleon had sworn at Bayonne to keep intact, were disregarded;
but letters on this subject fell into the hands of the Spanish
guerillas and were published by order of the Regency at Cadiz.
Despised by the Spaniards, flouted by Napoleon, set at defiance by the
French satraps, and reduced wellnigh to bankruptcy, the puppet King
felt his position insupportable, and, hurrying to Paris, tendered his
resignation of the crown (May, 1811). In his anxiety to huddle up the
scandal, Napoleon appeased his brother, promised him one-fourth of the
taxes levied by the French commanders, and coaxed or drove him to
resume his thankless task at Madrid. But the doggedness of the
Emperor's resolve may be measured by the fact that, even when on the
brink of war with Russia, he defied Spanish national sentiment by
annexing Catalonia to France (March, 1812).
It seems strange that Napoleon did not himself proceed to Spain in
order to direct the operations in person and thus still the jealousies
of the Marshals which so hampered his armies. Wellington certainly
feared his coming. At a later date he told Earl Stanhope that Napoleon
was vastly superior to any of his Marshals: "There was nothing like
him. He suited a French army so exactly.... His presence on the field
made a difference of 40,000 men."[224] That estimate is certainly
modest if one looks not merely at tactics but at the strategy of the
whole Peninsular War. But the Emperor did not again come into Spain.
At the outset of 1810 he prepared to do so; but, as soon as the
Austrian marriage was arranged, he abandoned this salutary project.
There were thenceforth several reasons why he should remain in or near
Paris. His attentions to his young wife, and his desire to increase
the splendour of the Court, counted for much. Yet more important was
it to curb the clericals (now incensed at the imprisonment of the
Pope), and sharply to watch the intrigues of the royalists and other
malcontents. Public opinion, also, still needed to be educated; the
constant drain of men for the wars and the increase in the price of
necessaries led to grumblings in the Press, which claimed the presence
of his Argus eye and the adoption of a very stringent censorship.[225]
But, above all, there was the commercial war with England. This could
be directed best from Paris, where he could speedily hear of British
endeavours to force goods into Germany, Holland, or Italy, and of any
change in our maritime code.
Important as was the war in Spain, it was only one phase of his
world-wide struggle with the mistress of the seas; and he judged that
if she bled to death under his Continental System, the Peninsular War
must subside into a guerilla strife, Spain thereafter figuring merely
as a greater Vendée. Accordingly, the year 1810 sees the climax of his
great commercial experiment.
The first land to be sacrificed to this venture was Holland. For many
months the Emperor had been discontented with his brother Louis, who
had taken into his head the strange notion that he reigned there by
divine right. As Napoleon pathetically said at St. Helena, when
reviewing the conduct of his brothers, "If I made one a king, he
imagined that he was _King by the grace of God_. He was no longer my
lieutenant: he was one enemy more for me to watch." A singular fate
for this king-maker, that he should be forgotten and the holy oil
alone remembered! Yet Louis probably used that mediæval notion as a
shield against his brother's dictation. The tough Bonaparte nature
brooked not the idea of mere lieutenancy. He declined to obey orders
from the brother whom he secretly detested. He flatly refused to be
transferred from the Hague to Madrid, or to put in force the
burdensome decrees of the Continental System.
On his side, Napoleon upbraided him with governing too softly, and
with seeking popularity where he should seek control. After the
Walcheren expedition, he chid him severely for allowing the English
fleet ever to show its face in the Scheldt; for "the fleets of that
Power ought to find nothing but rocks of iron" in that river, "which
was as important to France as the Thames to England."[226] But the
head and front of his offending was that British goods still found
their way into Holland. In vain did the Emperor forbid that American
ships which had touched at English ports should be debarred from those
of Holland. In vain did he threaten to close the Scheldt and Rhine to
Dutch barges. Louis held on his way, with kindly patience towards his
merchants, and with a Bonapartist obstinacy proof against fraternal
advice or threats. At last, early in 1810, Napoleon sent troops to
occupy Walcheren and neighbouring Dutch lands. It seemed for a time as
though this was but a device to extort favourable terms of peace from
England in return for an offer that France would not annex Holland.
