THE PEACE OF LUNEVILLE[18]
[Footnote 18: For the four years of the Consulate see the
memoirs of Lavalette, Barante, Mme. de Chastenay,
Chateaubriand, Duport de Cheverny, Mme. de Genlis, Miot de
Melito, Ouvrard, Savary, Thibaudeau, Thiebault, and Mme.
Vigee-Lebrun; Lady Morgan's Memoirs and Autobiography, Mme.
de Stael: Dix annees d'exil; the travels of Sir John Carr,
translated into French with notes by Albert Babeau; Arnault:
Souvenirs de Lacretelle, Histoire du Consulat; Stenger: La
Societe Francaise pendant le Consulat; Du Casse: Histoire des
negociations relatives aux traites de Luneville et d'Amiens;
Bailleu: Preussen und Frankreich von 1795 bis 1807; Beer:
Zehn Jahre Oesterreichischer Politik; Daudet: Les Bourbons et
la Russie; Beauchamp: Vie de Moreau; Lemaire: Vie de Moreau;
Forneron: Histoire de l'Emigration; Daudet: l'Emigration.]
Hostilities in Germany -- Moreau's Position -- Battle of
Hohenlinden Moreau's Renown -- The Peace of Luneville -- The Czar
Withdraws from the Coalition -- The Temper of France Bonaparte
and the Plain People -- His Capacity for Work His Social Defects
-- His Strength and Independence The Emigrant Nobility -- Their
Return -- Their Treatment.
On the opening of hostilities in Germany, the Austrians held a
position of great strength behind the Inn. Moreau's line was near
Munich, skirting the forests on the Isar. To strengthen his force,
troops enough were sent to raise his numbers to about a hundred
thousand men, and twenty-five thousand were stationed under Augereau
on the Main. Massena, whose ever more pronounced republicanism had not
passed unnoticed at Paris, was found guilty of bad administration in
Italy, and was replaced by Brune. This eclipse was, as it was intended
to be, only temporary. Murat was stationed in central Italy to watch
Naples; Macdonald stood in the Grisons with fifteen thousand troops,
ready to turn north or south at a moment's notice, as exigency should
demand. The time had come for the conclusive blow where alone it could
be delivered, in Bavaria.
The defensive position of the Archduke John was very strong. Moreau
had carefully studied the advantages for battle of the high plain on
which he himself stood, and in the raw, damp days of early winter
reluctantly began to prepare for an advance. His enemy, with the
over-confidence of youth, made ready simultaneously to abandon all the
strength of his position, and likewise moved forward. The French could
hardly believe their senses when, on December first, their left was
checked in its advance and driven back by what was evidently the main
army of their enemy. Moreau made ready to receive the Austrians on
familiar ground. The evening of the next day found his army arrayed
near Hohenlinden, eighteen miles east of Munich, so that every avenue
of approach by the neighboring forests was in their hands, and every
road to Munich closed.
[Sidenote: 1800--01]
The famous battle began on the morning of December fourth. It opened
at half-past seven, the main attack being on the center. Moreau,
supported by Grenier, Ney, and Grouchy, easily sustained the onset,
while right and left the wings began to infold the Austrians, who were
now blundering through the unknown woodland paths. When all was ready,
Ney and Grouchy were suddenly detached to break through and join their
forces to those of Richepanse, which had reached the Austrian rear.
The manoeuver was successfully accomplished, and by three in the
afternoon the day was won for the French, with a loss that was slight
in comparison with that of the Austrians, which was upward of twenty
thousand killed and wounded, besides much artillery and immense
stores. The flight was a rout, and even the Archduke narrowly escaped
capture. Moreau's pursuit was sharp, and a fortnight later he was
within easy reach of Vienna, where confusion and terror would have
reigned supreme had not the Archduke Charles been persuaded to resume
the chief command in the extremity. Fortunately also for Francis, this
rapidity had left Augereau's corps in danger from the possible advance
of Klenau, and, much as Moreau would have liked to eclipse his rival
in Paris, he dared go no further, and was compelled to rest content
with having won a victory greater than any Bonaparte had gained. The
campaign was of course ended, and to release Augereau from all menace
an armistice was signed at Steyer on Christmas day. In Italy, Brune
had with difficulty advanced to Trent on the Adige. He was there to
join Macdonald, whose feat of leading fifteen thousand men across the
Spluegen in the heart of winter had scarcely attracted the attention it
deserved.
The sober judgment of posterity in the light of the fullest
information is that well-nigh every movement of both the Austrian and
French armies at Hohenlinden was haphazard and bungling, the former
ignorant, the latter lucky. But what with an open road to Vienna on
the north and the prompt successes of the French forces south of the
Alps, the consequences were decisive. Moreau enjoyed a renown in
France that was, though fictitious, of enormous political value. The
First Consul must be the first in generous recognition so as not to
alienate an important group of republican supporters; he was quick to
see it and to use the fruits of victory.
