THE FRANKFORT PROPOSALS[4]
[Footnote 4: References: Fain: Manuscrit de 1814. Rothenburg:
Die Schlacht bei Leipzig im Jahre 1813.]
Importance of the Battle of Leipsic -- Decline of Napoleon's
Powers -- His Gentler Side -- Disintegration of Napoleon's Empire
-- The Coalition and the Sentiment of Nationality -- Reasons for
the Parley at Frankfort -- Insincerity of the Proposal --
Napoleon and France -- The Revolution and the Empire -- Hollow
Diplomacy.
The battle of Leipsic is one of the most important in general history.
Apparently it was only the offset to Austerlitz, as the Beresina had
been to Friedland. In reality it was far more, because it gave the
hegemony of continental Europe to Prussia. French imperialism in its
death-throes wiped out the score of royal France against the
Hapsburgs; Austria was not yet banished from central Europe to the
lower courses of the Danube, but, what was much the same thing,
Prussia was launched upon her career of military aggrandizement. Three
dynasties seemed in that battle to have celebrated a joint triumph; as
a matter of fact, the free national spirit of Germany, having narrowly
escaped being smothered by Napoleonic imperialism, had chosen a
national dynasty as its refuge. The conflict is well designated by
German historians as "the battle of the nations," but the language has
a different sense from that which is generally attributed to it. The
seeds of Italian unity had been sown, but they were not yet to
germinate. The battle of Leipsic seemed to check them, yet it was the
process there begun under which they sprang up and bore fruit. France
was destined to become for a time the sport of an antiquated dynastic
system. The liberties which men of English blood had been painfully
developing for a century she sought to seize in an instant; she was to
see them still elude her grasp for sixty years, until her democratic
life, having assumed consistency, should find expression in
institutions essentially and peculiarly her own. Though the conquering
monarchs believed that revolutionary liberalism had been quenched at
Leipsic, its ultimate triumph was really assured, since it was
consigned to its natural guardianship, that of national commonwealths.
The imperial agglomeration of races and nationalities was altogether
amorphous and had been found impossible; that form of union was not
again attempted after Leipsic, while another--that, namely, of
constitutional organic nationalities--was made operative. The
successive stages of advance are marked by 1813, 1848, and 1870.
The Saxon campaigns display the completion of the process in which the
great strategist, stifled by political anxieties, became the creature
of circumstances both as general and statesman. The Russian campaign
was nicely calculated, but its proportions and aim were those of the
Oriental theocrat, not of the prosaic European soldier. With the aid
of the railroad and the electric telegraph, they might possibly have
been wrought into a workable problem, but that does not excuse the
errors of premature and misplaced ambition. The Saxon campaigns,
again, are marked by a boldness of design and a skill in combination
characteristic of the best strategy; but again the proportions are
monstrous, and, what is worse, the execution is intermittent and
feeble. As in Russia, the war organism was insufficient for the
numbers and distances involved, while the subordinates of every grade,
though supple instruments, seemed mercenary, self-seeking, and
destitute of devotion. Bonaparte had ruled men's hearts by his use of
a cause, securing devotion to it and to himself by rude bonhomie, by
success, and by sufficient rewards; Napoleon, on the other hand,
quenched devotion by a lavishness which sated the greediest, and lost
the affections of his associates by the demands of his gigantic plans.
As the world-conqueror felt the foundations of his greatness
quivering, he became less callous and more human. Early in 1813 he
said: "I have a sympathetic heart, like another, but since earliest
childhood I have accustomed myself to keep that string silent, and now
it is altogether dumb." His judgment of himself was mistaken:
throughout the entire season he was strangely and exceptionally moved
by the horrors of war; his purse was ever open for the suffering; he
released the King of Saxony from his entangling engagements; in spite
of his hard-set expression on the retreat from Leipsic, he forbade his
men to fire the suburbs of the city in order to retard the pursuit of
their foes, and before he left Mainz for St. Cloud he showed the
deepest concern, and put forth the strongest effort, in behalf of the
dying soldiery.
The immediate effects of Leipsic were the full display of that
national spirit which had been refined, if not created, in the fires
of Napoleon's imperious career. An Austrian army under Hiller drove
Eugene over the Adige. The Italians, not unsusceptible to the power in
the air, felt their humiliation, and, turning on their imperial King
in bitter hate, determined, under the influence of feelings most
powerfully expressed by Alfieri, that they would emulate northern
Europe. But though they had for years been subject to the new
influences, enjoying the equal administration of the Code Napoleon,
and freed from the interference of petty local tyrants, they were
neither united nor enlightened in sufficient degree. After an outburst
of hatred to France, they were crushed by their old despots, and the
land relapsed into the direst confusion. The Confederation of the
Rhine was, however, resolved into its elements: the Mecklenburgs
reasserted their independence; King Jerome fled to France; Wuertemberg,
Hesse-Darmstadt, and Baden followed Bavaria's example; Cassel,
Brunswick, Hanover, and Oldenburg were craftily restored to their
former rulers before Stein's bureau could establish an administration.
