Book: History of Modern Europe 1792 1878

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[Aggressions of Bonaparte during the Continental peace.]

[Holland, Sept., 1801.]

Although the Ministry of Addington had acted with energy both in Egypt and
in the Baltic, it was generally felt that Pitt's retirement marked the
surrender of that resolute policy which had guided England since 1793. When
once the Preliminaries of Peace had been signed in London, Bonaparte
rightly judged that Addington would waive many just causes of complaint,
rather than break off the negotiations which were to convert the
Preliminaries into a definitive treaty. Accordingly, in his instructions to
Joseph Bonaparte, who represented France at the conferences held at Amiens,
the First Consul wrote, through Talleyrand, as follows:--"You are forbidden
to entertain any proposition relating to the King of Sardinia, or to the
Stadtholder, or to the internal affairs of Batavia, of Helvetia, or the
Republic of Italy. None of these subjects have anything to do with the
discussions of England." The list of subjects excluded from the
consideration of England was the list of aggressions by which Bonaparte
intended to fill up the interval of Continental peace. In the Treaty of
Luneville, the independence of the newly-established republics in Holland,
Switzerland, and Italy had been recognised by France. The restoration of
Piedmont to the House of Savoy had been the condition on which the Czar
made peace. But on every one of these points the engagements of France were
made only to be broken. So far from bringing independence to the
client-republics of France, the peace of Luneville was but the introduction
to a series of changes which brought these States directly into the hands
of the First Consul. The establishment of absolute government in France
itself entailed a corresponding change in each of its dependencies, and the
creation of an executive which should accept the First Consul's orders with
as little question as the Prefect of a French department. Holland received
its new constitution while France was still at war with England. The
existing Government and Legislature of the Batavian Republic were dissolved
(Sept., 1801), and replaced by a council of twelve persons, each holding
the office of President in turn for a period of three months, and by a
legislature of thirty-five, which met only for a few days in the year. The
power given to the new President during his office was enough, and not more
than enough, to make him an effective servant: a three-months' Minister and
an Assembly that met and parted at the word of command were not likely to
enter into serious rivalry with the First Consul. The Dutch peaceably
accepted the constitution thus forced upon them; they possessed no means of
resistance, and their affairs excited but little interest upon the
Continent.

[Bonaparte made President of the Italian Republic, Jan., 1802.]

[Piedmont annexed to France, Sept., 1802.]

Far more striking was the revolution next effected by the First Consul. In
obedience to orders sent from Paris to the Legislature of the Cisalpine
Republic, a body of four hundred and fifty Italian representatives crossed
the Alps in the middle of winter in order to meet the First Consul at
Lyons, and to deliberate upon a constitution for the Cisalpine Republic.
The constitution had, as a matter of fact, been drawn up by Talleyrand, and
sent to the Legislature at Milan some months before. But it was not for the
sake of Italy that its representatives were collected at Lyons, in the
presence of the First Consul, with every circumstance of national
solemnity. It was the most striking homage which Bonaparte could exact from
a foreign race in the face of all France; it was the testimony that other
lands besides France desired Bonaparte to be their sovereign. When all the
minor offices in the new Cisalpine Constitution had been filled, the
Italians learnt that the real object of the convocation was to place the
sceptre in Bonaparte's hands. They accepted the part which they found
themselves forced to play, and offered to the First Consul the presidency
of the Cisalpine State (Jan. 25, 1802). Unlike the French Consulate, the
chief magistracy in the new Cisalpine Constitution might be prolonged
beyond the term of ten years. Bonaparte had practically won the Crown of
Lombardy; and he had given to France the example of a submission more
unqualified than its own. A single phrase rewarded the people who had thus
placed themselves in his hands. The Cisalpine Republic was allowed to
assume the name of Italian Republic. The new title indicated the national
hopes which had sprung up in Italy during the past ten years; it indicated
no real desire on the part of Bonaparte to form either a free or a united
Italian nation. In the Cisalpine State itself, although a good
administration and the extinction of feudal privileges made Bonaparte's
government acceptable, patriots who asked for freedom ran the risk of exile
or imprisonment. What further influence was exercised by France upon
Italian soil was not employed for the consolidation of Italy. Tuscany was
bestowed by Bonaparte upon the Spanish Prince of Parma, and controlled by
agents of the First Consul. Piedmont, which had long been governed by
French generals, was at length definitely annexed to France.

[Intervention in Switzerland.]

[Bonaparte Mediator of the Helvetic League, Oct. 4, 1802.]