Negotiations to this effect were set on foot through the medium of
Ouvrard and Labouchere, son-in-law of the banker Baring: Fouché also,
without the knowledge of his master, ventured to put forth a
diplomatic feeler as to a possible Anglo-French alliance against the
United States, an action for which he was soon very properly
disgraced.[227]
The negotiation failed, as it deserved to do. Our objections were, not
merely to the absurd proposal that we should give up our maritime code
if Napoleon would abstain from annexing Holland and the Hanseatic
towns, but still more against the man himself and his whole policy. We
had every reason to distrust the good faith of the man who had
betrayed the Turks at Tilsit, Portugal at Fontainebleau, and the
Spaniards at Bayonne. To pause in the strife, to relax our hold on our
new colonies, and to desert the Spaniards, in order to preserve the
merely titular independence of Holland and the Hanse Towns, would have
been an act of singular simplicity. Nor does Napoleon seem to have
expected it. He wrote to his Foreign Minister, Champagny, on March
20th, 1810: "From not having made peace sooner, England has lost
Naples, Spain, Portugal, and the market of Trieste. If she delays much
longer, she will lose Holland, the Hanse Towns, and Sicily." And
surely this Sibylline conduct of his required that he should annex
these lands and all Europe in order to exact a suitable price from the
exhausted islanders. Such was the corollary of the Continental System.
Meanwhile Louis, nettled by the inquisitions of the French
_douaniers_, and by the order of his brother to seize all American
ships in Dutch ports, was drawing on himself further reproaches and
threats: "Louis, you are incorrigible ... you do not want to reign for
any length of time. States are governed by reason and policy, and not
by acrimony and weakness." Twenty thousand French troops were
approaching Amsterdam to bring him to reason, when the young ruler
decided to be rid of this royal mummery. On the night of July 1st he
fled from Haarlem, and travelled swiftly and secretly eastwards until
he reached Teplitz, in Bohemia. The ignominy of this flight rested on
the brother who had made kingship a mockery. The refugee left behind
him the reputation of a man who, lovable by nature but soured by
domestic discords, sought to shield his subjects from the ruin into
which the rigid application of the Continental System was certain to
plunge them. That fate now befell the unhappy little land. On July 9th
it was annexed to the French Empire, and all the commercial decrees
were carried out as rigidly at Rotterdam as at Havre.
At the close of the year, Napoleon's coast system was extended to the
borders of Holstein by the annexation of Oldenburg, the northern parts
of Berg, Westphalia, and Hanover, along with Lauenburg and the Hanse
Towns, Bremen, Hamburg, and Lübeck. The little Swiss Republic of
Valais was also absorbed in the Empire.
This change in North Germany, which carried the French flag to the
shores of the Baltic, was his final expedient for assuring England's
commercial ruin. As far back as February, 1798, he had recommended the
extension of French influence over the Hanse Towns as a means of
reducing his most redoubtable foe to surrender, and now there were two
special reasons for this annexation. First, the ships of Oldenburg had
been largely used for conveying British produce into North
Germany;[228] and secondly, the French commercial code was so rigorous
that no officials with even the semblance of independence could be
trusted with its execution. On August 5th a decree had been
promulgated at the Trianon, near Versailles, which imposed enormous
duties on every important colonial product. Cotton--especially that
from America--sugar, tea, coffee, cocoa, and other articles were
subjected to dues, generally of half their value and irrespective of
their place of production.
[Illustration: CENTRAL EUROPE AFTER 1810]
Traders were ordered to declare their possession of all colonial wares
and to pay the duty, under pain of confiscation. Depôts of such goods
within four days' distance from the frontiers of the Empire were held
to be clandestine; and troops were sent forthwith into Germany,
Switzerland, and Spain to seize such stores, a proceeding which
aroused the men of Stuttgart, Frankfurt, and Berne to almost open
resistance. It is difficult to see the reason for this decree, except
on the supposition that the Continental System did not stop British
imports, and that all tropical products were British.
