Book: History of Modern Europe 1792 1878

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[War declared, April 20th, 1792.]

Expostulation took a sharper tone; old subjects of complaint were revived;
and the armies on each side were already pressing towards the frontier when
the unhappy Louis was brought down to the Assembly by his Ministers, and
compelled to propose the declaration of war.

[Pretended grounds of war.]

[Expectation of foreign attack real among the French people; not real among
the French politicians.]

It is seldom that the professed grounds correspond with the real motives of
a war; nor was this the case in 1792. The ultimatum of the Austrian
Government demanded that compensation should be made to certain German
nobles whose feudal rights over their peasantry had been abolished in
Alsace; that the Pope should be indemnified for Avignon and the Venaissin,
which had been taken from him by France; and that a Government should be
established at Paris capable of affording the Powers of Europe security
against the spread of democratic agitation. No one supposed the first two
grievances to be a serious ground for hostilities. The rights of the German
nobles in Alsace over their villagers were no doubt protected by the
treaties which ceded those districts to France; but every politician in
Europe would have laughed at a Government which allowed the feudal system
to survive in a corner of its dominions out of respect for a settlement a
century and a half old: nor had the Assembly refused to these foreign
seigneurs a compensation claimed in vain by King Louis for the nobles of
France. As to the annexation of Avignon and the Venaissin, a power which,
like Austria, had joined in dismembering Poland, and had just made an
unsuccessful attempt to dismember Turkey, could not gravely reproach France
for incorporating a district which lay actually within it, and whose
inhabitants, or a great portion of them, were anxious to become citizens of
France. The third demand, the establishment of such a government as Austria
should deem satisfactory, was one which no high-spirited people could be
expected to entertain. Nor was this, in fact, expected by Austria. Leopold
had no desire to attack France, but he had used threats, and would not
submit to the humiliation of renouncing them. He would not have begun a war
for the purpose of delivering the French Crown; but, when he found that he
was himself certain to be attacked, he accepted a war with the Revolution
without regret. On the other side, when the Gironde denounced the league of
the Kings, they exaggerated a far-off danger for the ends of their domestic
policy. The Sovereigns of the Continent had indeed made no secret of their
hatred to the Revolution. Catherine of Russia had exhorted every Court in
Europe to make war; Gustavus of Sweden was surprised by a violent death in
the midst of preparations against France; Spain, Naples, and Sardinia were
ready to follow leaders stronger than themselves. But the statesmen of the
French Assembly well understood the interval that separates hostile feeling
from actual attack; and the unsubstantial nature of the danger to France,
whether from the northern or the southern Powers, was proved by the very
fact that Austria, the hereditary enemy of France, and the country of the
hated Marie Antoinette, was treated as the main enemy. Nevertheless, the
Courts had done enough to excite the anger of millions of French people who
knew of their menaces, and not of their hesitations and reserves. The man
who composed the "Marseillaise" was no maker of cunningly-devised fables;
the crowds who first sang it never doubted the reality of the dangers which
the orators of the Assembly denounced. The Courts of Europe had heaped up
the fuel; the Girondins applied the torch. The mass of the French nation
had little means of appreciating what passed in Europe; they took their
facts from their leaders, who considered it no very serious thing to plunge
a nation into war for the furtherance of internal liberty. Events were soon
to pass their own stern and mocking sentence upon the wisdom of the
Girondin statesmanship.

[Germany follows Austria into the war.]

[State of Germany.]

After voting the Declaration of War the French Assembly accepted a
manifesto, drawn up by Condorcet, renouncing in the name of the French
people all intention of conquest. The manifesto expressed what was
sincerely felt by men like Condorcet, to whom the Revolution was still too
sacred a cause to be stained with the vulgar lust of aggrandisement. But
the actual course of the war was determined less by the intentions with
which the French began it than by the political condition of the States
which bordered upon the French frontier. The war was primarily a war with
Austria, but the Sovereign of Austria was also the head of Germany. The
German Ecclesiastical Princes who ruled in the Rhenish provinces had been
the most zealous protectors of the emigrants; it was impossible that they
should now find shelter in neutrality. Prussia had made an alliance with
the Emperor against France; other German States followed in the wake of one
or other of the great Powers. If France proved stronger than its enemy,
there were governments besides that of Austria which would have to take
their account with the Revolution. Nor indeed was Austria the power most
exposed to violent change. The mass of its territory lay far from France;
at the most, it risked the loss of Lombardy and the Netherlands. Germany at
large was the real area threatened by the war, and never was a political
community less fitted to resist attack than Germany at the end of the
eighteenth century. It was in the divisions of the German people, and in
the rivalries of the two leading German governments, that France found its
surest support throughout the Revolutionary war, and its keenest stimulus
to conquest. It will throw light upon the sudden changes that now began to
break over Europe if we pause to make a brief survey of the state of
Germany at the outbreak of the war, to note the character and policy of its
reigning sovereigns, and to cast a glance over the circumstances which had
brought the central district of Europe into its actual condition.