Switzerland had not, like the Cisalpine Republic, derived its liberty from
the victories of French armies, nor could Bonaparte claim the presidency of
the Helvetic State under the title of its founder. The struggles of the
Swiss parties, however, placed the country at the mercy of France. Since
the expulsion of the Austrians by Massena in 1799, the antagonism between
the Democrats of the town and the Federalists of the Forest Cantons had
broken out afresh. A French army still occupied Switzerland; the Minister
of the First Consul received instructions to interfere with all parties and
consolidate none. In the autumn of 1801, the Federalists were permitted to
dissolve the central Helvetic Government, which had been created by the
Directory in 1798. One change followed another, until, on the 19th of May,
1802, a second Constitution was proclaimed, based, like that of 1798, on
centralising and democratic principles, and almost extinguishing the old
local independence of the members of the Swiss League. No sooner had French
partisans created this Constitution, which could only be maintained by
force against the hostility of Berne and the Forest Cantons, than the
French army quitted Switzerland. Civil war instantly broke out, and in the
course of a few weeks the Government established by the French had lost all
Switzerland except the Pays de Vaud, This was the crisis for which
Bonaparte had been waiting. On the 4th of October a proclamation appeared
at Lausanne, announcing that the First Consul had accepted the office of
Mediator of the Helvetic League. A French army entered Switzerland.
Fifty-six deputies from the cantons were summoned to Paris; and, in the
beginning of 1803, a new Constitution, which left the central Government
powerless in the hands of France and reduced the national sovereignty to
cantonal self-administration, placed Switzerland on a level with the
Batavian and the Cisalpine dependencies of Bonaparte. The Rhone Valley,
with the mountains crossed by the new road over the Simplon, was converted
into a separate republic under the title of La Valais. The new chief
magistrate of the Helvetic Confederacy entered upon his office with a
pension paid out of Bonaparte's secret police fund.

[Settlement of Germany.]

Such was the nature of the independence which the Peace of Luneville gave
to Holland, to Northern Italy, and to Switzerland. The re-organisation of
Germany, which was provided for by the same treaty, affected larger
interests, and left more permanent traces upon European history. In the
provinces ceded to France lay the territory of the ancient ecclesiastical
princes of the empire, the Electors of Mainz, Cologne, and Treves; but,
besides these spiritual sovereigns, a variety of secular potentates,
ranging from the Elector Palatine, with 600,000 subjects, to the Prince of
Wiedrunkel, with a single village, owned territory upon the left bank of
the Rhine; and for the dispossessed lay princes new territories had now to
be formed by the destruction of other ecclesiastical States in the interior
of Germany. Affairs returned to the state in which they had stood in 1798,
and the comedy of Rastadt was renewed at the point where it had been broken
off: the only difference was that the French statesmen who controlled the
partition of ecclesiastical Germany now remained in Paris, instead of
coming to the Rhine, to run the risk of being murdered by Austrian hussars.
Scarcely was the Treaty of Luneville signed when the whole company of
intriguers who had touted at Rastadt posted off to the French capital with
their maps and their money-bags, the keener for the work when it became
known that by common consent the Free Cities of the Empire were now to be
thrown into the spoil. Talleyrand and his confidant Mathieu had no occasion
to ask for bribes, or to manoeuvre for the position of arbiters in Germany.
They were overwhelmed with importunities. Solemn diplomatists of the old
school toiled up four flights of stairs to the office of the needy
secretary, or danced attendance at the parties of the witty Minister. They
hugged Talleyrand's poodle; they vied with one another in gaining a smile
from the child whom he brought up at his house. [92] The shrewder of them
fortified their attentions with solid bargains, and made it their principal
care not to be outbidden at the auction. Thus the game was kept up as long
as there was a bishopric or a city in the market.

This was the real process of the German re-organisation. A pretended one
was meanwhile enacted by the Diet of Ratisbon. The Diet deliberated during
the whole of the summer of 1801 without arriving at a single resolution.
Not even the sudden change of Russian policy that followed the death of the
Emperor Paul and deprived Bonaparte of the support of the Northern Maritime
League, could stimulate the German Powers to united action. The old
antagonism of Austria and Prussia paralysed the Diet. Austria sought a
German indemnity for the dethroned Grand Duke of Tuscany; Prussia aimed at
extending its influence into Southern Germany by the annexation of Wuerzburg
and Bamberg. Thus the summer of 1801 was lost in interminable debate, until
Bonaparte regained the influence over Russia which he had held before the
death of Paul, and finally set himself free from all check and restraint by
concluding peace with England.

