Book: History of Modern Europe 1792 1878

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[Congress of Rastadt, Nov. 1797.]

The public articles of the Treaty of Campo Formio contained only the terms
which had been agreed upon by France and Austria in relation to Italy and
the Netherlands: the conditions of peace between France and the Germanic
Body, which had been secretly arranged between France and the two leading
Powers, were referred by a diplomatic fiction to a Congress that was to
assemble at Rastadt. Accordingly, after Prussia and Austria had each signed
an agreement abandoning the Rhenish Provinces, the Congress was duly
summoned. As if in mockery of his helpless countrymen, the Emperor informed
the members of the Diet that "in unshaken fidelity to the great principle
of the unity and indivisibility of the German Empire, they were to maintain
the common interests of the Fatherland with noble conscientiousness and
German steadfastness; and so, united with their imperial head, to promote a
just and lasting peace, founded upon the basis of the integrity of the
Empire and of its Constitution." [62] Thus the Congress was convoked upon
the pretence of preserving what the two greater States had determined to
sacrifice; while its real object, the suppression of the ecclesiastical
principalities and the curtailment of Bavaria, was studiously put out of
sight.

[Rivalry of the Germans.]

The Congress was composed of two French envoys, of the representatives of
Prussia and Austria, and of a committee, numbering with their secretaries
seventy-four persons, appointed by the Diet of Ratisbon. But the recognised
negotiators formed only a small part of the diplomatists who flocked to
Rastadt in the hope of picking up something from the wreck of the Empire.
Every petty German sovereign, even communities which possessed no political
rights at all, thought it necessary to have an agent on the spot, in order
to filch, if possible, some trifling advantage from a neighbour, or to
catch the first rumour of a proposed annexation. It was the saturnalia of
the whole tribe of busybodies and intriguers who passed in Germany for men
of state. They spied upon one another; they bribed the secretaries and
doorkeepers, they bribed the very cooks and coachmen, of the two omnipotent
French envoys. Of the national humiliation of Germany, of the dishonour
attaching to the loss of entire provinces and the reorganisation of what
remained at the bidding of the stranger, there seems to have been no sense
in the political circles of the day. The collapse of the Empire was viewed
rather as a subject of merriment. A gaiety of life and language prevailed,
impossible among men who did not consider themselves as the spectators of a
comedy. Cobenzl, the chief Austrian plenipotentiary, took his travels in a
fly, because his mistress, the _citoyenne_ Hyacinthe, had decamped with all
his carriages and horses. A witty but profane pamphlet was circulated, in
which the impending sacrifice of the Empire was described in language
borrowed from the Gospel narrative, Prussia taking the part of Judas
Iscariot, Austria that of Pontius Pilate, the Congress itself being the
chief priests and Pharisees assembling that they may take the Holy Roman
Empire by craft, while the army of the Empire figures as the "multitude who
smote upon their breasts and departed." In the utter absence of any German
pride or patriotism the French envoys not only obtained the territory that
they required, but successfully embroiled the two leading Powers with one
another, and accustomed the minor States to look to France for their own
promotion at the cost of their neighbours. The contradictory pledges which
the French Government had given to Austria and to Prussia caused it no
embarrassment. To deceive one of the two powers was to win the gratitude of
the other; and the Directory determined to fulfil its engagement to Prussia
at the expense of the bishoprics, and to ignore what it had promised to
Austria at the expense of Bavaria.

[Rhenish Provinces.]

[Ecclesiastical States suppressed.]

