With the Treaty of Schoenbrunn Napoleon secured possession of
Carniola, the Austrian part of Istria, Croatia, the military frontiers
from the Save to the sea, and also certain districts of Carinthia,
Styria and Tirol. Now at last the Adriatic littoral, with large tracts
of the interior, was united under one hand. We may note that Eugene
Beauharnais in vain entreated that the frontier for the Slovenes
should, on account of strategic necessities, be drawn to the east of
the Isonzo, but Napoleon did not hesitate to make that river the
boundary between the two countries, as it was between the two races.
Mazzini in 1860 shared this opinion, which he had also maintained in
1831, in his book _The Rights of Man_, that Slavs and Italians should
be divided by this river. And in 1860 Cavour expressed himself to the
same effect in a letter to Laurent Valerio.
"Mes braves Croates," says Napoleon in his Memoirs; and for what he
did in this Illyria, the forerunner of our Yugoslavia, they must be
always thankful. Never had these people had such able administrators,
such sympathetic governors. They governed it too much as if it were a
part of France, but they were doing their utmost to understand the
people and their customs. General Marmont acquired an excellent
knowledge of the Serbo-Croat language; he intended to introduce the
national tongue into all the public offices. But this naturally could
not be carried through without an intervening period, and unluckily
Marmont so far excelled his compatriots as a linguist, that when the
newspaper _Telegraphe officiel des Provinces Illyriennes_ appeared at
Ljubljana, the capital (under the brilliant editorship of Charles
Nodier, who came out from France for that purpose), and it was
announced that there would be French, German, Italian and Slav
articles, the latter do not appear to have been published. Illyria was
under the influence of its neighbours, Italian, German and Hungarian,
with regard to the spoken and still more with regard to the written
language. A fundamental necessity was that the country should have one
common language. Under French influence Joachim Stulli brought out his
_Vocabulario italiano-illyrico-latino_ in 1810, and at Triest in 1812
Star[vc]evi['c] published his new Illyrian grammar. There was visible
in these works an aspiration that some day the Yugoslavs would be
united in one country and with various dialects, and the proviso that
for public affairs and for schools and literature the so-called
"[vS]to" dialect, the most widely spread and the most perfect, should
be given preference. If Napoleon had not fallen, his Illyria would no
doubt have gradually attracted to herself the other Yugoslav provinces
that still were under the Austrian, Hungarian or Turk; and in this way
one of the great thorns would have been taken out of Europe's side.
There was an official, Marcel de Serres, on Napoleon's staff, who was
exclusively concerned with Yugoslav affairs; and it is probable that
with a closer knowledge of the people there would have been less
insistence on the radical reforms which were sometimes ill-adapted to
the country and were often hated vehemently by the persons whom they
shook out of their age-long comatose condition. Napoleon would have
modified the methods of recruiting had he known how much resentment
his conscription was arousing. Venice had obtained most faithful
soldiers; this was one of the few trades that she permitted, but she
had never said they were obliged to serve. Napoleon's system caused
great numbers of desertions, while the men who stayed had little
discipline and looked for opportunities to join the enemy. Perhaps in
time the nobles would have been resigned to losing, if not all, at any
rate a portion of their privileges; and the Catholic clergy would have
moderated their strong views against the gaoler of Pius VII., the
champion of liberal and emancipated France, the master of Dandolo, who
wanted to reduce the number of bishoprics, oblige candidates for the
priesthood to learn certain lay subjects and regulate the funds in the
possession of the Orders, with the purpose of assisting the indigent
clergy and benevolent institutions--much would have been forgiven by
the clergy to the man who brought about national union.