Napoleon's own correspondence shows that he believed this to be so. At
that same time he issued orders that all colonial produce found at
Stettin should be confiscated because it was evidently English
property brought on American ships. He further recommended Murat and
Eugène to press hard on such wares in order to replenish their
exchequers and raise funds for restoring their commerce. Eugène must,
however, be careful to tax American and colonial cotton most heavily,
while letting in that of the Levant on favourable terms.
Jerome, too, was bidden rigorously to enforce the Trianon tariff in
Westphalia; and the hint was to be passed on to Prussia and the
Rhenish Confederation that, by subjecting colonial goods to these
enormous imposts, those States would gain several millions of francs
"and the loss would fall partly on English commerce and partly on the
smugglers."[229] In fact, all his acts and words at this time reveal
the densest ignorance, not only of political economy, but of the
elementary facts of commerce, as when he imagined that officials, who
were sufficiently hard worked with watching a nimble host of some
100,000 smugglers along an immense frontier, would also be able to
distinguish between Syrian and American cottons, and to exact 800
francs from 100 kilogrammes of the latter, as against 400 francs from
the former, or that six times as much could ever be levied on Chinese
teas as on other teas! Such a tariff called for a highly drilled army
of those sufficiently rare individuals, honest _douaniers_, endowed
also with Napoleonic activity and omniscience. But, as Chaptal
remarked, the Emperor had never thought much about the needs of
commerce, and he despised merchants as persons who had "neither a
faith nor a country, whose sole object was gain." His own notion about
commerce was that he could "make it manoeuvre like a regiment"; and
this military conception of trade led him to entertain the fond hope
that exchequers benefited by confiscation and prohibitive tariffs,
that a "national commerce" could be speedily built up by cutting off
imports, and that the burden of loss in the present commercial war
fell on England and not on the continental consumer.
Such was the penalty which the great man paid for scorning all new
knowledge as _idéalogie_. The principles set forth by Quesnay, Turgot,
and Adam Smith were to him mere sophistical juggling. He once said to
Mollien: "I seek the good that is practical, not the ideal best: the
world is very old: we must profit by its experience: it teaches that
old practices are worth more than new theories: you are not the only
one who knows trade secrets."[230] This was his general attitude
towards the exponents of new financial or commercial views. Indeed, we
can hardly think of this great champion of external control and state
intervention favouring the open-handed methods of _laisser faire_.
Unhappy France, that gave this motto to the world but let her greatest
ruler emphasize her recent reaction towards commercial mediævalism!
Luckless Emperor, who aspired to found the United States of Europe,
but outraged the principle which most surely and lastingly works for
international harmony, that of Free Trade!
While the Trianon tariff sought to hinder the import of England's
colonial products, or, failing that, to reap a golden harvest from
them, Napoleon further endeavoured to terrify continental dealers from
accepting any of her manufactures. His Fontainebleau decree of October
18th, 1810, ordered that all such goods should be seized and publicly
burnt; and five weeks later special tribunals were instituted for
enforcing these ukases and for trying all persons, whether smugglers
caught red-handed or shopkeepers who inadvertently offered for sale
the cottons of Lancashire or the silks of Bengal.
The canon was now complete. It only remained to convert the world to
the new gospel of pacific war. The results were soon clearly visible
in a sudden rise of prices throughout France, Germany, and Italy. Raw
cotton now fetched 10 to 11 francs, sugar 6 to 7 francs, coffee 8
francs, and indigo 21 francs, per pound, or on the average about ten
times the prices then ruling at London.[231] The reason for this
advantage to the English consumer and manufacturer is clear. England
swayed the tropics and held the seas; and, having a monopoly of
colonial produce, she could import it easily and abundantly, while the
continental purchaser had ultimately to pay for the risks incurred by
his shopkeeper, by British merchants, and by their smugglers, who "ran
in" from Heligoland, Jersey, or Sicily. These classes vied in their
efforts to prick holes in the continental decrees. Bargees and women,
dogs and hearses, were pressed into service against Napoleon. The
last-named device was for a time tried with much success near Hamburg,
until the French authorities, wondering at the strange increase of
funerals in a river-side suburb, peered into the hearses, and found
them stuffed full with bales of British merchandise. This gruesome
plan failing, others were tried. Large quantities of sand were brought
from the seashore, until, unfortunately for the housewives, some
inquisitive official found that it hailed from the West Indies.
