Book: History of Modern Europe 1792 1878

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[Battle of Novi, Aug. 15.]

For the moment, however, the allied forces continued to co-operate in Italy
against the French army on the Apennines covering Genoa. This army had
received reinforcements, and was now placed under the command of Joubert,
one of the youngest and most spirited of the Republican generals. Joubert
determined to attack the Russians before the fall of Mantua should add the
besieging army to Suvaroff's forces in the field. But the information which
he received from Lombardy misled him. In the second week of August he was
still unaware that Mantua had fallen a fortnight before. He descended from
the mountains to attack Suvaroff at Tortona, with a force about equal to
Suvaroff's own. On reaching Novi he learnt that the army of Mantua was also
before him (Aug. 15). It was too late to retreat; Joubert could only give
to his men the example of Republican spirit and devotion. Suvaroff himself,
with Kray, the conqueror of Mantua, began the attack: the onset of a second
Austrian corps, at the moment when the strength of the Russians was
failing, decided the day. Joubert did not live to witness the close of a
defeat which cost France eleven thousand men. [79]

[Suvaroff goes into Switzerland.]

The allied Governments had so framed their plans that the most overwhelming
victory could produce no result. Instead of entering France, Suvaroff was
compelled to turn back into Switzerland, while the Austrians continued to
besiege the fortresses of Piedmont. In Switzerland Suvaroff had to meet an
enemy who was forewarned of his approach, and who had employed every
resource of military skill and daring to prevent the union of the two
Russian armies now advancing from the south and the north. Before Suvaroff
could leave Italy, a series of admirably-planned attacks had given Massena
the whole network of the central Alpine passes, and closed every avenue of
communication between Suvaroff and the army with which he hoped to
co-operate. The folly of the Austrian Cabinet seconded the French general's
exertions. No sooner had Korsakoff and the new Russian division reached
Schaffhausen than the Archduke Charles, forced by his orders from Vienna,
turned northwards (Sept. 3), leaving the Russians with no support but
Hotze's corps, which was scattered over six cantons. [80] Korsakoff
advanced to Zuerich; Massena remained in his old position on the Uetliberg.
It was now that Suvaroff began his march into the Alps, sorely harassed and
delayed by the want of the mountain-teams which the Austrians had promised
him, and filled with the apprehension that Korsakoff would suffer some
irreparable disaster before his own arrival.

[Second Battle of Zuerich, Sept. 26.]

Two roads lead from the Italian lakes to central Switzerland; one, starting
from the head of Lago Maggiore and crossing the Gothard, ends on the shore
of Lake Lucerne; the other, crossing the Spluegen, runs from the Lake of
Como to Reichenau, in the valley of the Rhine. The Gothard in 1799 was not
practicable for cannon; it was chosen by Suvaroff, however, for his own
advance, with the object of falling upon Massena's rear with the utmost
possible speed. He left Bellinzona on the 21st of September, fought his way
in a desperate fashion through the French outposts that guarded the defiles
of the Gothard, and arrived at Altorf near the Lake of Lucerne. Here it was
discovered that the westward road by which Suvaroff meant to strike upon
the enemy's communications had no existence. Abandoning this design,
Suvaroff made straight for the district where his colleague was encamped,
by a shepherd's path leading north-eastwards across heights of 7,000 feet
to the valley of the Muotta. Over this desolate region the Russians made
their way; and the resolution which brought them as far as the Muotta would
have brought them past every other obstacle to the spot where they were to
meet their countrymen. But the hour was past. While Suvaroff was still
struggling in the mountains, Massena advanced against Zuerich, put
Korsakoff's army to total rout, and drove it, with the loss of all its
baggage and of a great part of its artillery, outside the area of
hostilities.

[Retreat of Suvaroff.]

The first rumours of the catastrophe reached Suvaroff on the Muotta; he
still pushed on eastwards, and, though almost without ammunition, overthrew
a corps commanded by Massena in person, and cleared the road over the
Pragel at the point of the bayonet, arriving in Glarus on the 1st of
October. Here the full extent of Korsakoff's disaster was made known to
him. To advance or to fall back was ruin. It only remained for Suvaroff's
army to make its escape across a wild and snow-covered mountain-tract into
the valley of the Rhine, where the river flows below the northern heights
of the Grisons. This exploit crowned a campaign which filled Europe with
astonishment. The Alpine traveller of to-day turns with some distrust from
narratives which characterise with every epithet of horror and dismay
scenes which are the delight of our age; but the retreat of Suvaroff's
army, a starving, footsore multitude, over what was then an untrodden
wilderness of rock, and through fresh-fallen autumn snow two feet deep, had
little in common with the boldest feats of Alpine hardihood. [81] It was
achieved with loss and suffering; it brought the army from a position of
the utmost danger into one of security; but it was followed by no renewed
attack. Proposals for a combination between Suvaroff and the Archduke
Charles resulted only in mutual taunts and menaces. The co-operation of
Russia in the war was at an end. The French remained masters of the whole
of the Swiss territory that they had lost since the beginning of the
campaign.

