Book: History of Modern Europe 1792 1878

C >> C. A. Fyffe >> History of Modern Europe 1792 1878




[Napoleon marches against Moore, Dec. 19.]

[Retreat of the English.]

[Corunna, Jan. 16, 1809.]

On the 19th of December a report reached Madrid that Moore had suspended
his retreat on Portugal. Napoleon instantly divined the actual movement of
the English, and hurried from Madrid against Moore at the head of 40,000
men. Moore had met Baird on the 20th at Mayorga; on the 23rd the united
British divisions reached Sahagun, scarcely a day's march from Soult at
Saldanha. Here the English commander learnt that Napoleon himself was on
his track. Escape was a question of hours. Napoleon had pushed across the
Guadarama mountains in forced marches through snow and storm. Had his
vanguard been able to seize the bridge over the river Esla at Benavente
before the English crossed it, Moore would have been cut off from all
possibility of escape. The English reached the river first and blew up the
bridge. This rescued them from immediate danger. The defence of the river
gave Moore's army a start which rendered the superiority of Napoleon's
numbers of little effect. For a while Napoleon followed Moore towards the
northern coast. On the 1st of January, 1809, he wrote an order which showed
that he looked upon Moore's escape as now inevitable, and on the next day
he quitted the army, leaving to his marshals the honour of toiling after
Moore to the coast, and of seizing some thousands of frozen or drunken
British stragglers. Moore himself pushed on towards Corunna with a rapidity
which was dearly paid for by the demoralisation of his army. The sufferings
and the excesses of the troops were frightful; only the rear-guard, which
had to face the enemy, preserved soldierly order. At length Moore found it
necessary to halt and take up position, in order to restore the discipline
of his army. He turned upon Soult at Lugo, and offered battle for two
successive days; but the French general declined an engagement; and Moore,
satisfied with having recruited his troops, continued his march upon
Corunna. Soult still followed. On January 11th the English army reached the
sea; but the ships which were to convey them back to England were nowhere
to be seen. A battle was inevitable, and Moore drew up his troops, 14,000
in number, on a range of low hills outside the town to await the attack of
the French. On the 16th, when the fleet had now come into harbour, Soult
gave battle. The French were defeated at every point of their attack. Moore
fell at the moment of his victory, conscious that the army which he had so
bravely led had nothing more to fear. The embarkation was effected that
night; on the next day the fleet put out to sea.

[Siege of Saragossa, Dec., 1808.]

[Napoleon leaves Spain, Jan 19, 1809.]

Napoleon quitted Spain on the 19th of January, 1809, leaving his brother
Joseph again in possession of the capital, and an army of 300,000 men under
the best generals of France engaged with the remnants of a defeated force
which had never reached half that number. No brilliant victories remained
to be won; no enemy remained in the field important enough to require the
presence of Napoleon. Difficulties of transit and the hostility of the
people might render the subjugation of Spain a slower process than the
subjugation of Prussia or Italy; but, to all appearance, the ultimate
success of the Emperor's plans was certain, and the worst that lay before
his lieutenants was a series of wearisome and obscure exertions against an
inconsiderable foe. Yet, before the Emperor had been many weeks in Paris, a
report reached him from Marshal Lannes which told of some strange form of
military capacity among the people whose armies were so contemptible in the
field. The city of Saragossa, after successfully resisting its besiegers in
the summer of 1808, had been a second time invested after the defeats of
the Spanish armies upon the Ebro. [153] The besiegers themselves were
suffering from extreme scarcity when, on the 22nd of January, 1809, Lannes
took up the command. Lannes immediately called up all the troops within
reach, and pressed the battering operations with the utmost vigour. On the
29th, the walls of Saragossa were stormed in four different places.

[Defeats of the Spaniards, March, 1809.]