Or again, devious routes were resorted to. Sugar was smuggled from
London into Germany by way of Salonica, that being now almost the only
neutral port open to British commerce. Thence it was borne in panniers
on the backs of mules over the Balkans to Belgrade, where it was
transferred to barges and carried up the Danube. Another illicit trade
route was from the desolate shores of Dalmatia through Hungary. The
writer of a pamphlet, "England, Ireland, and America," states that his
firm then employed 500 horses on and near that coast in carrying
British goods into Central Europe, and that the cost of getting them
into France was "about £28 per cwt., or more than fifty times the
present freight to Calcutta." In fact, the result of the Emperor's
economic experiments may be summed up in the statement of Chaptal that
the general run of prices in France was higher by one-third than it
was before 1789.
Now the merest tyro might see that the difference in price above the
normal level was paid by the consumer. The colonial producer, the
British merchant and shipper were certainly harassed, and trade was
dislocated; but, as Mollien observed, commerce soon adapted itself to
altered conditions; and merchants never parted with their wares
without getting hard cash or resorting to the primitive method of
barter. Money was also frequently melted down in France and Germany so
as to effect bargains with England in bars of metal. And so, in one
way or another, trade was carried on, with infinite discomfort and
friction, it is true; but it never wholly ceased even between England
and France direct.
In fact, Napoleon so clung to the old mercantilist craze of
stimulating exports in order that they might greatly exceed the
imports, as to favour the sending of agricultural produce to England,
provided that such cargoes comprised manufactured goods. He allowed
this privilege not only to his Empire but also to the Kingdom of
Italy.[232] The difficulty was that England would not receive the
manufactured goods of her enemies; and, as corn and cheese could not
be exported to England, unless a certain proportion of silk and cloths
went with them, the latter were got up so as to satisfy the French
customs officers and then cast into the sea. It is needless to add
that this export of manufactures to England, on which Napoleon prided
himself, was limited to showy but worthless articles, which were made
solely _ad usum delphinorum_.
It was fortunate for us that Napoleon entertained these crude ideas on
political economy; for his action opened for us a loophole of escape
from a very serious difficulty. At that time our fast growing
population was barely fed by our own wheat even after good seasons;
and Providence afflicted us in 1809 and 1810 with very poor harvests.
In 1810 the average price was 103 shillings the quarter, the highest
ever known except in 1800 and 1801; and as commerce was dislocated by
the Continental System and hand-labour was being largely replaced by
the new power-looms and improved spinning machinery, the outlook would
have been hopeless, had not our great enemy allowed us to import
continental corn. This device, which he imagined would impoverish us
to enrich his own States, was the greatest aid that he could have
rendered to our hard-pressed social system; and readers of Charlotte
Brontë's realistic sketches of the Luddite rioting in Yorkshire may
imagine what would have befallen England if, besides lack of work and
low wages, there had been the added horrors of a bread famine. But
fortunately the curious commercial notions harboured by our foe
enabled us in the winter of 1810-11 to get supplies of corn not only
from Prussia and Poland but even from Italy and France.
In one sense this incident has been misunderstood. It has been
referred to by Porter[233] and other hopeful persons as proof positive
that as long as we can buy corn we shall get it, even from our
enemies. It proves nothing of the sort. Napoleon's correspondence and
his whole policy with regard to licences, which we shall presently
examine, shows clearly that he believed he would greatly benefit his
own States and impoverish our people by selling us large stores of
corn at a very high price. There is no hint in any of his letters that
he ever framed the notion of _starving_ us into surrender. All that he
looked to was the draining away of our wealth by cutting off our
exports, and by allowing imports to enter our harbours much as usual.