Holland recalled the Prince of Orange, Spain rose to support
Wellington, and Soult was not merely driven over the Pyrenees--he was
defeated on French soil, and shut up in Bayonne.
Even the three monarchs, as they sedately moved across Germany with
their exhausted and battered armies, were aware of nationality as a
controlling force in the future. In a direct movement on Paris they
could, as Ney said, "have marked out their days in advance," but they
halted at Frankfort for a parley. There were several reasons why they
should pause. They had seen France rise in her might; they did not
care to assist at the spectacle again. Moreover, the coalition had
accomplished its task and earned its pay; not a Frenchman, except real
or virtual prisoners, was left east of the Rhine. From that point the
interests of the three monarchs were divergent. As Gentz, the Austrian
statesman, said, "The war for the emancipation of states bids fair to
become one for the emancipation of the people." Alexander, Frederick
William, and Francis were each and all anxious for the future of
absolutism, but otherwise there was mutual distrust. Austria was
suspicious of Prussia, and desired immediate peace. In the restoration
of Holland under English auspices, Russia saw the perpetuation of
British maritime and commercial supremacy, to the disadvantage of her
Oriental aspirations, and the old Russian party demanded peace. On the
other hand, Alexander wished to avenge Napoleon's march to Moscow by
an advance to Paris; and though Frederick William distrusted what he
called the Czar's Jacobinism, his own soldiers, thirsting for further
revenge, also desired to prosecute the war; even the most enlightened
Prussian statesmen believed that nothing short of a complete cataclysm
in France could shake Napoleon's hold on that people and destroy his
power. Offsetting these conflicting tendencies against one another,
Metternich was able to secure military inaction for a time, while the
coalition formulated a series of proposals calculated to woo the
French people, and thus to bring Napoleon at once to terms.
Ostensibly the Frankfort proposals, adopted on November ninth, were
only a slight advance on the ultimatum of Prague: Austria was to have
enough Italian territory to secure her preponderance in that
peninsula; France was to keep Savoy, with Nice; the rest of Italy was
to be independent. Holland and Spain liberated, France was to have her
"natural" boundaries, the Alps, the Pyrenees, the ocean, and the
Rhine. Napoleon was to retain a slight preponderance in Germany, and
the hope was held out that in a congress to settle details for a
general pacification, Great Britain, content with the "maritime
rights" which had caused the war, would hand back the captured French
colonies. The various ministers present at Frankfort assented to these
proposals for Great Britain, Austria, Russia, and Prussia
respectively; but Alexander and Frederick William were dissatisfied
with them, and when Castlereagh heard them, he was as furious as his
cold blood would permit at the thought of France retaining control of
the Netherlands, Antwerp being the commercial key to central Europe.
Such a humor in three of the high contracting parties makes it
doubtful whether the Frankfort proposals had any reality, and this
doubt is further increased by the circumstances of the so-called
negotiation. St. Aignan, the French envoy to the Saxon duchies, had in
violation of international law and courtesy been seized at Gotha and
held as a prisoner. He was now set free and instructed to urge upon
Napoleon the necessity of an immediate settlement. To his
brother-in-law, the pacific Caulaincourt, who was soon to displace
Maret as minister of foreign affairs, he was to hand a private and
personal letter from Metternich. In the course of this epistle the
writer expresses his conviction that any effort to conclude a peace
would come to nothing. Not only, therefore, were the pretended
negotiations entirely destitute of form, they were prejudged from the
outset. Still further, the allies refused what Napoleon had granted
after Bautzen, an armistice, and insisted that hostilities were to
proceed during negotiation. All possible doubt as to the sincerity of
the proposals is turned into assurance by Metternich's admission in
his memoirs that they were intended to divorce Napoleon from the
French nation, and in particular to work on the feelings of the army.
He says that neither Alexander nor Frederick William would have
assented to them had they not been convinced that Napoleon would
"never in the world of his own accord" resolve to accept them. Yet the
world has long believed that Napoleon, as he himself expressed it,
lost his crown for Antwerp; that had he believed the honeyed words of
the Austrian minister, and opened negotiations on an indefinite basis
without delay, he might have kept France with its revolutionary
boundaries intact for himself and his dynasty, and by the sacrifice of
his imperial ambitions have retained for her, if not preponderance, at
least importance in the councils of Europe.