Hohenlinden brought matters at Luneville to a speedy conclusion. A
separate peace for Austria was signed on February ninth, 1801, which
virtually shattered the time-honored Hapsburg policy of territorial
expansion. Her line in northern Italy was fixed at the Adige; the
Grand Duke of Tuscany lost his land, and, like him of Modena, received
no other compensation except a grant from the Breisgau in Germany; the
Rhine, from source to mouth, was to be the French boundary; and the
temporal princes so maimed were to be indemnified by the
secularization of the ecclesiastical lands on the right bank. Austria
was thus not only left insignificant in Italy, she was deprived of her
independent station as a great power in Europe; she was even
threatened in her Germanic ascendancy, for the spiritual princes of
the empire were her main support in the Diet, and the diminution of
their numbers meant the supremacy of Prussia in Germany. The treaty
was negotiated for France by Joseph Bonaparte; it was signed by
Austria, not only for herself, but for the Germanic body, in which,
according to its terms, the First Consul might, if necessary,
intervene in order to secure the execution of the stipulations made in
the document.
Such provisions could only mean either the permanent humiliation of
Austria, or the resumption of hostilities whenever recruited strength
would permit. It is doubtful whether they would have been accepted
even then had not the First Consul finally succeeded in winning the
Czar to his cause. It will be remembered that in the previous year the
cession of Malta to Russia had been suggested by the French envoy at
St. Petersburg. This was, of course, another step in the process of
widening the dissension already created in the coalition. The
proposition had been received by the Czar with great delight; and
when, on September fifth, 1800, the English compelled the French
garrison of that fortress to capitulate, and, careless of the Grand
Master's rights, entered on full possession of the island, Paul,
openly accusing England and Austria of treachery, entered an "armed
neutrality" with Sweden, Denmark, and Prussia to check English
aggression at sea. The real motive of Frederick William III in joining
this movement was to repress Austria's aspirations for the annexation
of Bavarian lands. He persisted in his neutrality, and would make no
alliance with Bonaparte; but he was glad to see his rival weakened.
The Czar believed that by diminishing Austria's power in Italy that
state would be impotent to restrain Russia's ambition in the Orient.
One authority declares that the Czar had been assured by the First
Consul that he was about to restore the Bourbons, and would himself be
content with an Italian principality; but this is doubtful. So ardent
was the Russian autocrat, however, that he urged forward the
preparation of plans for the projected Franco-Russian expedition,
which was to march by way of Khiva and Herat, and strike at the heart
of England's power by the conquest of India. This was the first of
those sportive tricks which for years to come Bonaparte was so
triumphantly to play with the old dynasties of Europe. The success of
this combination temporarily secured the peace of the Continent on
terms most advantageous to himself.
The people of France were tired of the awful earnestness which had
characterized the philosophical and political upheavals of the
eighteenth century, and were ever more and more eager for glory and
for pleasure. This was true of all political schools, excepting only a
very few men of serious minds. The masses had come to loathe royalty.
They were living under what was called a republic, and when an
expression was needed for the national life as a whole they and their
writers employed the common classical term "empire." The word
"citizen," used in both genders as a form of address, recalled the
days of rude leveling. It had lasted through the Directory; with the
Consulate it disappeared, first from official documents, and then, in
spite of resistance by a few radicals, it soon gave place everywhere
to the old "monsieur" and "madame." In like manner the former habits
of polite society quietly reasserted themselves with the return to
prominence of those who had been trained in them. Liberty could no
longer be endangered by admirable usages whose connection with
monarchy was forgotten. Such incidents were significant of the
movement which, with the assured stability of the Consulate, brought
immediately to its service those persons who represented, not exactly
the greatness, but the capacity of France. Excepting that which was
resident in a few royalists and in a few radicals, the power of the
nation rallied to the support of the new order. When Daunou, Cabanis,
Gregoire, Carnot, and Lafayette were identified with the Consulate,
the Jacobinism which had turned the early nobility of the Revolution
into baseness might well hide its head. For a time, at least, the
majority believed that the highest aims of the Revolution were to be
attained under the new government.
The Bonapartes resided in the Luxembourg from November, 1799, to
February, 1800. In that short time a little coterie of visitors, with
many royalists in its number, had been regular in attendance; but the
republican side was studiously kept prominent, and thence the First
Consul had married his sister Caroline to Murat, the son of an
innkeeper at Cahors. During that period the anniversary of the death
of Louis XVI was stricken from the list of public festivals, but those
of July fourteenth, the storming of the Bastille, and of September
twenty-second, the founding of the republic, were kept. After the
installation of the family at the Tuileries, in February, 1800, there
was little change, except that a clever beginning was made in
ceremonial and etiquette, which augured further changes, and the
bearers of noble names became more and more prominent. "It is not
exactly a court," said the Princess Dolgoruki of the receptions, "but
it is no longer a camp." Toward those who aspired to the familiar
address of equality the First Consul grew more forbidding; to the
plain people in civil and military life he was always accessible, and
with them he was simple, even confidential, in his manner and tone. "I
have your letter, my gallant comrade," he wrote to a sergeant. "I know
your services: ... you are one of the brave grenadiers of the army.