As long as he prevented us selling our produce, he heeded little how
much we bought from his States: in fact, the more we bought, the
sooner we should be bankrupt--such was his notion.
It is strange that he never sought to cut off our corn-supplies. They
were then drawn almost entirely from the Baltic ports. The United
States and Canada had as yet only sent us a few driblets of corn. La
Plata and the Cape of Good Hope were quite undeveloped; and our
settlements in New South Wales were at that time often troubled by
dearth. The plan of sealing up the cornfields of Europe from Riga to
Trieste would have been feasible, at least for a few weeks; French
troops held Danzig and Stettin; Russia, Prussia, and Denmark were at
his beck and call; and an imperial decree forbidding the export of
corn from France and her allied States to the United Kingdom could
hardly have failed to reduce us to starvation and surrender in the
very critical winter of 1810-11. But that strange mental defect of
clinging with ever increasing tenacity to preconceived notions led
Napoleon to allow and even to favour exports of corn to us in the time
of our utmost need; and Britain survived the strain.[234]
What folly, however, to refer to the action of this man of one
economic idea as being likely to determine the conduct of continental
statesmen in some future naval war with England. In truth, the urgency
of the problem of our national food-supply in time of a great war can
only be fully understood by those who have studied the Napoleonic era.
England then grew nearly enough corn for her needs; her fleets swept
the seas; and Napoleon's economic hobby left her foreign food-supply
unhampered at the severest crisis. Yet, even so, the price of the
quartern loaf rose to more than fifteenpence, and we were brought to
the verge of civil war. A comparison of that time with the conditions
that now prevail must yield food for reflection to all but the
case-hardened optimists.
But already Napoleon was convinced that the Continental System must be
secretly relaxed in special cases. Despite the fulsome addresses which
some Chambers of Commerce sent up, he knew that his seaports were in
the depths of distress, and that French cotton manufacturers could not
hope to compete with those of Lancashire now that his own tariff had
doubled the price of raw cotton and dyes in France. He therefore hit
upon the curious device of allowing continental merchants to buy
licences for the privilege of secretly evading his own decrees. The
English Government seems to have been the first to issue similar
secret permits; but Napoleon had scarcely signed his Berlin Decree for
the blockade of England before he connived at its infraction. When
sugar, coffee, and other comforts became scarce, they were secretly
imported from perfidious Albion for the imperial table. The final
stage was reached in July, 1810, when licences to import forbidden
goods were secretly sold to favoured merchants, and many
officials--among them Bourrienne--reaped a rich harvest from the sale
of these imperial indulgences. Merchants were so eager to evade the
hated laws that they offered high prices to the treasury and
_douceurs_ to officials for the coveted boon; and as much as £40,000
is said to have been paid for a single licence.
On both sides of the Channel this device was abhorred, but its results
were specially odious in Napoleon's States, where the burdens to be
evaded were far heavier than those entailed by the Orders in Council.
In fact, the Continental System was now seen to be an organized
hypocrisy, which, in order to ruin the mistress of the seas, exposed
the peoples to burdens more grievous than those borne by England, and
left all but the wealthiest merchants a prey to a grinding fiscal
tyranny. And the sting of it all was its social injustice; for while
the poor were severely punished, sometimes with death, for smuggling
sugar or tobacco, Napoleon and the favoured few who could buy licences
often imported these articles in large quantities. What wonder, then,
that Russia and Sweden should decline long to endure these gratuitous
hardships, and should seek to evade the behests of the imperial
smuggler of the Tuileries!
Nevertheless, as no inventive people can ever be thrown wholly on its
own resources without deriving some benefit, we find that France met
the crisis with the cheery patience and unflagging ingenuity which she
has ever evinced. In a great Empire which embraced all the lands
between Hamburg, Bayonne, and Rome, not to mention Illyria and
Dalmatia, a great variety of products might readily reward the
inventor and the husbandman. Tobacco, rice, and cotton could be reared
in the southern portions. Valiant efforts were also made to get
Asiatic produce overland, so as to disappoint the English cruisers;
and the coffee of Arabia was taxed very lightly, so as to ruin the
American producer. When the fragrant berry became more and more
scarce, chicory was discovered by good patriots to be a palatable
substitute, and scientific men sought to induce French manufacturers
to use the isatis plant instead of indigo. Prizes were offered by the
State and by local Chambers of Commerce to those who should make up
for the lack of tropical goods and dyes.