Neither Napoleon nor the French nation was deceived; a peace made
under such circumstances could result only in a dishonorable tutelage
to the allied sovereigns. France abhorred the dynasties and all their
works, believing that dynastic rule could never mean anything except
absolutism and feudalism. The experiment of popular sovereignty
wielded by a democracy had been a failure; but the liberal French,
like men of the same intelligence throughout Europe, did not, for all
that, lose faith in popular sovereignty; they knew there must be some
channel for its exercise. Outside of France, as in it, the most
enlightened opinion of the time regarded Napoleon as the savior of
society. The Queen of Saxony bitterly reproached Metternich for having
deserted Napoleon's "sacred cause." This was because the Emperor of
the French seemed to have used the people's power for the people's
good. His giant arm alone could wield the popular majesty. It is said
that the great mass of the French nation, on hearing of the Frankfort
proposals, groaned and laughed by turns. Being profoundly, devotedly
imperialist and therefore idealistic, they were outraged at the
thought of Hapsburgs, Romanoffs, or Hohenzollerns, the very
incarnations of German feudality, as leaders of the new Europe. It
seemed the irony of fate that civil and political rights on the basis,
not of privilege, but of manhood, the prize for which the world had
been turned upside down, should be intrusted to such keepers. Welded
into a homogeneous nationality themselves, the French could not
understand that the inchoate nationalities in other states had as yet
nothing but dynastic forms of expression, or foresee that during a
century to come the old dynasties would find safety only in adapting
royalty to national needs.
Napoleon seems to have been fully aware of French sentiment. In
addition, he understood that not merely for this sufficient reason
could he never be king of France in name or fact, but also that,
having elsewhere harried and humiliated both peoples and dynasties in
the name of revolutionary ideals, the masses had found him out, and
were as much embittered as their rulers, believing him to be a
charlatan using dazzling principles as a cloak for personal ambition.
In May, 1813, the Emperor Francis, anxious to salve the lacerated
pride of the Hapsburgs, produced a bundle of papers purporting to
prove that the Bonapartes had once been ruling princes at Treviso. "My
nobility," was Napoleon's stinging reply, "dates only from Marengo."
He well knew that when the battle should be fought that would undo
Marengo, his nobility would end. In other words, without solid French
support he was nothing, and that support he was fully aware he could
never have as king of France. If the influence of what France
improperly believed to be solely the French Revolution were to be
confined to her boundaries, revolutionary or otherwise, not only was
Napoleon's prestige destroyed, but along with it would go French
leadership in Europe. An imperial throne there must be, exerting
French influence far abroad. What happened at Paris, therefore, may be
regarded as a counter-feint to Metternich's effort at securing an
advantageous peace from the French nation when it should have
renounced Napoleon. It was merely an attempt to collect the remaining
national strength, not now for aggressive warfare, but for the
expulsion of hated invaders.
Having received no formulated proposition for acceptance or rejection,
and desiring to force one, the Emperor of the French virtually
disregarded the letter of Metternich's communication, and sent a
carefully considered message to the allies. Making no mention in this
of the terms brought by St. Aignan, he suggested Caulaincourt as
plenipotentiary to an international congress, which should meet
somewhere on the Rhine, say at Mannheim. Further, he declared that his
object had always been the independence of all the nations, "from the
continental as well as from the maritime point of view." This
communication reached Frankfort on November sixteenth, and, whether
wilfully or not, was misinterpreted to mean that the writer would
persist in questioning England's maritime rights. Thereupon Metternich
replied by accepting Mannheim as the place for the proposed
conference, and promised to communicate the language of Napoleon's
letter to his co-allies. How far these co-allies were from a sincere
desire for peace is proven by their next step, taken almost on the
date of Metternich's reply. A proclamation was widely posted in the
cities of France, which stated, in a cant borrowed from Napoleon's own
practice, that the allies desired France "to be great, strong, and
prosperous"; they were making war, it was asserted, not "on France,
but on that preponderance which Napoleon had too long exercised, to
the misfortune of Europe and of France herself, to which they
guaranteed in advance an extent of territory such as she never had
under her kings." Napoleon's riposte was to despatch a swarm of trusty
emissaries throughout France in order to compose all quarrels of the
people with the government, to strengthen popular devotion in every
possible way--in short, to counteract the possible effects of this
call. The messengers found public opinion thoroughly imperial, but
profoundly embittered against Maret as the supposed instigator of
disastrous wars. Maret was transferred to the department of state, and
the pacific Caulaincourt was made minister of foreign affairs. On
December second, at the earliest possible moment, the new minister
addressed a note to Metternich, accepting the terms of the "general
and summary basis." This, said the despatch, would involve great
sacrifices; but Napoleon would feel no regret if only by a similar
abnegation England would provide the means for a general, honorable
peace. Metternich replied that nothing now stood in the way of
convening a congress, and that he would notify England to send a
plenipotentiary. There, however, the matter ended, and Metternich's
record of those Frankfort days scarcely notices the subject, so
interested is he in the squabbles of the sovereigns over the opening
of a new campaign. It was the end of the year when they reached an
agreement.