[British and Russian expedition against Holland Aug. 1799.]

In the summer months of 1799 the Czar had relieved his irritation against
Austria by framing in concert with the British Cabinet the plan for a joint
expedition against Holland. It was agreed that 25,000 English and 17,000
Russian troops, brought from the Baltic in British ships, should attack the
French in the Batavian Republic, and raise an insurrection on behalf of the
exiled Stadtholder. Throughout July the Kentish coast-towns were alive with
the bustle of war; and on the 13th of August the first English division,
numbering 12,000 men, set sail from Deal under the command of Sir Ralph
Abercromby. After tossing off the Dutch coast for a fortnight, the troops
landed at the promontory of the Helder. A Dutch corps was defeated on the
sand-hills, and the English captured the fort of the Helder, commanding the
Texel anchorage. Immediately afterwards a movement in favour of the
Stadtholder broke out among the officers of the Dutch fleet. The captains
hoisted the Orange flag, and brought their ships over to the English.

This was the first and the last result of the expedition. The Russian
contingent and a second English division reached Holland in the middle of
September, and with them came the Duke of York, who now took the command
out of the hands of Abercromby. On the other side reinforcements daily
arrived from France, until the enemy's troops, led by General Brune, were
equal in strength to the invaders. A battle fought at Alkmaar on the 19th
of September gave the Allies some partial successes and no permanent
advantage; and on the 3rd of October the Duke of York gained one of those
so-called victories which result in the retreat of the conquerors. Never
were there so many good reasons for a bad conclusion. The Russians moved
too fast or too slow; the ditches set at nought the rules of strategy; it
was discovered that the climate of Holland was unfavourable to health, and
that the Dutch had not the slightest inclination to get back their
Stadtholder. The result of a series of mischances, every one of which would
have been foreseen by an average midshipman in Nelson's fleet, or an
average sergeant in Massena's army, was that York had to purchase a retreat
for the allied forces at a price equivalent to an unconditional surrender.
He was allowed to re-embark on consideration that Great Britain restored to
the French 8,000 French and Dutch prisoners, and handed over in perfect
repair all the military works which our own soldiers had erected at the
Helder. Bitter complaints were raised among the Russian officers against
York's conduct of the expedition. He was accused of sacrificing the Russian
regiments in battle, and of courting a general defeat in order not to
expose his own men. The accusation was groundless. Where York was,
treachery or bad faith was superfluous. York in command, the feeblest enemy
became invincible. Incompetence among the hereditary chiefs of the English
army had become part of the order of nature. The Ministry, when taxed with
failure, obstinately shut their eyes to the true cause of the disaster.
Parliament was reminded that defeat was the most probable conclusion of any
military operations that we might undertake, and that England ought not to
expect success when Prussia and Austria had so long met only with
misfortune. Under the command of Nelson, English sailors were indeed
manifesting that kind of superiority to the seamen of other nations which
the hunter possesses over his prey; yet this gave no reason why foresight
and daring should count for anything ashore. If the nation wished to see
its soldiers undefeated, it must keep them at home to defend their country.
Even among the Opposition no voice was raised to protest against the system
which sacrificed English life and military honour to the dignity of the
Royal Family. The collapse of the Anglo-Russian expedition was viewed with
more equanimity in England than in Russia. The Czar dismissed his
unfortunate generals. York returned home, to run horses at Newmarket, to
job commissions with his mistress, and to earn his column at St. James's
Park.

[Unpopularity of the Directory.]

[Plans of Sieyes 1799.]