A notable discovery was made by Chaptal and Delessert, who improved on
Markgraf's process of procuring sugar from beetroot and made it a
practical success. Napoleon also hoped that a chemical substitute for
indigo had been found, and exclaimed to a doleful deputation of
merchants, who came to the Tuileries in the early summer of 1811, that
chemistry would soon revolutionize commerce as completely as the
discovery of the compass had done. Besides, the French Empire was the
richest country in the world, and could almost do without foreign
commerce, at least until England had given way; and that would soon
come to pass; for the pressure of events would soon compel London
merchants to throw their sugar and indigo into the Thames.[235]
In reality, he placed commerce far behind agriculture, which he
considered to be the basis of a nation's wealth and a nation's health.
But he also took a keen interest in manufactures. The silk industry at
Lyons found in him a generous patron. He ordered that the best
scientific training should there be given, so as to improve the
processes of manufacture; and, as silk of nearly all kinds could be
produced in France and Italy, Lyons was comparatively prosperous.
When, however, it suffered from the general rise of prices and from
the impaired buying power of the community, he adopted heroic
remedies. He ordered that all ships leaving France should carry silk
fabrics equal in value to one-fourth of the whole freight; but whether
these stuffs went to adorn women or mermaids seems an open question.
Or again, on the advice of Chaptal, the Emperor made large purchases
of surplus stocks of Lyons silk, Rouen cottons, and Ste. Antoine
furniture, so as to prevent an imminent collapse of credit and a
recrudescence of Jacobinism in those industrial centres; for as he
said: "I fear a rising brought about by want of bread: I had rather
fight an army of 200,000 men than that."[236]
In the main, this policy of giving _panem et circenses_ was successful
in France; at least, it kept her quiet. The national feeling ran
strongly in favour of commercial prohibition. In 1787 Arthur Young
found the cotton-workers of the north furious at the recent inroads of
Lancashire cottons, while the wine-growers of the Garonne were equally
favourable to the enlightened Anglo-French commercial treaty of 1786.
It was Napoleon's lot to win the favour of the rigid protectionists,
while not alienating that of the men of the Gironde, who saw in him
the champion of agrarian liberty against the feudal nobles. Moreover,
the nation still cherished the pathetic belief that the war was due to
Albion's perfidy respecting Malta, and burned with a desire to
chastise the recreant islanders. For these reasons, Frenchmen endured
the drain of men and money with but little show of grumbling.
They were tired of the wars. _We have had enough glory_, they said,
even in the capital itself, and an acute German observer describes the
feeling there as curiously mixed. Parisian gaiety often found vent in
lampoons against the Emperor; and much satire at his expense might
with safety be indulged in among a crowd, provided it were seasoned
with wit. The people seemed not to fear Napoleon, as he was feared in
Germany: the old revolutionary party was still active and might easily
become far more dangerous than the royalist coteries of the Boulevard
St. Germain. For the rest, they were all so accustomed to political
change that they looked on his government as provisional, and put up
with him only as long as the army triumphed abroad and he could make
his power felt at home. Such was the impression of Paris gained by
Varnhagen von Ense. Public opinion in the provinces seems to have been
more favourable to Napoleon; and, on the whole, pride in the army and
in the vigorous administration which that nation loves, above all,
hatred of England and the hope of wresting from her the world's
empire, led the French silently to endure rigorous press laws,
increased taxes, war prices, licences, and chicory.
For Germans the hardships were much greater and the alleviations far
less. They had no deep interest in Malta or in the dominion of the
seas; and political economy was then only beginning to dawn on the
Teutonic mind. The general trend of German thought had inclined
towards the _Everlasting Nay_, until Napoleon flashed across its ken.
