Book: History of Modern Europe 1792 1878

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




[Napoleon dethroned, April 2.]

Napoleon's reign was indeed at an end. Since the rupture of the Congress of
Chatillon on the 18th of March, the Allies had determined to make his
dethronement a condition of peace. As the end approached, it was seen that
no successor was possible but the chief of the House of Bourbon, although
Austria would perhaps have consented to the establishment of a Regency
under the Empress Marie Louise, and the Czar had for a time entertained the
project of placing Bernadotte at the head of the French State. Immediately
after the entry into Paris it was determined to raise the exile Louis
XVIII. to the throne. The politicians of the Empire who followed Talleyrand
were not unwilling to unite with the conquerors, and with the small party
of Royalist noblesse, in recalling the Bourbon dynasty. Alexander, who was
the real master of the situation, rightly judged Talleyrand to be the man
most capable of enlisting the public opinion of France on the side of the
new order. He took up his abode at Talleyrand's house, and employed this
dexterous statesman as the advocate both of the policy of the Allies, and
of the principles of constitutional liberty, which at this time Alexander
himself sincerely befriended. A Provisional Government was appointed under
Talleyrand's leadership. On the 2nd of April the Senate proclaimed the
dethronement of Napoleon. On the 6th it published a Constitution, and
recalled the House of Bourbon.

Louis XVIII. was still in England: his brother, the Count of Artois, had
joined the invaders in France and assumed the title of Lieutenant of the
Kingdom; but the influence of Alexander was necessary to force this
obstinate and unteachable man into anything like a constitutional position.
The Provisional Government invited the Count to take up the administration
until the King's arrival, in virtue of a decree of the Senate. D'Artois
declined to recognise the Senate's competency, and claimed the Lieutenancy
of the Kingdom as his brother's representative. The Senate refusing to
admit the Count's divine right, some unmeaning words were exchanged when
d'Artois entered Paris; and the Provisional Government, disregarding the
claims of the Royal Lieutenant, continued in the full exercise of its
powers. At length the Czar insisted that d'Artois should give way. The
decree of the Senate was accordingly accepted by him at the Tuileries on
the 14th of April; the Provisional Government retired, and a Council of
State was formed, in which Talleyrand still continued to exercise the real
powers of government. In the address made by d'Artois on this occasion, he
stated that although the King had not empowered him to accept the
Constitution made by the Senate on the 6th of April, he entertained no
doubt that the King would accept the principles embodied in that
Constitution, which were those of Representative Government, of the freedom
of the press, and of the responsibility of ministers. A week after
d'Artois' declaration, Louis XVIII. arrived in France.

[Louis XVIII. and the Czar.]

[Louis XVIII. enters Paris, May 3.]

Louis XVIII., though capable of adapting himself in practice to a
constitutional system, had never permitted himself to question the divine
right of the House of Bourbon to sovereign power. The exiles who surrounded
him were slow to understand the needs of the time. They recommended the
King to reject the Constitution. Louis made an ambiguous answer when the
Legislative Body met him at Compiegne and invited an expression of the
royal policy. It was again necessary for the Czar to interfere, and to
explain to the King that France could no longer be an absolute monarchy.
Louis, however, was a better arguer than the Count of Artois. He reasoned
as a man whom the sovereigns of Europe had felt it their duty to restore
without any request from himself. If the Senate of Napoleon, he urged, had
the right to give France a Constitution, he himself ought never to have
been brought from his peaceful English home. He was willing to grant a free
Constitution to his people in exercise of his own royal rights, but he
could not recognise one created by the servants of an usurper. Alexander
was but half satisfied with the liberal professions of Louis: he did not,
however, insist on his acceptance of the Constitution drawn up by the
Senate, but he informed him that until the promises made by d'Artois were
confirmed by a royal proclamation, there would be no entry into Paris. The
King at length signed a proclamation written by Talleyrand, and made his
festal entry into the capital on the 3rd of May.

[Feeling of Paris.]