According to all ordinary precedents of war, the French were now in
possession of the city. But the besiegers found that their real work was
only beginning. The streets were trenched and barricaded; every dwelling
was converted into a fortress; for twenty days the French were forced to
besiege house by house. In the centre of the town the popular leaders
erected a gallows, and there they hanged every one who flinched from
meeting the enemy. Disease was added to the horrors of warfare. In the
cellars, where the women and children crowded in filth and darkness, a
malignant pestilence broke out, which, at the beginning of February, raised
the deaths to five hundred a day. The dead bodies were unburied; in that
poisoned atmosphere the slightest wound produced mortification and death.
At length the powers of the defenders sank. A fourth part of the town had
been won by the French; of the townspeople and peasants who were within the
walls at the beginning of the siege, it is said that thirty thousand had
perished; the remainder could only prolong their defence to fall in a few
days more before disease or the enemy. Even now there were members of the
Junta who wished to fight as long as a man remained, but they were
outnumbered. On the 20th of February what was left of Saragossa
capitulated. Its resistance gave to the bravest of Napoleon's soldiers an
impression of horror and dismay new even to men who had passed through
seventeen years of revolutionary warfare, but it failed to retard
Napoleon's armies in the conquest of Spain. No attempt was made to relieve
the heroic or ferocious city. Everywhere the tide of French conquest
appeared to be steadily making its advance. Soult invaded Portugal; in
combination with him, two armies moved from Madrid upon the southern and
the south-western provinces of Spain. Oporto fell on the 28th of March; in
the same week the Spanish forces covering the south were decisively beaten
at Ciudad Real and at Medellin upon the line of the Guadiana. The hopes of
Europe fell. Spain itself could expect no second Saragossa. It appeared as
if the complete subjugation of the Peninsula could now only be delayed by
the mistakes of the French generals themselves, and by the untimely removal
of that controlling will which had hitherto made every movement a step
forward in conquest.




CHAPTER IX.


Austria preparing for war--The war to be one on behalf of the German
Nation--Patriotic Movement in Prussia--Expected Insurrection in North
Germany--Plans of Campaign--Austrian Manifesto to the Germans--Rising of
the Tyrolese--Defeats of the Archduke Charles in Bavaria--French in
Vienna--Attempts of Doernberg and Schill--Battle of Aspern--Second Passage
of the Danube--Battle of Wagram--Armistice of Znaim--Austria waiting for
events--Wellesley in Spain--He gains the Battle of Talavera, but
retreats--Expedition against Antwerp fails--Austria makes Peace--Treaty of
Vienna--Real Effects of the War of 1809--Austria after 1809--Metternich--
Marriage of Napoleon with Marie Louise--Severance of Napoleon and
Alexander--Napoleon annexes the Papal States, Holland, La Valais, and the
North German Coast--The Napoleonic Empire: Its Benefits and Wrongs--The
Czar withdraws from Napoleon's Commercial System--War with Russia
imminent--Wellington in Portugal: Lines of Torres Vedras; Massena's
Campaign of 1810, and retreat--Soult in Andalusia--Wellington's Campaign
of 1810--Capture of Ciudad Rodrigo and Badajoz--Salamanca.


[Austria preparing for war, 1808-9.]

Napoleon, quitting Spain in the third week of January, 1809, travelled to
Paris with the utmost haste. He believed Austria to be on the point of
declaring war; and on the very day of his arrival at the capital he called
out the contingents of the Rhenish Federation. In the course of the next
few weeks, however, he formed the opinion that Austria would either decline
hostilities altogether, or at least find it impossible to declare war
before the middle of May. For once the efforts of Austria outstripped the
calculations of her enemy. Count Stadion, the earnest and enlightened
statesman who had held power in Austria since the Peace of Presburg, had
steadily prepared for a renewal of the struggle with France. He was
convinced that Napoleon would soon enter upon new enterprises of conquest,
and still farther extend his empire at the expense of Austria, unless
attacked before Spain had fallen under his dominion. Metternich, now
Austrian Ambassador at Paris, reported that Napoleon was intending to
divide Turkey as soon as he had conquered Spain; and, although he advised
delay, he agreed with the Cabinet at Vienna that Austria must sooner or
later strike in self-defence. [154] Stadion, more sanguine, was only
prevented from declaring war in 1808 by the counsels of the Archduke
Charles and of other generals who were engaged in bringing the immense mass
of new levies into military formation. Charles himself attached little
value to the patriotic enthusiasm which, since the outbreak of the Spanish
insurrection, had sprung up in the German provinces of Austria. He saw the
approach of war with more apprehension than pleasure; but, however faint
his own hopes, he laboured earnestly in creating for Austria a force far
superior to anything that she had possessed before, and infused into the
mass of the army that confident and patriotic spirit which he saw in others
rather than felt in himself. By the beginning of March, 1809, Austria had
260,000 men ready to take the field.