You are included in the list for one of a hundred presentation swords
which I have ordered distributed. Every soldier in your corps thought
you deserved it most. I wish much to see you again. The minister of
war is sending you an order to come to Paris." After the battle of
Montebello, the affair fought by Lannes five days before Marengo, when
Coignet, a common soldier who could neither read nor write, but who
had performed several daring deeds in that, his first engagement, was
by Berthier's orders presented at ten in the evening to the Consul,
the latter playfully caught his visitor by the ear, and held him thus
during a short catechism. At the close, the delighted peasant,
entranced by such familiarity, saw his services noted in a mysterious
book, and was dismissed with the remark that no doubt, eventually, he
would merit service in the guard, the members of which must be
veterans of four campaigns. The effect of such incidents was to turn
the popular admiration into a passion.
No one ever declared that Napoleon Bonaparte was a gentleman animated
by trained self-respect and consideration for others. Many thought
his accesses of feverish sensitiveness, which now began to be noted,
were due to a hysterical temperament: in society he often sat in
forbidding silence; sometimes he wept tears which the world would
consider unmanly, and appeared to be temporarily disordered in his
mind. But he had much rude good nature and considerable wholesome
sensibility. He worked regularly from twelve to fifteen hours a day,
evolving schemes which paralyzed his secretaries by their magnitude.
The hours which such a man of affairs spent in the companionship of
women were not marked by that quick appreciation and attention which
gratify the great lady. No one has suffered more at the hands of women
than Bonaparte. Mme. Junot and Mme. de Remusat forgot nothing which
would place his rude passions in glaring contrast with their own
chastity, or even with the polished laxity of that notoriously immoral
society which scorned old-fashioned restraints. The long struggle for
recognition and attention which that "femme incomprise," Mme. de
Stael, waged with Bonaparte ended in her defeat, and she then turned
against her antagonist the weapon of her clever pen.
It is certain that with all his genius the great statesman and the
great general failed to understand the power of woman. His youth gave
him no due share in the society of those mothers, sweethearts, and
female friends who, in the routine of daily life, by instinct,
training, and ability, mold every generation as it rises to its place.
The years of nonage were absorbed in political intrigue, and those of
early manhood in tasks not laid upon most men until middle life. Amid
the storms of the Revolution was formed a general without experience
in those social forces of peace which finally overpower all others.
His married life began in passion and ambition; the relation was
checked in its normal development by ensuing hurricanes of alternating
jealousy and physical attraction. The social power of his wife was
great, but superficial; and while she powerfully supported her
husband's ambitions, and often captivated his senses, she failed in
creating any companionship with him in noble enterprise. The innate
coarseness of a giant was, therefore, never diminished, and the
society of those who turned pleasing and pleasure into a fine art, who
regarded entertainment as the chief concern of life, was generally
irksome to a man who looked upon many over-ready women as instruments
for gratifying physical passion; to a general who saw in all women the
possible mothers of soldiers; to a "scientific" politician who looked
on the family and on children as inert factors in a mathematical
problem; to a wilful dictator ignorant of the unalterable supremacy of
woman in her own sphere. But even Mme. de Remusat admits that there
were times and places when serious women with earnest notions of duty
received at his hands the most gracious and considerate treatment. In
the main, Napoleon's nature was so dominated by his gigantic schemes
that he was impervious to the feminine fascinations by which men are
so often ruled. He would tolerate neither Egerias nor Hypatias,
neither Cleopatras nor Messalinas, although the times might easily
have furnished him with examples of each type.