For a time he won the admiration of the chief thinkers of Germany by
brushing away the feudal cobwebs from her fair face. He seemed about
to call her sons to a life of public activity; and in the famous
soliloquy of Faust, in which he feels his way from word to thought,
from thought to might, and from might to action, we may discern the
literary projection of the influence exerted by the new Charlemagne on
that nation of dreamers.[237] But the promise was fulfilled only in
the most harshly practical way, namely, by cutting off all supplies of
tobacco and coffee; and when Teufelsdröckh himself, admirer though he
was of the French Revolution, found that the summons for his favourite
beverage--the "dear melancholy coffee, that begets fancies," of
Lessing--produced only a muddy decoction of acorns, there was the risk
of his tendencies earthwards taking a very practically revolutionary
turn.
In truth, the German universities were the leaders of the national
reaction against the Emperor of the West. Fichte's pleading for a
truly national education had taken effect. Elementary instruction was
now being organized in Prussia; and the divorce of thought from
action, which had so long sterilized German life, was ended by the
foundation of the University of Berlin by Humboldt. Thus, in 1810, the
year of Prussia's deepest woe, when her brave Queen died of a stricken
heart, when French soldiers and _douaniers_ were seizing and burning
colonial wares, her thinkers came into closer touch with her men of
action, with mutually helpful results. Thinkers ceased to be mere
dreamers, and Prussian officials gained a wider outlook on life. The
life of beneficent activity, to which Napoleon might have summoned the
great majority of Germans, dawned on them from Berlin, not from Paris.
His influence was more and more oppressive. The final results of his
commercial decrees on the trade of Hamburg were thus described by
Perthes, a well-known writer and bookseller of that town: "Of the 422
sugar-boiling houses, few now stood open: the printing of cottons had
ceased entirely: the tobacco-dressers were driven away by the
Government. The imposition of innumerable taxes, door and window,
capitation and land taxes, drove the inhabitants to despair." But the
same sagacious thinker was able to point the moral of it all, and
prove to his friends that their present trials were due to the selfish
particularism of the German States: "It was a necessity that some
great power should arise in the midst of the degenerate selfishness of
the times and also prove victorious, for there was nothing vigorous to
oppose it. Napoleon is an historical necessity."[238]
Thus, both in the abodes of learning and in the centres of industry
men were groping after a higher unity and a firmer political
organization, which, after the Napoleonic deluge had swept by, was to
lay the foundation of a New Germany.
To all appearances, however, Napoleon's power seemed to be more firmly
established than ever in the ensuing year. On March 20th, 1811, a son
was born to him. At the crisis of this event, he revealed the warmth
of his family instincts. On hearing that the life of mother or infant
might have to be sacrificed, he exclaimed at once, "Save the
mother."[239] When the danger was past, he very considerately informed
Josephine, stating, "he has my chest, my mouth and my eyes. I trust
that he will fulfil his destiny." That destiny was mapped out in the
title conferred on the child, "King of Rome," which was designed to
recall the title "King of the Romans," used in the Holy Roman Empire.
Napoleon resolved that the old elective dignity should now be renewed
in a strictly hereditary Empire, vaster than that of Charlemagne.
Paris was to be its capital, Rome its second city, and the future
Emperors were always to be crowned a second time at Rome. Furthermore,
lest the mediæval dispute as to the supremacy of Emperor or Pope in
Rome should again vex mankind, the Papacy was virtually annexed: the
status of the pontiff was defined in the most Erastian sense, imperial
funds were assigned for his support, and he was bidden to maintain two
palaces, "the one necessarily at Paris, the other at Rome."