[The war of 1809 to be a war for Germany.]

The war now breaking out was to be a war for the German nation, as the
struggle of the Spaniards had been a struggle for Spain. The animated
appeals of the Emperor's generals formed a singular contrast to the silence
with which the Austrian Cabinet had hitherto entered into its wars. The
Hapsburg sovereign now stood before the world less as the inheritor of an
ancient empire and the representative of the Balance of Power than as the
disinterested champion of the German race. On the part of the Emperor
himself the language of devotion for Germany was scarcely more than
ironical. Francis belonged to an age and to a system in which the idea of
nationality had no existence; and, like other sovereigns, he regarded his
possessions as a sort of superior property which ought to be defended by
obedient domestic dogs against marauding foreign wolves. The same personal
view of public affairs had hitherto satisfied the Austrians. It had been
enough for them to be addressed as the dutiful children of a wise and
affectionate father. The Emperor spoke the familiar Viennese dialect; he
was as homely in his notions and his prejudices as any beerseller in his
dominions; his subjects might see him at almost any hour of the day or
night; and out of the somewhat tough material of his character popular
imagination had no difficulty in framing an idol of parental geniality and
wisdom. Fifteen years of failure and mismanagement had, however, impaired
the beauty of the domestic fiction; and although old-fashioned Austrians,
like Haydn, the composer of the Austrian Hymn, were ready to go down to the
grave invoking a blessing on their gracious master, the Emperor himself and
his confidants were shrewd enough to see that the newly-excited sense of
German patriotism would put them in possession of a force which they could
hardly evoke by the old methods.

[Austrian Parties.]

One element of reality lay in the professions which were not for the most
part meant very seriously. There was probably now no statesman in Austria
who any longer felt a jealousy of the power of Prussia. With Count Stadion
and his few real supporters the restoration of Germany was a genuine and
deeply-cherished desire; with the majority of Austrian politicians the
interests of Austria herself seemed at least for the present to require the
liberation of North Germany. Thus the impassioned appeals of the Archduke
Charles to all men of German race to rise against their foreign oppressor,
and against their native princes who betrayed the interests of the
Fatherland, gained the sanction of a Court hitherto very little inclined to
form an alliance with popular agitation. If the chaotic disorder of the
Austrian Government had been better understood in Europe, less importance
would have been attached to this sudden change in its tone. No one in the
higher ranks at Vienna was bound by the action of his colleagues. The
Emperor, though industrious, had not the capacity to enforce any coherent
system of government. His brothers caballed one against another, and
against the persons who figured as responsible ministers. State-papers were
brought by soldiers to the Emperor for his signature without the knowledge
of his advisers. The very manifestos which seemed to herald a new era for
Germany owed most of their vigour to the literary men who were entrusted
with their composition. [155]

[Patriotic movement in Prussia.]

[Governing classes in South Germany on the side of Napoleon.]

The answer likely to be rendered by Germany to the appeal of Austria was
uncertain. In the Rhenish Federation there were undoubted signs of
discontent with French rule among the common people; but the official
classes were universally on the side of Napoleon, who had given them their
posts and their salaries; while the troops, and especially the officers,
who remembered the time when they had been mocked by the Austrians as
"harlequins" and "nose-bags," were won by the kindness of the great
conqueror, who organised them under the hands of his own generals, and gave
them the companionship of his own victorious legions. Little could be
expected from districts where to the mass of the population the old regime
of German independence had meant nothing more than attendance at the
manor-court of a knight, or the occasional spectacle of a ducal wedding, or
a deferred interest in the droning jobbery of some hereditary
town-councillor. In Northern Germany there was far more prospect of a
national insurrection. There the spirit of Stein and of those who had
worked with him was making itself felt, in spite of the fall of the
Minister. Scharnhorst's reforms had made the Prussian army a school of
patriotism, and the work of statesmen and soldiers was promoted by men who
spoke to the feelings and the intelligence of the nation. Literature lost
its indifference to nationality and to home. The philosopher Fichte, the
poet Arndt, the theologian Schleiermacher pressed the claims of Germany and
of the manlier virtues upon a middle class singularly open to literary
influences, singularly wanting in the experience and the impulses of active
public life. [156] In the Kingdom of Westphalia preparations for an
insurrection against the French were made by officers who had served in the
Prussian and the Hessian armies. In Prussia itself, by the side of many
nobler agencies, the newly-founded Masonic society of the Tugendbund, or
League of Virtue, made the cause of the Fatherland popular among thousands
to whom it was an agreeable novelty to belong to any society at all. No
spontaneous, irresistible uprising, like that which Europe had seen in the
Spanish Peninsula, was to be expected among the unimpulsive population of
the North German plains; but the military circles of Prussia were generally
in favour of war, and an insurrection of the population west of the Elbe
was not improbable in the event of Napoleon's army being defeated by
Austria in the field. King Frederick William, too timid to resolve upon war
himself, too timid even to look with satisfaction upon the bold attitude of
Austria, had every reason for striking, if once the balance should incline
against Napoleon: even against his own inclination it was possible that the
ardour of his soldiers might force him into war.