The promises of Louis himself, the unbroken courtesy and friendliness shown
by the Allies to Paris since their victory a month before, had almost
extinguished the popular feeling of hostility towards a dynasty which owed
its recall to the overthrow of French armies. The foreign leaders
themselves had begun to excite a certain admiration and interest. Alexander
was considered, and with good reason, as a generous enemy; the simplicity
of the King of Prussia, his misfortunes, his well-remembered gallantry at
the Battle of Jena, gained him general sympathy. It needed but little on
the part of the returning Bourbons to convert the interest and curiosity of
Paris into affection. The cortege which entered the capital with Louis
XVIII. brought back, in a singular motley of obsolete and of foreign
costumes, the bearers of many unforgotten names. The look of the King
himself, as he drove through Paris, pleased the people. The childless
father of the murdered Duke of Enghien gained the pitying attention of
those few who knew the face of a man twenty-five years an exile. But there
was one among the members of the returning families whom every heart in
Paris went out to meet. The daughter of Louis XVI., who had shared the
captivity of her parents and of her brother, the sole survivor of her
deeply-wronged house, now returned as Duchess of Angouleme. The uniquely
mournful history of her girlhood, and her subsequent marriage with her
cousin, the son of the Count of Artois, made her the natural object of a
warmer sympathy than could attach to either of the brothers of Louis XVI.
But adversity had imprinted its lines too deeply upon the features and the
disposition of this joyless woman for a moment's light to return. Her voice
and her aspect repelled the affection which thousands were eager to offer
to her. Before the close of the first days of the restored monarchy, it was
felt that the Bourbons had brought back no single person among them who was
capable of winning the French nation's love.

[Napoleon sent to Elba.]

[Napoleon.]

The recall of the ancient line had been allowed to appear to the world as
the work of France itself; Napoleon's fate could only be fixed by his
conquerors. After the fall of Paris, Napoleon remained at Fontainebleau
awaiting events. The soldiers and the younger officers of his army were
still ready to fight for him; the marshals, however, were utterly weary,
and determined that France should no longer suffer for the sake of a single
man. They informed Napoleon that he must abdicate. Yielding to their
pressure, Napoleon, on the 3rd of April, drew up an act of abdication in
favour of his infant son, and sent it by Caulaincourt to the allied
sovereigns at Paris. The document was rejected by the Allies; Caulaincourt
returned with the intelligence that Napoleon must renounce the throne for
himself and all his family. For a moment the Emperor thought of renewing
the war; but the marshals refused their aid more resolutely than before,
and, on the 6th of April, Napoleon signed an unconditional surrender of the
throne for himself and his heirs. He was permitted by the Allies to retain
the unmeaning title of Emperor, and to carry with him a body-guard and a
considerable revenue to the island of Elba, henceforward to be his
principality and his prison. The choice of this island, within easy reach
of France and Italy, and too extensive to be guarded without a large fleet,
was due to Alexander's ill-judged generosity towards Napoleon, and to a
promise made to Marmont that the liberty of the Emperor should be
respected. Alexander was not left without warning of the probable effects
of his leniency. Sir Charles Stewart, military representative of Great
Britain at the allied head-quarters, urged both his own and the allied
Governments to substitute some more distant island for Elba, if they
desired to save Europe from a renewed Napoleonic war, and France from the
misery of a second invasion. The Allies, though not without misgivings,
adhered to their original plan, and left it to time to justify the
predictions of their adviser.

[Treaty of Paris, May 30.]