A momentary difficulty arose upon the opening of the Congress, when it
appeared that, misled by the Emperor's protestations, the Diet had only
empowered its Committee to treat upon the basis of the integrity of the
Empire (Dec. 9). The French declined to negotiate until the Committee had
procured full powers: and the prospects of the integrity of the Empire were
made clear enough a few days later by the entry of the French into Mainz,
and the formal organisation of the Rhenish Provinces as four French
Departments. In due course a decree of the Diet arrived, empowering the
Committee to negotiate at their discretion: and for some weeks after the
inhabitants of the Rhenish Provinces had been subjected to the laws, the
magistracy, and the taxation of France, the Committee deliberated upon the
proposal for their cession with as much minuteness and as much impartiality
as if it had been a point of speculative philosophy. At length the French
put an end to the tedious trifling, and proceeded to the question of
compensation for the dispossessed lay Princes. This they proposed to effect
by means of the disestablishment, or secularisation, of ecclesiastical
States in the interior of Germany. Prussia eagerly supported the French
proposal, both with a view to the annexation of the great Bishopric of
Muenster, and from ancient hostility to the ecclesiastical States as
instruments and allies of Catholic Austria. The Emperor opposed the
destruction of his faithful dependents; the ecclesiastical princes
themselves raised a bitter outcry, and demonstrated that the fall of their
order would unloose the keystone of the political system of Europe; but
they found few friends. If Prussia coveted the great spoils of Muenster, the
minor sovereigns, as a rule, wore just as eager for the convents and abbeys
that broke the continuity of their own territories: only the feeblest of
all the members of the Empire, the counts, the knights, and the cities,
felt a respectful sympathy for their ecclesiastical neighbours, and foresaw
that in a system of annexation their own turn would come next. The
principle of secularisation was accepted by the Congress without much
difficulty, all the energy of debate being reserved for the discussion of
details: arrangements which were to transfer a few miles of ground and half
a dozen custom-houses from some bankrupt ecclesiastic to some French-bought
duke excited more interest in Germany than the loss of the Rhenish
Provinces, and the subjection of a tenth part of the German nation to a
foreign rule.

[Austria determines on war, 1798.]

One more question was unexpectedly presented to the Congress. After
proclaiming for six years that the Rhine was the natural boundary of
France, the French Government discovered that a river cannot be a military
frontier at all. Of what service, urged the French plenipotentiaries, were
Strasburg and Mainz, so long as they were commanded by the guns on the
opposite bank? If the Rhine was to be of any use to France, France must be
put in possession of the fortresses of Kehl and Castel upon the German
side. Outrageous as such a demand appears, it found supporters among the
venal politicians of the smaller Courts, and furnished the Committee with
material for arguments that extended over four months. But the policy of
Austria was now taking a direction that rendered the resolutions of the
Congress of very little importance. It had become clear that France was
inclining to an alliance with Prussia, and that the Bavarian annexations
promised to Austria by the secret articles of Campo Formio were to be
withheld. Once convinced, by the failure of a private negotiation in
Alsace, that the French would neither be content with their gains of 1797,
nor permit Austria to extend its territory in Italy, Thugut determined upon
a renewal of the war. [63] In spite of a powerful opposition at Court,
Thugut's stubborn will still controlled the fortune of Austria: and the
aggressions of the French Republic in Switzerland and the Papal States, at
the moment when it was dictating terms of peace to the Empire, gave only
too much cause for the formation of a new European league.

[French intervention in Switzerland.]

At the close of the last century there was no country where the spirit of
Republican freedom was so strong, or where the conditions of life were so
level, as in Switzerland; its inhabitants, however, were far from enjoying
complete political equality. There were districts which stood in the
relation of subject dependencies to one or other of the ruling cantons: the
Pays de Vaud was governed by an officer from Berne; the valley of the
Ticino belonged to Uri; and in most of the sovereign cantons themselves
authority was vested in a close circle of patrician families. Thus,
although Switzerland was free from the more oppressive distinctions of
caste, and the Governments, even where not democratic, were usually just
and temperate, a sufficiently large class was excluded from political
rights to give scope to an agitation which received its impulse from Paris.
It was indeed among communities advanced in comfort and intelligence, and
divided from those who governed them by no great barrier of wealth and
prestige, that the doctrines of the Revolution found a circulation which
they could never gain among the hereditary serfs of Prussia or the
priest-ridden peasantry of the Roman States. As early as the year 1792 a
French army had entered the territory of Geneva, in order to co-operate
with the democratic party in the city. The movement was, however, checked
by the resolute action of the Bernese Senate; and the relations of France
to the Federal Government had subsequently been kept upon a friendly
footing by the good sense of Barthelemy, the French ambassador at Berne,
and the discretion with which the Swiss Government avoided every occasion
of offence. On the conquest of Northern Italy, Bonaparte was brought into
direct connection with Swiss affairs by a reference of certain points in
dispute to his authority as arbitrator. Bonaparte solved the difficulty by
annexing the district of the Valteline to the Cisalpine Republic; and from
that time he continued in communication with the Swiss democratic leaders
on the subject of a French intervention in Switzerland, the real purpose of
which was to secure the treasure of Berne, and to organise a government,
like that of Holland and the Cisalpine Republic, in immediate dependence
upon France.