[Plans of campaign.]

So strong were the hopes of a general rising in Northern Germany, that the
Austrian Government to some extent based its plans for the campaign on this
event. In the ordinary course of hostilities between France and Austria the
line of operations in Germany is the valley of the Danube; but in preparing
for the war of 1809 the Austrian Government massed its forces in the
north-west of Bohemia, with the object of throwing them directly upon
Central Germany. The French troops which were now evacuating Prussia were
still on their way westwards at the time when Austria was ready to open the
campaign. Davoust, with about 60,000 men, was in Northern Bavaria,
separated by a great distance from the nearest French divisions in Baden
and on the Rhine. By a sudden incursion of the main army of Austria across
the Bohemian mountains, followed by an uprising in Northern Germany,
Davoust and his scattered detachments could hardly escape destruction. Such
was the original plan of the campaign, and it was probably a wise one in
the present exceptional superiority of the Austrian preparations over those
of France. For the first time since the creation of the Consulate it
appeared as if the opening advantages of the war must inevitably be upon
the side of the enemies of France. Napoleon had underrated both the energy
and the resources of his adversary. By the middle of March, when the
Austrians were ready to descend upon Davoust from Bohemia, Napoleon's first
troops had hardly crossed the Rhine. Fortunately for the French commander,
the Austrian Government, at the moment of delivering its well-planned blow,
was seized with fear at its own boldness. Recollections of Hohenlinden and
Ulm filled anxious minds with the thought that the valley of the Danube was
insufficiently defended; and on the 20th of March, when the army was on the
point of breaking into Northern Bavaria, orders were given to divert the
line of march to the south, and to enter the Rhenish Confederacy by the
roads of the Danube and the Inn. Thus the fruit of so much energy, and of
the enemy's rare neglectfulness, was sacrificed at the last moment. It was
not until the 9th of April that the Austrian movement southward was
completed, and that the army lay upon the line of the Inn, ready to attack
Napoleon in the territory of his principal German ally.

[Austrian manifesto to the Germans.]

The proclamations now published by the Emperor and the Archduke bore
striking testimony to the influence of the Spanish insurrection in exciting
the sense of national right, and awakening the Governments of Europe to the
force which this placed in their hands. For the first time in history a
manifesto was addressed "to the German nation." The contrast drawn in the
Archduke's address to his army between the Spanish patriots dying in the
defence of their country, and the German vassal-contingents dragged by
Napoleon into Spain to deprive a gallant nation of its freedom, was one of
the most just and the most telling that tyranny has ever given to the
leaders of a righteous cause. [157] The Emperor's address "to the German
nation" breathed the same spirit. It was not difficult for the politicians
of the Rhenish Federation to ridicule the sudden enthusiasm for liberty and
nationality shown by a Government which up to the present time had dreaded
nothing so much as the excitement of popular movements; but, however
unconcernedly the Emperor and the old school of Austrian statesmen might
adopt patriotic phrases which they had no intention to remember when the
struggle was over, such language was a reality in the effect which it
produced upon the thousands who, both in Austria and other parts of
Germany, now for the first time heard the summons to unite in defence of a
common Fatherland.

[Austrians invade Bavaria, April 9, 1809.]

[Rising of the Tyrol, April, 1809.]

[Its causes religious.]