[German policy of Bonaparte.]

No part of Bonaparte's diplomacy was more ably conceived or more likely to
result in a permanent empire than that which affected the secondary States
of Germany. The rivalry of Austria and Prussia, the dread of Austrian
aggression felt in Bavaria, the grotesque ambition of the petty sovereigns
of Baden and Wuertemburg, were all understood and turned to account in the
policy which from this time shaped the French protectorate beyond the
Rhine. Bonaparte intended to give to Prussia such an increase of territory
upon the Baltic as should counterbalance the power of Austria; and for this
purpose he was willing to sacrifice Hanover or Mecklenburg: but he forbade
Prussia's extension to the south. Austria, so far from gaining new
territory in Bavaria, was to be deprived of its own outlying possessions in
Western Germany, and excluded from all influence in this region. Bavaria,
dependent upon French protection against Austria, was to be greatly
strengthened. Baden and Wuertemberg, enriched by the spoil of little
sovereignties, of Bishoprics and Free Cities, were to look to France for
further elevation and aggrandisement. Thus, while two rival Powers balanced
one another upon the Baltic and the Lower Danube, the sovereigns of central
and western Germany, owing everything to the Power that had humbled
Austria, would find in submission to France the best security for their own
gains, and the best protection against their more powerful neighbours.

[Treaty between France and Russia for joint action in Germany, Oct. 11,
1801.]

One condition alone could have frustrated a policy agreeable to so many
interests, namely, the existence of a national sentiment among the Germans
themselves. But the peoples of Germany cared as little about a Fatherland
as their princes. To the Hessian and the Bavarian at the centre of the
Empire, Germany was scarcely more than it was to the Swiss or the Dutch,
who had left the Empire centuries before. The inhabitants of the Rhenish
Provinces had murmured for a while at the extortionate rule of the
Directory; but their severance from Germany and their incorporation with a
foreign race touched no fibre of patriotic regret; and after the
establishment of a better order of things under the Consulate the
annexation to France appears to have become highly popular. [93] Among a
race whose members could thus be actually conquered and annexed without
doing violence to their feelings Bonaparte had no difficulty in finding
willing allies. While the Diet dragged on its debates upon the settlement
of the Empire, the minor States pursued their bargainings with the French
Government; and on the 14th of August, 1801, Bavaria signed the first of
those treaties which made the First Consul the patron of Western Germany.
Two months later a secret treaty between France and Russia admitted the new
Czar, Alexander, to a share in the reorganisation of the Empire. The
Governments of Paris and St. Petersburg pledged themselves to united action
for the purpose of maintaining an equilibrium between Austria and Prussia;
and the Czar further stipulated for the advancement of his own relatives,
the Sovereigns of Bavaria, Baden, and Wuertemberg. The relationship of these
petty princes to the Russian family enabled Bonaparte to present to the
Czar, as a graceful concession, the very measure which most vitally
advanced his own power in Germany. Alexander's intervention made resistance
on the part of Austria hopeless. One after another the German Sovereigns
settled with their patrons for a share in the spoil; and on the 3rd of
June, 1802, a secret agreement between France and Russia embodied the whole
of these arrangements, and disposed of almost all the Free Cities and the
entire ecclesiastical territory of the Empire.

[Diet of Ratisbon accepts French Scheme.]

[End of German Ecclesiastical States and forty-five Free Cities, March,
1803.]

When everything had thus been settled by the foreigners, a Committee, to
which the Diet of Ratisbon had referred the work of re-organisation, began
its sessions, assisted by a French and a Russian representative. The Scheme
which had been agreed upon between France and Russia was produced entire;
and in spite of the anger and the threats of Austria it passed the
Committee with no greater delay than was inseparable from everything
connected with German affairs. The Committee presented the Scheme to the
Diet: the Diet only agitated itself as to the means of passing the Scheme
without violating those formalities which were the breath of its life. The
proposed destruction of all the Ecclesiastical States, and of forty-five
out of the fifty Free Cities, would extinguish a third part of the members
of the Diet itself. If these unfortunate bodies were permitted to vote upon
the measure, their votes might result in its rejection: if unsummoned,
their absence would impair the validity of the resolution. By a masterpiece
of conscientious pedantry it was agreed that the doomed prelates and cities
should be duly called to vote in their turn, and that upon the mention each
name the answer "absent" should be returned by an officer. Thus, faithful
to its formalities, the Empire voted the destruction of its ancient
Constitution; and the sovereignties of the Ecclesiastics and Free Cities,
which had lasted for so many centuries, vanished from Europe (March, 1803).
[94]

[Effect on Germany.]