[Since 1648, all the German States independent of the Emperor.]

[Holy Roman Empire.]

Germany at large still preserved the mediaeval name and forms of the Holy
Roman Empire. The members of this so-called Empire were, however, a
multitude of independent States; and the chief of these States, Austria,
combined with its German provinces a large territory which did not even in
name form part of the Germanic body. The motley of the Empire was made up
by governments of every degree of strength and weakness. Austria and
Prussia possessed both political traditions and resources raising them to
the rank of great European Powers; but the sovereignties of the second
order, such as Saxony and Bavaria, had neither the security of strength nor
the free energy often seen in small political communities; whilst in the
remaining petty States of Germany, some hundreds in number, all public life
had long passed out of mind in a drowsy routine of official benevolence or
oppression. In theory there still existed a united Germanic body; in
reality Germany was composed of two great monarchies in embittered rivalry
with one another, and of a multitude of independent principalities and
cities whose membership in the Empire involved little beyond a liability to
be dragged into the quarrels of their more powerful neighbours. A German
national feeling did not exist, because no combination existed uniting the
interests of all Germany. The names and forms of political union had come
down from a remote past, and formed a grotesque anachronism amid the
realities of the eighteenth century. The head of the Germanic body held
office not by hereditary right, but as the elected successor of Charlemagne
and the Roman Caesars. Since the fifteenth century the imperial dignity had
rested with the Austrian House of Hapsburg; but, with the exception of
Charles V., no sovereign of that House had commanded forces adequate to the
creation of a united German state, and the opportunity which then offered
itself was allowed to pass away. The Reformation severed Northern Germany
from the Catholic monarchy of the south. The Thirty Years' War, terminating
in the middle of the seventeenth century, secured the existence of
Protestantism on the Continent of Europe, but it secured it at the cost of
Germany, which was left exhausted and disintegrated. By the Treaty of
Westphalia, A.D. 1648, the independence of every member of the Empire was
recognised, and the central authority was henceforth a mere shadow. The
Diet of the Empire, where the representatives of the Electors, of the
Princes, and of the Free Cities, met in the order of the Middle Ages, sank
into a Heralds' College, occupied with questions of title and precedence;
affairs of real importance were transacted by envoys from Court to Court.
For purposes of war the Empire was divided into Circles, each Circle
supplying in theory a contingent of troops; but this military organisation
existed only in letter. The greater and the intermediate States regulated
their armaments, as they did their policy, without regard to the Diet of
Ratisbon; the contingents of the smaller sovereignties and free cities were
in every degree of inefficiency, corruption, and disorder; and in spite of
the courage of the German soldier, it could make little difference in a
European war whether a regiment which had its captain appointed by the city
of Gmuend, its lieutenant by the Abbess of Rotenmuenster, and its ensign by
the Abbot of Gegenbach, did or did not take the field with numbers fifty
per cent. below its statutory contingent. [7] How loose was the connection
subsisting between the members of the Empire, how slow and cumbrous its
constitutional machinery, was strikingly proved after the first inroads of
the French into Germany in 1792, when the Diet deliberated for four weeks
before calling out the forces of the Empire, and for five months before
declaring war.

[Austria.]

[Catholic policy of the Hapsburgs.]