The leading divisions of the Archduke's army crossed the Inn on the 9th of
April. Besides the forces intended for the invasion of Bavaria, which
numbered 170,000 men, the Austrian Government had formed two smaller
armies, with which the Princes Ferdinand and John were to take up the
offensive in the Grand Duchy of Warsaw and in Northern Italy. On every side
Austria was first in the field; but even before its regular forces could
encounter the enemy, a popular outbreak of the kind that the Government had
invoked wrested from the French the whole of an important province. While
the army crossed the Inn, the Tyrolese people rose, and overpowered the
French and Bavarian detachments stationed in their country. The Tyrol had
been taken from Austria at the Peace of Presburg, and attached to
Napoleon's vassal kingdom of Bavaria. In geographical position and in
relationship of blood the Tyrolese were as closely connected with the
Bavarians as with the Austrians; and the annexation would probably have
caused no lasting discontent if the Bavarian Government had condescended to
take some account of the character of its new subjects. Under the rule of
Austria the Tyrolese had enjoyed many privileges. They were exempt from
military service, except in their own militia; they paid few taxes; they
possessed forms of self-government which were at least popular enough to be
regretted after they had been lost. The people adored their bishops and
clergy. Nowhere could the Church exhibit a more winning example of unbroken
accord between a simple people and a Catholic Crown. Protestantism and the
unholy activities of reason had never brought trouble into the land. The
people believed exactly what the priests told them, and delighted in the
innumerable holidays provided by the Church. They had so little cupidity
that no bribe could induce a Tyrolese peasant to inform the French of any
movement; they had so little intelligence that, when their own courage and
stout-heartedness had won their first battle, they persuaded one another
that they had been led by a Saint on a white horse. Grievances of a
substantial character were not wanting under the new Bavarian rule; but it
was less the increased taxation and the enforcement of military service
that exasperated the people than the attacks made by the Government upon
the property and rights of the Church. Montgelas, the reforming Bavarian
minister, treated the Tyrolese bishops with as little ceremony as the
Swabian knights. The State laid claim to all advowsons; and upon the
refusal of the bishops to give up their patronage, the bishops themselves
were banished and their revenues sequestrated. A passion for uniformity and
common sense prompted the Government to revive the Emperor Joseph's edicts
against pilgrimages and Church holidays. It became a police-offence to shut
up a shop on a saint's day, or to wear a gay dress at a festival. Bavarian
soldiers closed the churches at the end of a prescribed number of masses.
At a sale of Church property, ordered by the Government, some of the sacred
vessels were permitted to fall into the hands of the Jews.

These were the wrongs that fired the simple Tyrolese. They could have borne
the visits of the tax-gatherer and the lists of conscription; they could
not bear that their priests should be overruled, or that their observances
should be limited to those sufficient for ordinary Catholics. Yet, with all
its aspect of unreason, the question in the Tyrol was also part of that
larger question whether Napoleon's pleasure should be the rule of European
life, or nations should have some voice in the disposal of their own
affairs. The Tyrolese were not more superstitious, and they were certainty
much less cruel, than the Spaniards. They fought for ecclesiastical
absurdities; but their cause was also the cause of national right, and the
admiration which their courage excited in Europe was well deserved.

[Tyrolese expel Bavarians and French, April 1809.]

Early in the year 1809 the Archduke John had met the leaders of the
Tyrolese peasantry, and planned the first movements of a national
insurrection. As soon as the Austrian army crossed the Inn, the peasants
thronged to their appointed meeting-places. Scattered detachments of the
Bavarians were surrounded, and on the 12th of April the main body of the
Tyrolese, numbering about 15,000 men, advanced upon Innsbruck. The town was
invested; the Bavarian garrison, consisting of 3,000 regular troops, found
itself forced to surrender after a severe engagement. On the next morning a
French column, on the march from Italy to the Danube, approached Innsbruck,
totally unaware of the events of the preceding day. The Tyrolese closed
behind it as it advanced. It was not until the column was close to the town
that its commander, General Brisson, discovered that Innsbruck had fallen
into an enemy's hands. Retreat was impossible; ammunition was wanting for a
battle; and Brisson had no choice but to surrender to the peasants, who had
already proved more than a match for the Bavarian regular troops. The
Tyrolese had done their work without the help of a single Austrian
regiment. In five days the weak fabric of Bavarian rule had been thrown to
the ground. The French only maintained themselves in the lower valley of
the Adige: and before the end of April their last positions at Trent and
Roveredo were evacuated, and no foreign soldier remained on Tyrolese soil.

Copyright (c) 2007. knowncrafts.net. All rights reserved.