It was at this moment, when the tide of military success was already
turning in favour of the Republic, that the revolution took place which
made Bonaparte absolute ruler of France. Since the attack of the Government
upon the Royalists in Fructidor, 1797, the Directory and the factions had
come no nearer to a system of mutual concession, or to a peaceful
acquiescence in the will of a parliamentary majority. The Directory,
assailed both by the extreme Jacobins and by the Constitutionalists, was
still strong enough to crush each party in its turn. The elections of 1798,
which strengthened the Jacobins, were annulled with as little scruple as
the Royalist elections in the preceding year; it was only when defeat in
Germany and Italy had brought the Government into universal discredit that
the Constitutionalist party, fortified by the return of a large majority in
the elections of 1799, dared to turn the attack upon the Directors
themselves. The excitement of foreign conquest had hitherto shielded the
abuses of Government from criticism; but when Italy was lost, when generals
and soldiers found themselves without pay, without clothes, without
reinforcements, one general outcry arose against the Directory, and the
nation resolved to have done with a Government whose outrages and
extortions had led to nothing but military ruin. The disasters of France in
the spring of 1799, which resulted from the failure of the Government to
raise the armies to their proper strength, were not in reality connected
with the defects of the Constitution. They were caused in part by the
shameless jobbery of individual members of the Administration, in part by
the absence of any agency, like that of the Conventional Commissioners of
1793, to enforce the control of the central Government over the local
authorities, left isolated and independent by the changes of 1789. Faults
enough belonged, however, to the existing political order; and the
Constitutionalists, who now for the second time found themselves with a
majority in the Councils, were not disposed to prolong a system which from
the first had turned their majorities into derision. A party grew up around
the Abbe Sieyes intent upon some change which should give France a
government really representing its best elements. What the change was to be
few could say; but it was known that Sieyes, who had taken a leading part
in 1789, and had condemned the Constitution of 1795 from the moment when it
was sketched, had elaborated a scheme which he considered exempt from every
error that had vitiated its predecessors. As the first step to reform,
Sieyes himself was elected to a Directorship then falling vacant. Barras
attached himself to Sieyes; the three remaining Directors, who were
Jacobins and popular in Paris, were forced to surrender their seats. Sieyes
now only needed a soldier to carry out his plans. His first thought had
turned on Joubert, but Joubert was killed at Novi. Moreau scrupled to raise
his hand against the law; Bernadotte, a general distinguished both in war
and in administration, declined to play a secondary part. Nor in fact was
the support of Sieyes indispensable to any popular and ambitious soldier
who was prepared to attack the Government. Sieyes and his friends offered
the alliance of a party weighty in character and antecedents; but there
were other well-known names and powerful interests at the command of an
enterprising leader, and all France awaited the downfall of a Government
whose action had resulted only in disorder at home and defeat abroad.

[Bonaparte returns from Egypt, Oct., 1799.]

Such was the political situation when, in the summer of 1799, Bonaparte,
baffled in an attack upon the Syrian fortress of St. Jean d'Acre, returned
to Egypt, and received the first tidings from Europe which had reached him
since the outbreak of the war. He saw that his opportunity had arrived. He
determined to leave his army, whose ultimate failure was inevitable, and to
offer to France in his own person that sovereignty of genius and strength
for which the whole nation was longing. On the 7th of October a despatch
from Bonaparte was read in the Council of Five Hundred, announcing a
victory over the Turks at Aboukir. It brought the first news that had been
received for many months from the army of Egypt; it excited an outburst of
joyous enthusiasm for the general and the army whom a hated Government was
believed to have sent into exile; it recalled that succession of victories
which had been unchecked by a single defeat, and that Peace which had given
France a dominion wider than any that her Kings had won. While every
thought was turned upon Bonaparte, the French nation suddenly heard that
Bonaparte himself had landed on the coast of Provence. "I was sitting that
day," says Beranger in his autobiography, "in our reading-room with thirty
or forty other persons. Suddenly the news was brought in that Bonaparte had
returned from Egypt. At the words, every man in the room started to his
feet and burst into one long shout of joy." The emotion portrayed by
Beranger was that of the whole of France. Almost everything that now
darkens the early fame of Bonaparte was then unknown. His falsities, his
cold, unpitying heart were familiar only to accomplices and distant
sufferers; even his most flagrant wrongs, such as the destruction of
Venice, were excused by a political necessity, or disguised as acts of
righteous chastisement. The hopes, the imagination of France saw in
Bonaparte the young, unsullied, irresistible hero of the Republic. His fame
had risen throughout a crisis which had destroyed all confidence in others.
The stale placemen of the factions sank into insignificance by his side;
even sincere Republicans, who feared the rule of a soldier, confessed that
it is not always given to a nation to choose the mode of its own
deliverance. From the moment that Bonaparte landed at Frejus, he was master
of France.

[Conspiracy of Sieyes and Bonaparte.]