The defence of Germany rested in fact with the armies of Austria and
Prussia. The Austrian House of Hapsburg held the imperial title, and
gathered around it the sovereigns of the less progressive German States.
While the Protestant communities of Northern Germany identified their
interests with those of the rising Prussian Monarchy, religious sympathy
and the tradition of ages attached the minor Catholic Courts to the
political system of Vienna. Austria gained something by its patronage; it
was, however, no real member of the German family. Its interests were not
the interests of Germany; its power, great and enduring as it proved, was
not based mainly upon German elements, nor used mainly for German ends. The
title of the Austrian monarch gave the best idea of the singular variety of
races and nationalities which owed their political union only to their
submission to a common head. In the shorter form of state the reigning
Hapsburg was described as King of Hungary, Bohemia, Croatia, Slavonia, and
Galicia; Archduke of Austria; Grand Duke of Transylvania; Duke of Styria,
Carinthia, and Carniola; and Princely Count of Hapsburg and Tyrol. At the
outbreak of the war of 1792 the dominions of the House of Austria included
the Southern Netherlands and the Duchy of Milan, in addition to the great
bulk of the territory which it still governs. Eleven distinct languages
were spoken in the Austrian monarchy, with countless varieties of dialects.
Of the elements of the population the Slavic was far the largest, numbering
about ten millions, against five million Germans and three million Magyars;
but neither numerical strength nor national objects of desire coloured the
policy of a family which looked indifferently upon all its subject races as
instruments for its own aggrandisement. Milan and the Netherlands had come
into the possession of Austria since the beginning of the eighteenth
century, but the destiny of the old dominions of the Hapsburg House had
been fixed for many generations in the course of the Thirty Years' War. In
that struggle, as it affected Austria, the conflict of the ancient and the
reformed faith had become a conflict between the Monarchy, allied with the
Church, and every element of national life and independence, allied with
the Reformation. Protestantism, then dominant in almost all the Hapsburg
territories, was not put down without extinguishing the political liberties
of Austrian Germany, the national life of Bohemia, the spirit and ambition
of the Hungarian nobles. The detestable desire of the Emperor Ferdinand,
"Rather a desert than a country full of heretics," was only too well
fulfilled in the subsequent history of his dominions. In the German
provinces, except the Tyrol, the old Parliaments, and with them all trace
of liberty, disappeared; in Bohemia the national Protestant nobility lost
their estates, or retained them only at the price of abandoning the
religion, the language, and the feelings of their race, until the country
of Huss passed out of the sight of civilised Europe, and Bohemia
represented no more than a blank, unnoticed mass of tillers of the soil. In
Hungary, where the nation was not so completely crushed in the Thirty
Years' War, and Protestanism survived, the wholesale executions in 1686,
ordered by the Tribunal known as the "Slaughter-house of Eperies,"
illustrated the traditional policy of the Monarchy towards the spirit of
national independence. Two powers alone were allowed to subsist in the
Austrian dominions, the power of the Crown and the power of the Priesthood;
and, inasmuch as no real national unity could exist among the subject
races, the unity of a blind devotion to the Catholic Church was enforced
over the greater part of the Monarchy by all the authority of the State.

[Reforms of Maria Theresa, 1740-1780.]

Under the pressure of this soulless despotism the mind of man seemed to
lose all its finer powers. The seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, in
which no decade passed in England and France without the production of some
literary masterpiece, some scientific discovery, or some advance in
political reasoning, are marked by no single illustrious Austrian name,
except that of Haydn the musician. When, after three generations of torpor
succeeding the Thirty Years' War, the mind of North Germany awoke again in
Winckelmann and Lessing, and a widely-diffused education gave to the middle
class some compensation for the absence of all political freedom, no trace
of this revival appeared in Austria. The noble hunted and slept; the serf
toiled heavily on; where a school existed, the Jesuit taught his schoolboys
ecclesiastical Latin, and sent them away unable to read their
mother-tongue. To this dull and impenetrable society the beginnings of
improvement could only be brought by military disaster. The loss of Silesia
in the first years of Maria Theresa disturbed the slumbers of the
Government, and reform began. Although the old provincial Assemblies,
except in Hungary and the Netherlands, had long lost all real power, the
Crown had never attempted to create a uniform system of administration: the
collection of taxes, the enlistment of recruits, was still the business of
the feudal landowners of each district. How such an antiquated order was
likely to fare in the presence of an energetic enemy was clearly enough
shown in the first attack made upon Austria by Frederick the Great. As the
basis of a better military organisation, and in the hope of arousing a
stronger national interest among her subjects, Theresa introduced some of
the offices of a centralised monarchy, at the same time that she improved
the condition of the serf, and substituted a German education and German
schoolmasters for those of the Jesuits. The peasant, hitherto in many parts
of the monarchy attached to the soil, was now made free to quit his lord's
land, and was secured from ejectment so long as he fulfilled his duty of
labouring for the lord on a fixed number of days in the year. Beyond this
Theresa's reform did not extend. She had no desire to abolish the feudal
character of country life; she neither wished to temper the sway of
Catholicism, nor to extinguish those provincial forms which gave to the
nobles within their own districts a shadow of political independence.
Herself conservative in feeling, attached to aristocracy, and personally
devout, Theresa consented only to such change as was recommended by her
trusted counsellors, and asked no more than she was able to obtain by the
charm of her own queenly character.