It was well known what would be the terms of peace, now that Napoleon was
removed from the throne. The Allies had no intention of depriving France of
any of the territory that it had held before 1792: the conclusion of a
definitive Treaty was only postponed until the Constitution, which
Alexander required King Louis XVIII. to grant, had been drawn up by a royal
commission and approved by the King. On the 27th of May the draft of this
Constitution, known as the Charta, was laid before the King, and sanctioned
by him; on the 30th, the Treaty of Paris was signed by the representatives
of France and of all the great Powers. [191] France, surrendering all its
conquests, accepted the frontier of the 1st of January, 1792, with a slight
addition of territory on the side of Savoy and at points on its northern
and eastern border. It paid no indemnity. It was permitted to retain all
the works of art accumulated by twenty years of rapine, except the trophies
carried from the Brandenburg Gate of Berlin and the spoils of the Library
of Vienna. It received back nearly all the colonies which had been taken
from it by Great Britain. By the clauses of the Treaty disposing of the
territory that had formed the Empire and the dependencies of Napoleon,
Holland was restored to the House of Orange, with the provision that its
territory should be largely increased; Switzerland was declared
independent; it was stipulated that Italy, with the exception of the
Austrian Provinces, should consist of independent States, and that Germany
should remain distributed among a multitude of sovereigns, independent, but
united by a Federal tie. The navigation of the Rhine was thrown open. By a
special agreement with Great Britain the French Government undertook to
unite its efforts to those of England in procuring the suppression of the
Slave-trade by all the Powers, and pledged itself to abolish the
Slave-trade among French subjects within five years at the latest. For the
settlement of all European questions not included in the Treaty of Paris it
was agreed that a Congress of the Powers should, within two months,
assemble at Vienna. These were the public articles of the Treaty of Paris.
Secret clauses provided that the Allies--that is, the Allies independently
of France--should control the distributions of territory to be made at the
Congress; that Austria should receive Venetia and all Northern Italy as far
as the Ticino; that Genoa should be given to the King of Sardinia; and that
the Southern Netherlands should be united into a single kingdom with
Holland, and thus form a solid bulwark against France on the north. No
mention was made of Naples, whose sovereign, Murat, had abandoned Napoleon
and allied himself with Austria, but without fulfilling in good faith the
engagements into which he had entered against his former master. A nominal
friend of the Allies, he knew that he had played a double game, and that
his sovereignty, though not yet threatened, was insecure. [192]

[Territorial arrangements of 1814.]

Much yet remained to be settled by the Congress at Vienna, but in the
Treaty of Paris two at least of the great Powers saw the objects attained
for which they had straggled so persistently through all the earlier years
of the war, and which at a later time had appeared to pass almost out of
the range of possibility. England saw the Netherlands once more converted
into a barrier against France, and Antwerp held by friendly hands. Austria
reaped the full reward of its cool and well-balanced diplomacy during the
crisis of 1813, in the annexation of an Italian territory that made it the
real mistress of the Peninsula. Castlereagh and every other English
politician felt that Europe had done itself small honour in handing Venice
back to the Hapsburg; but this had been the condition exacted by Metternich
at Prague before he consented to throw the sword of Austria into the
trembling scale; [193] and the Republican traditions both of Venice and of
Genoa counted for little among the statesmen of 1814, in comparison with
the divine right of a Duke of Modena or a Prince of Hesse Cassel. [194]
France itself, though stripped of the dominion won by twenty years of
warfare, was permitted to retain, for the benefit of a restored line of
kings, the whole of its ancient territory, and the spoil of all the
galleries and museums of Western Europe. It would have been no unnatural
wrong if the conquerors of 1814 had dealt with the soil of France as France
had dealt with other lands; it would have been an act of bare justice to
restore to its rightful owners the pillage that had been brought to Paris,
and to recover from the French treasury a part of the enormous sums which
Napoleon had extorted from conquered States. But the Courts were too well
satisfied with their victory to enter into a strict account upon secondary
matters; and a prudent regard on the part of the Allies to the prospects of
the House of Bourbon saved France from experiencing what it had inflicted
upon others.

[All the Powers except France gained territory by the war, 1792-1814.]