[Helvetic Republic, April 12.]

[War between France and Swiss Federation, June, 1798.]

At length the moment for armed interference arrived. On the 15th December,
1797, a French force entered the Bishopric of Basle, and gave the signal
for insurrection in the Pays de Vaud. The Senate of Berne summoned the Diet
of the Confederacy to provide for the common defence: the oath of
federation was renewed, and a decree was passed calling out the Federal
army. It was now announced by the French that they would support the
Vaudois revolutionary party, if attacked. The Bernese troops, however,
advanced; and the bearer of a flag of truce having been accidentally
killed, war was declared between the French Republic and the Government of
Berne. Democratic movements immediately followed in the northern and
western cantons; the Bernese Government attempted to negotiate with the
French invaders, but discovered that no terms would be accepted short of
the entire destruction of the existing Federal Constitution. Hostilities
commenced; and the Bernese troops, supported by contingents from most of
the other cantons, offered a brave but ineffectual resistance to the
advance of the French, who entered the Federal capital on the 6th of March,
1798. The treasure of Berne, amounting to about L800,000, accumulated by
ages of thrift and good management, was seized in order to provide for
Bonaparte's next campaign, and for a host of voracious soldiers and
contractors. A system of robbery and extortion, more shameless even than
that practised in Italy, was put in force against the cantonal governments,
against the monasteries, and against private individuals. In compensation
for the material losses inflicted upon the country, the new Helvetic
Republic, one and indivisible, was proclaimed at Aarau. It conferred an
equality of political rights upon all natives of Switzerland, and
substituted for the ancient varieties of cantonal sovereignty a single
national government, composed, like that of France, of a Directory and two
Councils of Legislature.

The towns and districts which had been hitherto excluded from a share in
government welcomed a change which seemed to place them on a level with
their former superiors: the mountain-cantons fought with traditional
heroism in defence of the liberties which they had inherited from their
fathers; but they were compelled, one after another, to submit to the
overwhelming force of France, and to accept the new constitution. Yet, even
now, when peace seemed to have been restored, and the whole purpose of
France attained, the tyranny and violence of the invaders exhausted the
endurance of a spirited people. The magistrates of the Republic were
expelled from office at the word of a French Commission; hostages were
seized; at length an oath of allegiance to the new order was required as a
condition for the evacuation of Switzerland by the French army. Revolt
broke out in Unterwalden, and a handful of peasants met the French army at
the village of Stanz, near the eastern shore of the Lake of Lucerne (Sept.
8). There for three days they fought with unyielding courage. Their
resistance inflamed the French to a cruel vengeance; slaughtered families
and burning villages renewed, in this so-called crusade of liberty, the
savagery of ancient war.

[French intrigues in Rome.]

Intrigues at Rome paved the way for a French intervention in the affairs of
the Papal States, coincident in time with the invasion of Switzerland. The
residence of the French ambassador at Rome, Joseph Bonaparte, was the
centre of a democratic agitation. The men who moved about him were in great
part strangers from the north of Italy, but they found adherents in the
middle and professional classes in Rome itself, although the mass of the
poor people, as well as the numerous body whose salaries or profits
depended upon ecclesiastical expenditure, were devoted to the priests and
the Papacy. In anticipation of disturbances, the Government ordered
companies of soldiers to patrol the city. A collision occurred on the 28th
December, 1797, between the patrols and a band of revolutionists, who,
being roughly handled by the populace as well as by the soldiers, made
their way for protection to the courtyard of the Palazzo Corsini, where
Joseph Bonaparte resided. Here, in the midst of a confused struggle,
General Duphot, a member of the Embassy, was shot by a Papal soldier. [64]

[Berthier enters Rome, Feb. 10, 1798.]

[Roman Republic, Feb. 15, 1798.]