[Joseph II., 1780-1790.]

With the accession of her son Joseph II. in 1780 a new era began for
Austria. The work deferred by Theresa was then taken up by a monarch whose
conceptions of social and religious reform left little for the boldest
innovators of France ten years later to add. There is no doubt that the
creation of a great military force for enterprises of foreign conquest was
an end always present in Joseph's mind, and that the thirst for
uncontrolled despotic power never left him; but by the side of these
coarser elements there was in Joseph's nature something of the true fire of
the man who lives for ideas. Passionately desirous of elevating every class
of his subjects at the same time that he ignored all their habits and
wishes, Joseph attempted to transform the motley and priest-ridden
collection of nations over whom he ruled into a single homogeneous body,
organised after the model of France and Prussia, worshipping in the spirit
of a tolerant and enlightened Christianity, animated in its relations of
class to class by the humane philosophy of the eighteenth century. In the
first year of his reign Joseph abolished every jurisdiction that did not
directly emanate from the Crown, and scattered an army of officials from
Ostend to the Dniester to conduct the entire public business of his
dominions under the immediate direction of the central authority at Vienna.
In succeeding years edict followed edict, dissolving monasteries,
forbidding Church festivals and pilgrimages, securing the protection of the
State to every form of Christian worship, abolishing the exemption from
land-tax and the monopoly of public offices enjoyed by the nobility,
transforming the Universities from dens of monkish ignorance into schools
of secular learning, converting the peasant's personal service into a
rent-charge, and giving him in the officer of the Crown a protector and an
arbiter in all his dealings with his lord. Noble and enlightened in his
aims, Joseph, like every other reformer of the eighteenth century,
underrated the force which the past exerts over the present; he could see
nothing but prejudice and unreason in the attachment to provincial custom
or time-honoured opinion; he knew nothing of that moral law which limits
the success of revolutions by the conditions which precede them. What was
worst united with what was best in resistance to his reforms. The bigots of
the University of Louvain, who still held out against the discoveries of
Newton, excited the mob to insurrection against Joseph, as the enemy of
religion; the Magyar landowners in Hungary resisted a system which
extinguished the last vestiges of their national independence at the same
time that it destroyed the harsh dominion which they themselves exercised
over their peasantry. Joseph alternated between concession and the extreme
of autocratic violence. At one moment he resolved to sweep away every local
right that fettered the exercise of his power; then, after throwing the
Netherlands into successful revolt, and forcing Hungary to the verge of
armed resistance, he revoked his unconstitutional ordinances (January 28,
1790), and restored all the institutions of the Hungarian monarchy which
existed at the date of his accession.

[Leopold II., 1790-1792.]

A month later, death removed Joseph from his struggle and his sorrows. His
successor, Leopold II., found the monarchy involved as Russia's ally in an
attack upon Turkey; threatened by the Northern League of Prussia, England,
and Holland; exhausted in finance; weakened by the revolt of the
Netherlands; and distracted in every province by the conflict of the
ancient and the modern system of government, and the assertion of new
social rights that seemed to have been created only in order to be
extinguished. The recovery of Belgium and the conclusion of peace with
Turkey were effected under circumstances that brought the adroit and
guarded statesmanship of Leopold into just credit. His settlement of the
conflict between the Crown and the Provinces, between the Church and
education, between the noble and the serf, marked the line in which, for
better or for worse, Austrian policy was to run for sixty years. Provincial
rights, the privileges of orders and corporate bodies, Leopold restored;
the personal sovereignty of his house he maintained unimpaired. In the more
liberal part of Joseph's legislation, the emancipation of learning from
clerical control, the suppression of unjust privilege in taxation, the
abolition of the feudal services of the peasant, Leopold was willing to
make concessions to the Church and the aristocracy; to the spirit of
national independence which his predecessor's aggression had excited in
Bohemia as well as in Hungary, he made no concession beyond the restoration
of certain cherished forms. An attempt of the Magyar nobles to affix
conditions to their acknowledgment of Leopold as King of Hungary was
defeated; and, by creating new offices at Vienna for the affairs of Illyria
and Transylvania, and making them independent of the Hungarian Diet,
Leopold showed that the Crown possessed an instrument against the dominant
Magyar race in the Slavic and Romanic elements of the Hungarian Kingdom.
[8] On the other hand, Leopold consented to restore to the Church its
control over the higher education, and to throw back the burden of taxation
upon land not occupied by noble owners. He gave new rigour to the
censorship of the press; but the gain was not to the Church, to which the
censorship had formerly belonged, but to the Government, which now employed
it as an instrument of State. In the great question of the emancipation of
the serf Leopold was confronted by a more resolute and powerful body of
nobility in Hungary than existed in any other province. The right of the
lord to fetter the peasant to the soil and to control his marriage Leopold
refused to restore in any part of his dominions; but, while in parts of
Bohemia he succeeded in maintaining the right given by Joseph to the
peasant to commute his personal service for a money payment, in Hungary he
was compelled to fall back upon the system of Theresa, and to leave the
final settlement of the question to the Diet. Twenty years later the
statesman who emancipated the peasants of Prussia observed that Hungary was
the only part of the Austrian dominions in which the peasant was not in a
better condition than his fellows in North Germany; [9] and so torpid was
the humanity of the Diet that until the year 1835 the prison and the
flogging-board continued to form a part of every Hungarian manor.