Sieyes saw that Bonaparte, and no one else, was the man through whom he
could overthrow the existing Constitution. [82] So little sympathy existed,
however, between Sieyes and the soldier to whom he now offered his support,
that Bonaparte only accepted Sieyes' project after satisfying himself that
neither Barras nor Bernadotte would help him to supreme power. Once
convinced of this, Bonaparte closed with Sieyes' offers. It was agreed that
Sieyes and his friend Ducos should resign their Directorships, and that the
three remaining Directors should be driven from office. The Assemblies, or
any part of them favourable to the plot, were to appoint a Triumvirate
composed of Bonaparte, Sieyes, and Ducos, for the purpose of drawing up a
new Constitution. In the new Constitution it was understood, though without
any definite arrangement, that Bonaparte and Sieyes were to be the leading
figures. The Council of Ancients was in great part in league with the
conspirators: the only obstacle likely to hinder the success of the plot
was a rising of the Parisian populace. As a precaution against attack, it
was determined to transfer the meeting of the Councils to St. Cloud.
Bonaparte had secured the support of almost all the generals and troops in
Paris. His brother Lucien, now President of the Council of Five Hundred,
hoped to paralyse the action of his own Assembly, in which the conspirators
were in the minority.

[Coup d'etat, 18 Brumaire (Nov. 9), 1799.]

Early on the morning of the 9th of November (18 Brumaire), a crowd of
generals and officers met before Bonaparte's house. At the same moment a
portion of the Council of Ancients assembled, and passed a decree which
adjourned the session to St. Cloud, and conferred on Bonaparte the command
over all the troops in Paris. The decree was carried to Bonaparte's house
and read to the military throng, who acknowledged it by brandishing their
swords. Bonaparte then ordered the troops to their posts, received the
resignation of Barras, and arrested the two remaining Directors in the
Luxembourg. During the night there was great agitation in Paris. The arrest
of the two Directors and the display of military force revealed the true
nature of the conspiracy, and excited men to resistance who had hitherto
seen no great cause for alarm. The Councils met at St. Cloud at two on the
next day. The Ancients were ready for what was coming; the Five Hundred
refused to listen to Bonaparte's accomplices, and took the oath of fidelity
to the Constitution. Bonaparte himself entered the Council of Ancients, and
in violent, confused language declared that he had come to save the
Republic from unseen dangers. He then left the Assembly, and entered the
Chamber of the Five Hundred, escorted by armed grenadiers. A roar of
indignation greeted the appearance of the bayonets. The members rushed in a
mass upon Bonaparte, and drove him out of the hall. His brother now left
the President's chair and joined the soldiers outside, whom he harangued in
the character of President of the Assembly. The soldiers, hitherto
wavering, were assured by Lucien's civil authority and his treacherous
eloquence. The drums beat; the word of command was given; and the last free
representatives of France struggled through doorways and windows before the
levelled and advancing bayonets.

[Sieyes' plan of Constitution.]

The Constitution which Sieyes hoped now to impose upon France had been
elaborated by its author at the close of the Reign of Terror. Designed at
that epoch, it bore the trace of all those apprehensions which gave shape
to the Constitution of 1795. The statutory outrages of 1793, the Royalist
reaction shown in the events of Vendemiaire, were the perils from which
both Sieyes and the legislators of 1795 endeavoured to guard the future of
France. It had become clear that a popular election might at any moment
return a royalist majority to the Assembly: the Constitution of 1795
averted this danger by prolonging the power of the Conventionalists; Sieyes
overcame it by extinguishing popular election altogether. He gave to the
nation no right but that of selecting half a million persons who should be
eligible to offices in the Communes, and who should themselves elect a
smaller body of fifty thousand, eligible to offices in the Departments. The
fifty thousand were in their turn to choose five thousand, who should be
eligible to places in the Government and the Legislature. The actual
appointments were to be made, however, not by the electors, but by the
Executive. With the irrational multitude thus deprived of the power to
bring back its old oppressors, priests, royalists, and nobles might safely
do their worst. By way of still further precaution, Sieyes proposed that
every Frenchman who had been elected to the Legislature since 1789 should
be inscribed for ten years among the privileged five thousand.

Such were the safeguards provided against a Bourbonist reaction. To guard
against a recurrence of those evils which France had suffered from the
precipitate votes of a single Assembly, Sieyes broke up the legislature
into as many chambers as there are stages in the passing of a law. The
first chamber, or Council of State, was to give shape to measures suggested
by the Executive; a second chamber, known as the Tribunate, was to discuss
the measures so framed, and ascertain the objections to which they were
liable; the third chamber, known as the Legislative Body, was to decide in
silence for or against the measures, after hearing an argument between
representatives of the Council and of the Tribunate. As a last impregnable
bulwark against Jacobins and Bourbonists alike, Sieyes created a Senate
whose members should hold office for life, and be empowered to annul every
law in which the Chambers might infringe upon the Constitution.