The policy which now restored to France the frontier of 1792 was viewed
with a very different feeling in France and in all other countries. Europe
looked with a kind of wonder upon its own generosity; France forgot the
unparalleled provocations which it had offered to mankind, and only
remembered that Belgium and the Rhenish Provinces had formed part of the
Republic and the Empire for nearly twenty years. These early conquests of
the Republic, which no one had attempted to wrest from France since 1795,
had undoubtedly been the equivalent for which, in the days of the
Directory, Austria had been permitted to extend itself in Italy, and
Prussia in Germany. In the opinion of men who sincerely condemned
Napoleon's distant conquests, the territory between France and the Rhine
was no more than France might legitimately demand, as a counterpoise to the
vast accessions falling to one or other of the Continental Powers out of
the territory of Poland, Venice, and the body of suppressed States in
Germany. Poland, excluding the districts taken from it before 1792,
contained a population twice as great as that of Belgium and the Rhenish
Provinces together: Venice carried with it, in addition to a commanding
province on the Italian mainland, the Eastern Adriatic Coast as far as
Ragusa. If it were true that the proportionate increase of power formed the
only solid principle of European policy, France sustained a grievous injury
in receiving back the limits of 1791, when every other State on the
Continent was permitted to retain the territory, or an equivalent for the
territory, which it had gained in the great changes that took place between
1791 and 1814. But in fact there had never been a time during the last
hundred and fifty years when France, under an energetic Government, had not
possessed a force threatening to all its neighbours. France, reduced to its
ancient limits, was still the equal, and far more than the equal, of any of
the Continental Powers, with all that they had gained during the
Revolutionary War. It remained the first of European nations, though no
longer, as in the eighteenth century, the one great nation of the western
continent. Its efforts after universal empire had aroused other nations
into life. Had the course of French conquest ceased before Napoleon grasped
power, France would have retained its frontier of the Rhine, and long have
exercised an unbounded influence over both Germany and Italy, through the
incomparably juster and brighter social life which the Revolution, combined
with all that France had inherited from the past, enabled it to display to
those countries. Napoleon, in the attempt to impose his rule upon all
Europe, created a power in Germany whose military future was to be not less
solid than that of France itself, and left to Europe, in the accord of his
enemies, a firmer security against French attack than any that the efforts
of statesmen had ever framed.

[Permanent effect on Europe of period 1792-1814.]

[National sense excited in Germany and Italy.]

The league of the older monarchies had proved stronger in the end than the
genius and the ambition of a single man. But if, in the service of
Napoleon, France had exhausted its wealth, sunk its fleets, and sacrificed
a million lives, only that it might lose all its earlier conquests, and
resume limits which it had outgrown before Napoleon held his first command,
it was not thus with the work which, for or against itself, France had
effected in Europe during the movements of the last twenty years. In the
course of the epoch now ending the whole of the Continent up to the
frontiers of Austria and Russia had gained the two fruitful ideas of
nationality and political freedom. There were now two nations in Europe
where before there had been but aggregates of artificial States. Germany
and Italy were no longer mere geographical expressions: in both countries,
though in a very unequal degree, the newly-aroused sense of nationality had
brought with it the claim for unity and independence. In Germany, Prussia
had set a great example, and was hereafter to reap its reward; in Italy
there had been no State and no statesman to take the lead either in
throwing off Napoleon's rule, or in forcing him, as the price of support,
to give to his Italian kingdom a really national government. Failing to act
for itself, the population of all Italy, except Naples, was parcelled out
between Austria and the ancient dynasties; but the old days of passive
submission to the foreigner were gone for ever, and time was to show
whether those were the dreamers who thought of a united Italy, or those who
thought that Metternich's statesmanship had for ever settled the fate of
Venice and of Milan.

[Desire for political liberty.]

The second legacy of the Revolutionary epoch, the idea of constitutional
freedom, which in 1789 had been as much wanting in Spain, where national
spirit was the strongest, as in those German States where it was the
weakest, had been excited in Italy by the events of 1796 and 1798, in Spain
by the disappearance of the Bourbon king and the self-directed struggle of
the nation against the invader; in Prussia it had been introduced by the
Government itself when Stein was at the head of the State. "It is
impossible," wrote Lord Castlereagh in the spring of 1814, "not to perceive
a great moral change coming on in Europe, and that the principles of
freedom are in full operation." [195] There was in fact scarcely a Court in
Europe which was not now declaring its intention to frame a Constitution.
The professions might be lightly made; the desire and the capacity for
self-government might still be limited to a narrower class than the friends
of liberty imagined; but the seed was sown, and a movement had begun which
was to gather strength during the next thirty years of European history,
while one revolution after another proved that Governments could no longer
with safety disregard the rights of their subjects.

[Social changes.]