It is impossible briefly to describe the various conflicts between
Pius VII. and Napoleon. Though now kept in captivity by Napoleon, the
Pope refused to ratify these and other ukases of his captor; and the
credit which Napoleon had won by his wordly-wise
Concordat was now lost by his infraction of many of its clauses and by
his harsh treatment of a defenceless old man. It is true that Pius had
excommunicated Napoleon; but that was for the crime of annexing the
Papal States, and public opinion revolted at the spectacle of an
all-powerful Emperor now consigning to captivity the man who in former
years had done so much to consolidate his authority. After the
disasters of the Russian campaign, he sought to come to terms with the
pontiff; but even then the bargain struck at Fontainebleau was so hard
that his prisoner, though unnerved by ill-health, retracted the unholy
compromise. Whereupon Napoleon ordered that the cardinals who advised
this step should be seized and carried away from Fontainebleau. Few of
Napoleon's actions were more harmful than this series of petty
persecutions; and among the influences that brought about his fall, we
may reckon the dignified resistance of the pontiff, whose meekness
threw up in sharp relief the pride and arrogance of his captor. The
Papacy stooped, but only to conquer.
For the present, everything seemed to favour the new Charlemagne.
Never had the world seen embodied might like that of Napoleon's
Empire; and well might he exclaim at the birth of the King of Rome,
"Now begins the finest epoch of my reign." All the auguries seemed
favourable. In France, the voice of opposition was all but hushed.
Italians, Swiss, and even some Spaniards, helped to keep down Prussia.
Dutchmen and Danes had hunted down Schill for him at Stralsund. Polish
horsemen had charged up the Somosierra Pass against the Spanish guns,
and did valiant service on the bloody field of Albuera. The
Confederation of the Rhine could send forth 150,000 men to fight his
battles. The Hapsburgs were his vassals, and only faint shadows of
discord as yet clouded his relations with Alexander. One of his
Marshals, Bernadotte, had been chosen to succeed to the crown of
Sweden; and at the other end of Europe, it seemed that Wellington and
the Spanish patriots must ultimately succumb to superior numbers.
Surely now was the time for the fulfilment of those glowing oriental
designs beside which his European triumphs seemed pale. In the autumn
of 1810 he sent agents carefully to inspect the strongholds of Egypt
and Syria, and his consuls in the Levant were ordered to send a report
every six months on the condition of the Turkish Empire.[240] Above
all, he urged on the completion of dockyards and ships of war. Vast
works were pushed on at Antwerp and Cherbourg: ships and gunboats were
to be built at every suitable port from the Texel to Naples and
Trieste; and as the result of these labours, the Emperor counted on
having 104 ships of the line, which would cover the transports from
the Mediterranean, Cherbourg, Boulogne and the Scheldt, and threaten
England with an array of 200,000 fighting men.[241]
In March, 1811, this plan was modified, possibly because, as in 1804,
he found the difficulties of a descent on our coasts greater than he
first imagined. He now seeks merely to weary out the English in the
present year. But in the next year, or in 1813, he will send an
expedition of 40,000 men from the Scheldt, as if to menace Ireland;
and, having thrown us off our guard, he will divide that force into
four parts for the recovery of the French and Dutch colonies in the
West Indies. He counts also on having a part of his army in Spain free
for service elsewhere: it must be sent to seize Sicily or Egypt.
But this was not all. His thoughts also turn to the Cape of Good Hope.
Eight thousand men are to sail from Brest to seize that point of
vantage at which he had gazed so longingly in 1803. Of these plans,
the recovery of Egypt evidently lay nearest to his heart. He orders
the storage at Toulon of everything needful for an Egyptian
expedition, along with sixty gun-vessels of light draught suitable for
the navigation of the Nile or of the lakes near the coast.[242] Decrès
is charged to send models of these craft; and we may picture the eager
scrutiny which they received. For the Orient was still the pole to
which Napoleon's whole being responded. Turned away perforce by wars
with Austria, Russia, Prussia, and Spain, it swung round towards Egypt
and India on the first chance of European peace, only to be driven
back by some untoward shock nearer home. In 1803 he counted on the
speedy opening of a campaign on the Ganges. In 1811 he proposes that
the tricolour shall once more wave on the citadel of Cairo, and
threaten India from the shores of the Red Sea. But a higher will than
his disposed of these events, and ordained that he should then be
flung back from Russia and fight for his Empire in the plains of
Saxony.
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