The French had now the pretext against the Papal Government which they
desired. Joseph Bonaparte instantly left the city, and orders were sent to
Berthier, chief of the staff in northern Italy, to march upon Rome.
Berthier advanced amid the acclamations of the towns and the curses of the
peasantry, and entered Rome on the 10th of February, 1798. Events had
produced in the capital a much stronger inclination towards change than
existed on the approach of Bonaparte a year before. The treaty of Tolentino
had shaken the prestige of Papal authority; the loss of so many well-known
works of art, the imposition of new and unpopular taxes, had excited as
much hatred against the defeated government as against the extortionate
conquerors; even among the clergy and their retainers the sale of a portion
of the Church-lands and the curtailment of the old Papal splendours had
produced alienation and discontent. There existed too within the Italian
Church itself a reforming party, lately headed by Ricci, bishop of Pistoia,
which claimed a higher degree of independence for the clergy, and condemned
the assumption of universal authority by the Roman See. The ill-judged
exercise of the Pope's temporal power during the last six years had gained
many converts to the opinion that the head of the Church would best perform
his office if emancipated from a worldly sovereignty, and restored to his
original position of the first among the bishops. Thus, on its approach to
Rome, the Republican army found the city ripe for revolution. On the 15th
of February an excited multitude assembled in the Forum, and, after
planting the tree of liberty in front of the Capitol, renounced the
authority of the Pope, and declared that the Roman people constituted
itself a free Republic. The resolution was conveyed to Berthier, who
recognised the Roman Commonwealth, and made a procession through the city
with the solemnity of an ancient triumph. The Pope shut himself up in the
Vatican. His Swiss guard was removed, and replaced by one composed of
French soldiers, at whose hands the Pontiff, now in his eighty-first year,
suffered unworthy insults. He was then required to renounce his temporal
power, and, upon his refusal, was removed to Tuscany, and afterwards beyond
the Alps to Valence, where in 1799 he died, attended by a solitary
ecclesiastic.

In the liberated capital a course of spoliation began, more thorough and
systematic than any that the French had yet effected. The riches of Rome
brought all the brokers and contractors of Paris to the spot. The museums,
the Papal residence, and the palaces of many of the nobility were robbed of
every article that could be moved; the very fixtures were cut away, when
worth the carriage. On the first meeting of the National Institute in the
Vatican it was found that the doors had lost their locks; and when, by
order of the French, masses were celebrated in the churches in expiation of
the death of Duphot, the patrols who were placed at the gates to preserve
order rushed in and seized the sacred vessels. Yet the general robbery was
far less the work of the army than of the agents and contractors sent by
the Government. In the midst of endless peculation the soldiers were in
want of their pay and their food. A sense of the dishonour done to France
arose at length in the subordinate ranks of the army; and General Massena,
who succeeded Berthier, was forced to quit his command in consequence of
the protests of the soldiery against a system to which Massena had
conspicuously given his personal sanction. It remained to embody the
recovered liberties of Rome in a Republican Constitution, which was, as a
matter of course, a reproduction of the French Directory and Councils of
Legislature, under the practical control of the French general in command.
What Rome had given to the Revolution in the fashion of classical
expressions was now more than repaid. The Directors were styled Consuls;
the divisions of the Legislature were known as the Senate and the
Tribunate; the Praetorship and the Quaestorship were recalled to life in the
Courts of Justice. That the new era might not want its classical memorial,
a medal was struck, with the image and superscription of Roman heroism, to
"Berthier, the restorer of the city," and to "Gaul, the salvation of the
human race."

[Expedition to Egypt, May, 1798.]

It was in the midst of these enterprises in Switzerland and Central Italy
that the Directory assembled the forces which Bonaparte was to lead to the
East. The port of Expedition to embarkation was Toulon; and there, on the
9th of May, 1798, Bonaparte took the command of the most formidable
armament that had ever left the French shores. Great Britain was still but
feebly represented in the Mediterranean, a detachment from St. Vincent's
fleet at Cadiz, placed under the command of Nelson, being the sole British
force in these waters. Heavy reinforcements were at hand; but in the
meantime Nelson had been driven by stress of weather from his watch upon
Toulon. On the 19th of May the French armament put out to sea, its
destination being still kept secret from the soldiers themselves. It
appeared before Malta on the 16th of June. By the treachery of the knights
Bonaparte was put in possession of this stronghold, which he could not even
have attempted to besiege. After a short delay the voyage was resumed, and
the fleet reached Alexandria without having fallen in with the English, who
had now received their reinforcements. The landing was safely effected, and
Alexandria fell at the first assault. After five days the army advanced
upon Cairo. At the foot of the Pyramids the Mameluke cavalry vainly threw
themselves upon Bonaparte's soldiers. They were repulsed with enormous loss
on their own side and scarcely any on that of the French. Their camp was
stormed; Cairo was occupied; and there no longer existed a force in Egypt
capable of offering any serious resistance to the invaders.

[Battle of the Nile, Aug. 1.]