The loss was small indeed. The internal condition of the priest-ruled
districts was generally wretched; heavy ignorance, beggary, and intolerance
reduced life to a gross and dismal inertia. Except in their patronage of
music, the ecclesiastical princes had perhaps rendered no single service to
Germany. The Free Cities, as a rule, were sunk in debt; the management of
their affairs had become the perquisite of a few lawyers and privileged
families. For Germany, as a nation, the destruction of these petty
sovereignties was not only an advantage but an absolute necessity. The
order by which they were superseded was not devised in the interest of
Germany itself; yet even in the arrangements imposed by the foreigner
Germany gained centres from which the institutions of modern political life
entered into regions where no public authority had yet been known beyond
the court of the bishop or the feudal officers of the manor. [95] Through
the suppression of the Ecclesiastical States a Protestant majority was
produced in the Diet. The change bore witness to the decline of Austrian
and of Catholic energy during the past century; it scarcely indicated the
future supremacy of the Protestant rival of Austria; for the real interests
of Germany were but faintly imaged in the Diet, and the leadership of the
race was still open to the Power which should most sincerely identify
itself with the German nation. The first result of the changed character of
the Diet was the confiscation of all landed property held by religious or
charitable bodies, even where these had never advanced the slightest claim
to political independence. The Diet declared the whole of the land held in
Germany by pious foundations to be at the disposal of the Governments for
purposes of religion, of education, and of financial relief. The more needy
courts immediately seized so welcome an opportunity of increasing their
revenues. Germany lost nothing by the dissolution of some hundreds of
monasteries; the suppression of hospitals and the impoverishment of
Universities was a doubtful benefit. Through the destruction of the
Ecclesiastical States and the confiscation of Church lands, the support of
an army of priests was thrown upon the public revenues. The Elector of
Cologne, who had been an indifferent civil ruler, became a very prosperous
clergyman on L20,000 a year. All the members of the annexed or disendowed
establishments, down to the acolytes and the sacristans, were credited with
annuities equal in value to what they had lost. But in the confusion caused
by war the means to satisfy these claims was not always forthcoming; and
the ecclesiastical revolution, so beneficial on the whole to the public
interest, was not effected without much severe and undeserved individual
suffering.

[Governments in Germany become more absolute and more regular.]

[Bavaria. Reforms of Montgelas.]

[Suppression of the Knights.]

The movement of 1803 put an end to an order of things more curious as a
survival of the mixed religious and political form of the Holy Roman Empire
than important in the actual state of Europe. The temporal power now lost
by the Church in Germany had been held in such sluggish hands that its
effect was hardly visible except in a denser prejudice and an idler life
than prevailed under other Governments. The first consequence of its
downfall was that a great part of Germany which had hitherto had no
political organisation at all gained the benefit of a regular system of
taxation, of police, of civil and of criminal justice. If harsh and
despotic, the Governments which rose to power at the expense of the Church
were usually not wanting in the love of order and uniformity. Officers of
the State administered a fixed law where custom and privilege had hitherto
been the only rule. Appointments ceased to be bought or inherited; trades
and professions were thrown open; the peasant was relieved of his heaviest
feudal burdens. Among the newly consolidated States, Bavaria was the one
where the reforming impulse of the time took the strongest form. A new
dynasty, springing from the west of the Rhine, brought something of the
spirit of French liberalism into a country hitherto unsurpassed in Western
Europe for its ignorance and bigotry. [96] The Minister Montgelas, a
politician of French enlightenment, entered upon the same crusade against
feudal and ecclesiastical disorder which Joseph had inaugurated in Austria
twenty years before. His measures for subjecting the clergy to the law, and
for depriving the Church of its control over education, were almost
identical with those which in 1790 had led to the revolt of Belgium; and
the Bavarian landowners now unconsciously reproduced all the mediaeval
platitudes of the University of Louvain. Montgelas organised and levelled
with a remorseless common sense. Among his victims there was a class which
had escaped destruction in the recent changes. The Knights of the Empire,
with their village jurisdictions, were still legally existent; but to
Montgelas such a class appeared a mere absurdity, and he sent his soldiers
to disperse their courts and to seize their tolls. Loud lamentation
assailed the Emperor at Vienna. If the dethroned bishops had bewailed the
approaching extinction of Christianity in Europe, the knights just as
convincingly deplored the end of chivalry. Knightly honour, now being swept
from the earth, was proved to be the true soul of German nationality, the
invisible support of the Imperial throne. For a moment the intervention of
the Emperor forced Montgelas to withdraw his grasp from the sacred rents
and turnpikes; but the threatening storm passed over, and the example of
Bavaria was gradually followed by the neighbouring Courts.