The Consulate is the period of Bonaparte's greatest and most enduring
renown. In what he did the new France was heartily sympathetic; the
old France, with all its vices, spite, and bitterness, though
existent, was in abeyance, and remained so for some years to come. The
multitudinous memoirs concerning the time were for the most part
written in the days of the Restoration, when the revulsion of feeling
created a passion for the basest defamation, and unduly magnified the
small defects of etiquette, behavior, and dress in the preceding
regime. The scraps of evidence which these writings afford ought to be
carefully examined, and viewed from the standpoint of the
circumstances which produced them. Such a task being well-nigh
hopeless, the deeds of the First Consul must speak for him rather than
the statements about them and him which he himself and others have
made. He was not in touch with the polite society of Paris; he
certainly did most arbitrarily banish from its precincts Mme. de
Stael, the brilliant woman whose writings many praise but few now
read, and whose home was the focus for the discontented ability of the
time; he never appreciated the spirit of true liberty, and he often
misapprehended the gentler spirits who in its name sought his powerful
protection and patronage; he was not sensitive to the finer sentiments
of the mind, often mocking at the "ideologues"; and while he enjoyed
the society of Josephine and her friends, he repelled their
interference with his plans, and apparently never forgot that her
jealous devotion had grown with his power and reputation. All this
must be admitted in characterizing Bonaparte at the height of his
greatness; but the vile innuendos, insinuations, and imputations of
sordid traits, which so abound in the diaries of the time, must be
considered in relation to the murky natures of those who recorded
them, and, with allowances for the time and the training of the man,
may be consigned to the limbo of malice from which they came.
Exile had broken the spirit but had neither softened the hearts nor
enlightened the minds of the long-banished aristocracy and their
friends. The new society looked on the thousands and thousands of
returned emigrants with some pity and much indifference as they
wandered about Paris and the other cities in faded, worn,
old-fashioned garb. Their abodes were in garrets and cellars, their
ancient titles were carefully concealed; the few who were recognized
and betrayed by some vindictive spy were persecuted by legal tricks
even to death, and the rest were cowed. Their cowardly precipitate
flight had saved their lives, but it had destroyed their king, their
honor, and their self-respect. Artois at Turin, Conde at Worms, the
petty nobles at Coblentz, the great ones at Brussels, the clergy in
England with their adherents, grandees and gentlemen; each of these
groups had suffered in a different way from the rest, but all had
finally found themselves objects of suspicion to their hosts, and had
long since been reduced to an ignoble poverty. The employment in
foreign armies for which they had hoped was so guardedly measured to
them that their services were inappreciably small. They had been
driven for support to teaching and other such noble employments as
they could secure, then by a sure descent many became artisans,
craftsmen, and even menials, but, failing that, they were frequently
reduced to base mendicity, holding their hands for the alms which
their sad appearance and murmured pleas drew from the passers-by. This
was particularly the case at Hamburg, where twenty-five thousand took
refuge, and at Erlangen in Bavaria. But they had scattered everywhere
and had been a byword in all Europe.
Nevertheless, throughout Convention, Terror, and Directory they had
cherished high hopes, preserved some forms of courtliness and
organization, had kept their anniversaries, their military style, and
even a formal system, social and military; had dreamed of a
restoration in full form and a return to one-time wealth, dignity, and
social power; political power they had not had within the memories of
men, ecclesiastical power they enjoyed not as Frenchmen but as
Romanists. Their old-time merry arrogance had given place to an acrid
humor born of hunger and want, but they kept their temper and ambition
in spite of the mistakes they committed and heaped one upon another,
cradling their own hopes in the disasters of the Directory, which so
outdid their own as to insure, they were convinced, the
reestablishment of monarchy. Brumaire and its consequences opened
their eyes and confounded their plans; every step in the consolidation
of Bonaparte's power was a new blow to their pretensions, and the
amnesty which he tendered of his mercy was gall and bitterness. But
facts are stronger than feelings; they returned in throngs, a hundred
and twenty-five thousand at the lowest estimate, slowly and painfully
securing the erasure of their names from the list of proscription,
reveling in their mother tongue and familiar scenes, winning a poor
livelihood by their accustomed arts while scheming, fawning even to
secure the crumbs which fell from the tables of those in power. The
great ladies who had never fled gave them some poor comfort, the
Jacobins scoffed and jeered, but the versatile Talleyrand, and above
all the plotting Fouche, were open to suggestions.
Within some months their plight began to awaken considerable sympathy,
and that sympathy gradually found expression in the theaters and
newspapers. The next development was a movement to secure restoration,
at least in part, of patrimony and station. Then a mild but
symptomatic storm burst on their heads. The sequestered estates,
ecclesiastical and secular, were now in new hands, and as order
followed anarchy their values to the republicans who had acquired them
were steadily increasing. Any attempt to dislodge the (p.~202)
possessors would have meant the overthrow of Bonaparte's still
insecure power. So he treated the suppliants with contemptuous
disdain. What he had done was done. They were home once more and might
remain, if subservient: otherwise their existence was their own
affair. In the perspective of St. Helena he thought he had erred; that
he might have assembled all the considerable estates still in state
ownership and have distributed them in bits to former proprietors.
Possibly and yet improbably he might have conciliated a large
constituency of the social and ecclesiastical hierarchy for use in the
empire. In this thought the history of France has measurably justified
his regrets. But in fact he put the old stock of the nobility in a
place far below the middle and upper burghers who rallied to his
support. It was a choice of enemies, and he chose radicals and
royalists. They accepted the challenge and met the fate of
conspirators.