It only remained to invent an Executive. In the other parts of his
Constitution, Sieyes had borrowed from Rome, from Greece, and from Venice;
in his Executive he improved upon the political theories of Great Britain.
He proposed that the Government should consist of two Consuls and a Great
Elector; the Elector, like an English king, appointing and dismissing the
Consuls, but taking no active part in the administration himself. The
Consuls were to be respectively restricted to the affairs of peace and of
war. Grotesque under every aspect, the Constitution of Sieyes was really
calculated to effect in all points but one the end which he had in view.
His object was to terminate the convulsions of France by depriving every
element in the State of the power to create sudden change. The members of
his body politic, a Council that could only draft, a Tribunate that could
only discuss, a Legislature that could only vote, Yes or No, were impotent
for mischief; and the nation itself ceased to have a political existence as
soon as it had selected its half-million notables.

[Sieyes and Bonaparte.]

So far, nothing could have better suited the views of Bonaparte; and up to
this point Bonaparte quietly accepted Sieyes' plan. But the general had his
own scheme for what was to follow. Sieyes might apportion the act of
deliberation among debating societies and dumb juries to the full extent of
his own ingenuity; but the moment that he applied his disintegrating method
to the Executive, Bonaparte swept away the flimsy reasoner, and set in the
midst of his edifice of shadows the reality of an absolute personal rule.
The phantom Elector, and the Consuls who were to be the Elector's
tenants-at-will, corresponded very little to the power which France desired
to see at its head. "Was there ever anything so ridiculous?" cried
Bonaparte. "What man of spirit could accept such a post?" It was in vain
that Sieyes had so nicely set the balance. His theories gave to France only
the pageants which disguised the extinction of the nation beneath a single
will: the frame of executive government which the country received in 1799
was that which Bonaparte deduced from the conception of an absolute central
power. The First Consul summed up all executive authority in his own
person. By his side there were set two colleagues whose only function was
to advise. A Council of State placed the highest skill and experience in
France at the disposal of the chief magistrate, without infringing upon his
sovereignty. All offices, both in the Ministries of State and in the
provinces, were filled by the nominees of the First Consul. No law could be
proposed but at his desire.

[Contrast of the Institutions of 1791 and 1799.]

[Centralisation of 1799.]

The institutions given to France by the National Assembly of 1789 and those
given to it in the Consulate exhibited a direct contrast seldom found
outside the region of abstract terms. Local customs, survivals of earlier
law, such as soften the difference between England and the various
democracies of the United States, had no place in the sharp-cut types in
which the political order of France was recast in 1791 and 1799. The
Constituent Assembly had cleared the field before it began to reconstruct.
Its reconstruction was based upon the Rights of Man, identified with the
principle of local self-government by popular election. It deduced a system
of communal administration so completely independent that France was
described by foreign critics as partitioned into 40,000 republics; and the
criticism was justified when, in 1793, it was found necessary to create a
new central Government, and to send commissioners from the capital into the
provinces. In the Constitution of 1791, judges, bishops, officers of the
National Guard, were all alike subjected to popular election; the Minister
of War could scarcely move a regiment from one village to another without
the leave of the mayor of the commune. In the Constitution of 1799 all
authority was derived from the head of the State. A system of
centralisation came into force with which France under her kings had
nothing to compare. All that had once served as a check upon monarchical
power, the legal Parliaments, the Provincial Estates of Brittany and
Languedoc, the rights of lay and ecclesiastical corporations, had vanished
away. In the place of the motley of privileges that had tempered the
Bourbon monarchy, in the place of the popular Assemblies of the Revolution,
there sprang up a series of magistracies as regular and as absolute as the
orders of military rank. [83] Where, under the Constitution of 1791, a body
of local representatives had met to conduct the business of the Department,
there was now a Prefet, appointed by the First Consul, absolute, like the
First Consul himself, and assisted only by the advice of a nominated
council, which met for one fortnight in the year. In subordination to the
Prefet, an officer and similar council transacted the local business of the
Arrondissement. Even the 40,000 Maires with their communal councils were
all appointed directly or indirectly by the Chief of the State. There
existed in France no authority that could repair a village bridge, or light
the streets of a town, but such as owed its appointment to the central
Government. Nor was the power of the First Consul limited to the
administration. With the exception of the lowest and the highest members of
the judicature, he nominated all judges, and transferred them at his
pleasure to inferior or superior posts.

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