[Stein and the Duke of Nassau.]

[Stein's attack on the Minor Princes.]

It was to the weak and unpatriotic princes who were enriched by the French
that the knights fell victims. Among the knights thus despoiled by the Duke
of Nassau was the Ritter vom Stein, a nobleman who had entered the Prussian
service in the reign of Frederick the Great, and who had lately been placed
in high office in the newly-acquired province of Muenster. Stein was
thoroughly familiar with the advantages of systematic government; the loss
of his native parochial jurisdiction was not a serious one to a man who had
become a power in Prussia; and although domestic pride had its share in
Stein's resentment, the protest now published by him against the
aggressions of the Duke of Nassau sounded a different note from that of his
order generally. That a score of farmers should pay their dues and take off
their hats to the officer of the Duke of Nassau instead of to the bailiff
of the Ritter vom Stein was not a matter to excite deep feeling in Europe;
but that the consolidation of Germany should be worked out in the interest
of French hirelings instead of in the interests of the German people was
justly treated by Stein as a subject for patriotic anger, In his letter
[97] to the Duke of Nassau, Stein reproached his own despoiler and the
whole tribe of petty princes with that treason to German interests which
had won them the protection of the foreigner. He argued that the knights
were a far less important obstacle to German unity than those very princes
to whom the knights were sacrificed; and he invoked that distant day which
should give to Germany a real national unity, over knights and princes
alike, under the leadership of a single patriotic sovereign. Stein's appeal
found little response among his contemporaries. Like a sober man among
drunkards, he seemed to be scarcely rational. The simple conception of a
nation sacrificing its internal rivalries in order to avert foreign rule
was folly to the politicians who had all their lives long been outwitting
one another at Vienna or Berlin, or who had just become persons of
consequence in Europe through the patronage of Bonaparte. Yet, if years of
intolerable suffering were necessary before any large party in Germany rose
to the idea of German union, the ground had now at least been broken. In
the changes that followed the Peace of Luneville the fixity and routine of
Germany received its death-blow. In all but name the Empire had ceased to
exist. Change and re-constitution in one form or another had become
familiar to all men's minds; and one real statesman at the least was
already beginning to learn the lesson which later events were to teach to
the rest of the German race.

[France, 1801-1804.]

[Civil Code.]

Four years of peace separated the Treaty of Luneville from the next
outbreak of war between France and any Continental Power. They were years
of extension of French influence in every neighbouring State; in France
itself, years of the consolidation of Bonaparte's power, and of the decline
of everything that checked his personal rule. The legislative bodies sank
into the insignificance for which they had been designed; everything that
was suffered to wear the appearance of strength owed its vigour to the
personal support of the First Consul. Among the institutions which date
from this period, two, equally associated with the name of Napoleon, have
taken a prominent place in history, the Civil Code and the Concordat. Since
the middle of the eighteenth century the codification of law had been
pursued with more or less success by almost every Government in Europe. In
France the Constituent Assembly of 1789 had ordered the statutes, by which
it superseded the old variety of local customs, to be thus cast into a
systematic form. A Committee of the Convention had completed the draft of a
Civil Code. The Directory had in its turn appointed a Commission; but the
project still remained unfulfilled when the Directory was driven from
power. Bonaparte instinctively threw himself into a task so congenial to
his own systematising spirit, and stimulated the efforts of the best
jurists in France by his personal interest and pride in the work of
legislation. A Commission of lawyers, appointed by the First Consul,
presented the successive chapters of a Civil Code to the Council of State.
In the discussions in the Council of State Bonaparte himself took an
active, though not always a beneficial, part. The draft of each chapter, as
it left the Council of State, was submitted, as a project of Law, to the
Tribunate and to the Legislative Body. For a moment the free expression of
opinion in the Tribunate caused Bonaparte to suspend his work in impatient
jealousy. The Tribunate, however, was soon brought to silence; and in
March, 1804, France received the Code which has formed from that time to
the present the basis of its civil rights.

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