[Death of Leopold, March 1, 1792.]

[Francis II., 1792.]

Of the self-sacrificing ardour of Joseph there was no trace in Leopold's
character; yet his political aims were not low. During twenty-four years'
government of Tuscany he had proved himself almost an ideal ruler in the
pursuit of peace, of religious enlightenment, and of the material
improvement of his little sovereignty. Raised to the Austrian throne, the
compromise which he effected with the Church and the aristocracy resulted
more from a supposed political necessity than from his own inclination. So
long as Leopold lived, Austria would not have wanted an intelligence
capable of surveying the entire field of public business, nor a will
capable of imposing unity of action upon the servants of State. To the
misfortune of Europe no less than of his own dominions, Leopold was carried
off by sickness at the moment when the Revolutionary War broke out. An
uneasy reaction against Joseph's reforms and a well-grounded dread of the
national movements in Hungary and the Netherlands were already the
principal forces in the official world at Vienna; in addition to these came
the new terror of the armed proselytism of the Revolution. The successor of
Leopold, Francis II., was a sickly prince, in whose homely and
unimaginative mind the great enterprises of Joseph, amidst which he had
been brought up, excited only aversion. Amongst the men who surrounded him,
routine and the dread of change made an end of the higher forms of public
life. The Government openly declared that all change should cease so long
as the war lasted; even the pressing question of the peasant's relation to
his lord was allowed to remain unsettled by the Hungarian Diet, lest the
spirit of national independence should find expression in its debates. Over
the whole internal administration of Austria the torpor of the days before
Theresa seemed to be returning. Its foreign policy, however, bore no trace
of this timorous, conservative spirit. Joseph, as restless abroad as at
home, had shared the ambition of the Russian Empress Catherine, and
troubled Europe with his designs upon Turkey, Venice, and Bavaria. These
and similar schemes of territorial extension continued to fill the minds of
Austrian courtiers and ambassadors. Shortly after the outbreak of war with
France the aged minister Kaunitz, who had been at the head of the Foreign
Office during three reigns, retired from power. In spite of the first
partition of Poland, made in combination with Russia and Prussia in 1772,
and in spite of subsequent attempts of Joseph against Turkey and Bavaria,
the policy of Kaunitz had not been one of mere adventure and shifting
attack. He had on the whole remained true to the principle of alliance with
France and antagonism to Prussia; and when the revolution brought war
within sight, he desired to limit the object of the war to the restoration
of monarchical government in France. The conditions under which the young
Emperor and the King of Prussia agreed to turn the war to purposes of
territorial aggrandisement caused Kaunitz, with a true sense of the fatal
import of this policy, to surrender the power which he had held for forty
years. It was secretly agreed between the two courts that Prussia should
recoup itself for its expenses against France by seizing part of Poland. On
behalf of Austria it was demanded that the Emperor should annex Bavaria,
giving Belgium to the Elector as compensation. Both these schemes violated
what Kaunitz held to be sound policy. He believed that the interests of
Austria required the consolidation rather than the destruction of Poland;
and he declared the exchange of the Netherlands for Bavaria to be, in the
actual state of affairs, impracticable. [10] Had the coalition of 1792 been
framed on the principles advocated by Kaunitz, though Austria might not
have effected the restoration of monarchial power in France, the alliance
would not have disgracefully shattered on the crimes and infamies attending
the second partition of Poland.

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