But the fortune which had brought Bonaparte's army safe into the Egyptian
capital was destined to be purchased by the utter destruction of his fleet.
Nelson had passed the French in the night, when, after much perplexity, he
decided on sailing in the direction of Egypt. Arriving at Alexandria before
his prey, he had hurried off in an imaginary pursuit to Rhodes and Crete.
At length he received information which led him to visit Alexandria a
second time. He found the French fleet, numbering thirteen ships of the
line and four frigates, at anchor in Aboukir Bay. [65] His own fleet was
slightly inferior in men and guns, but he entered battle with a
presentiment of the completeness of his victory. Other naval battles have
been fought with larger forces; no destruction was ever so complete as that
of the Battle of the Nile (August 1). Two ships of the line and two
frigates, out of the seventeen sail that met Nelson, alone escaped from his
hands. Of eleven thousand officers and men, nine thousand were taken
prisoners, or perished in the engagement. The army of Bonaparte was cut off
from all hope of support or return; the Republic was deprived of
communication with its best troops and its greatest general.

[Coalition of 1798.]

A coalition was now gathering against France superior to that of 1793 in
the support of Russia and the Ottoman Empire, although Spain was now on the
side of the Republic, and Prussia, in spite of the warnings of the last two
years, refused to stir from its neutrality. The death of the Empress
Catherine, and the accession of Paul, had caused a most serious change in
the prospects of Europe. Hitherto the policy of the Russian Court had been
to embroil the Western Powers with one another, and to confine its efforts
against the French Republic to promises and assurances; with Paul, after an
interval of total reaction, the professions became realities. [66] No
monarch entered so cordially into Pitt's schemes for a renewal of the
European league; no ally had joined the English minister with a sincerity
so like his own. On the part of the Ottoman Government, the pretences of
friendship with which Bonaparte disguised the occupation of Egypt were
taken at their real worth. War was declared by the Porte; and a series of
negotiations, carried on during the autumn of 1798, united Russia, England,
Turkey, and Naples in engagements of mutual support against the French
Republic.

[Nelson at Naples, Sept., 1798.]

A Russian army set out on its long march towards the Adriatic: the levies
of Austria prepared for a campaign in the spring of 1799; but to the
English Government every moment that elapsed before actual hostilities was
so much time given to uncertainties; and the man who had won the Battle of
the Nile ridiculed the precaution which had hitherto suffered the French to
spread their intrigues through Italy, and closed the ports of Sicily and
Naples to his own most urgent needs. Towards the end of September, Nelson
appeared in the Bay of Naples, and was received with a delirium that
recalled the most effusive scenes in the French Revolution. [67] In the
city of Naples, as in the kingdom generally, the poorest classes were the
fiercest enemies of reform, and the steady allies of the Queen and the
priesthood against that section of the better-educated classes which had
begun to hope for liberty. The system of espionage and persecution with
which the sister of Marie Antoinette avenged upon her own subjects the
sufferings of her kindred had grown more oppressive with every new victory
of the Revolution. In the summer of 1798 there were men languishing for the
fifth year in prison, whose offences had never been investigated, and whose
relatives were not allowed to know whether they were dead or alive. A mode
of expression, a fashion of dress, the word of an informer, consigned
innocent persons to the dungeon, with the possibility of torture. In the
midst of this tyranny of suspicion, in the midst of a corruption which made
the naval and military forces of the kingdom worse than useless, King
Ferdinand and his satellites were unwearied in their theatrical invocations
of the Virgin and St. Januarius against the assailants of divine right and
the conquerors of Rome. A Court cowardly almost beyond the example of
Courts, a police that had trained every Neapolitan to look upon his
neighbour as a traitor, an administration that had turned one of the
hardiest races in Europe into soldiers of notorious and disgraceful
cowardice--such were the allies whom Nelson, ill-fitted for politics by his
sailor-like inexperience and facile vanity, heroic in his tenderness and
fidelity, in an evil hour encouraged to believe themselves invincible
because they possessed his own support. On the 14th of November, 1798, King
Ferdinand published a proclamation, which, without declaring war on the
French, announced that the King intended to occupy the Papal States and
restore the Papal government. The manifesto disclaimed all intention of
conquest, and offered a free pardon to all compromised persons. Ten days
later the Neapolitan army crossed the frontier, led by the Austrian
general, Mack, who passed among his admirers for the greatest soldier in
Europe. [68]

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