Lastly, in all the territory that had formed Napoleon's Empire and
dependencies, and also in Prussia, legal changes had been made in the
rights and relations of the different classes of society, so important as
almost to create a new type of social life. Within the Empire itself the
Code Napoleon, conferring upon the subjects of France the benefits which
the French had already won for themselves, had superseded a society resting
on class-privilege, on feudal service, and on the despotism of custom, by a
society resting on equality before the law, on freedom of contract, and on
the unshackled ownership and enjoyment of land, whether the holder
possessed an acre or a league. The principles of the French Code, if not
the Code itself, had been introduced into Napoleon's kingdom of Italy, into
Naples, and into almost all the German dependencies of France. In Prussia
the reforms of Stein and Hardenberg had been directed, though less boldly,
towards the same end; and when, after 1814, the Rhenish Provinces were
annexed to Prussia by the Congress of Vienna, the Government was wise
enough and liberal enough to leave these districts in the enjoyment of the
laws which France had given them, and not to risk a comparison between even
the best Prussian legislation and the Code Napoleon. In other territory now
severed from France and restored to German or Italian princes, attempts
were not wanting to obliterate the new order and to re-introduce the
burdens and confusions of the old regime. But these reactions, even where
unopposed for a time, were too much in conflict with the spirit of the age
to gain more than a temporary and precarious success. The people had begun
to know good and evil: examples of a free social order were too close at
hand to render it possible for any part of the western continent to relapse
for any very long period into the condition of the eighteenth century.

[Limits.]

It was indeed within a distinct limit that the Revolutionary epoch effected
its work of political and social change. Neither England nor Austria
received the slightest impulse to progress. England, on the contrary,
suspended almost all internal improvement during the course of the war; the
domestic policy of the Austrian Court, so energetic in the reign
immediately preceding the Revolution, became for the next twenty years,
except where it was a policy of repression, a policy of pure vacancy and
inaction. But in all other States of Western Europe the period which
reached its close with Napoleon's fall left deep and lasting traces behind
it. Like other great epochs of change, it bore its own peculiar character.
It was not, like the Renaissance and the Reformation, a time when new
worlds of faith and knowledge transformed the whole scope and conception of
human life; it was not, like our own age, a time when scientific discovery
and increased means of communication silently altered the physical
conditions of existence; it was a time of changes directly political in
their nature, and directly effected by the political agencies of
legislation and of war. In the perspective of history the Napoleonic age
will take its true place among other, and perhaps greater, epochs. Its
elements of mere violence and disturbance will fill less space in the eyes
of mankind; its permanent creations, more. As an epoch of purely political
energy, concentrating the work of generations within the compass of twenty
five years, it will perhaps scarcely find a parallel.




CHAPTER XII.


The Restoration of 1814--Norway--Naples--Westphalia--Spain--The Spanish
Constitution overthrown: Victory of the Clergy--Restoration in France--The
Charta--Encroachments of the Nobles and Clergy--Growing Hostility to the
Bourbons--Congress of Vienna--Talleyrand and the Four Powers--The Polish
Question--The Saxon Question--Theory of Legitimacy--Secret Alliance against
Russia and Prussia--Compromise--The Rhenish Provinces--Napoleon leaves Elba
and lands in France--His Declarations--Napoleon at Grenoble, at Lyon, at
Paris--The Congress of Vienna unites Europe against France--Murat's Action
in Italy--The Acte Additionnel--The Champ de Mai--Napoleon takes up the
offensive--Battles of Ligny, Quatre Bras, Waterloo--Affairs at
Paris--Napoleon sent to St. Helena--Wellington and Fouche--Arguments on the
proposed Cession of French Territory--Treaty of Holy Alliance--Second
Treaty of Paris--Conclusion of the Work of the Congress of Vienna--
Federation of Germany--Estimate of the Congress of Vienna and of the
Treaties of 1815--The Slave Trade.


Of all the events which, in the more recent history of mankind, have struck
the minds of nations with awe, and appeared to reveal in its direct
operation a power overruling the highest human effort, there is none equal
in grandeur and terror to the annihilation of Napoleon's army in the
invasion of Russia. It was natural that a generation which had seen State
after State overthrown, and each new violation of right followed by an
apparent consolidation of the conqueror's strength, should view in the
catastrophe of 1812 the hand of Providence visibly outstretched for the
deliverance of Europe. [196] Since that time many years have passed. Perils
which then seemed to envelop the future of mankind now appear in part
illusory; sacrifices then counted cheap have proved of heavy cost. The
history of the two last generations shows that not everything was lost to
Europe in passing subjection to a usurper, nor everything gained by the
victory of his opponents. It is now not easy to suppress the doubt whether
the permanent interests of mankind would not have been best served by
Napoleon's success in 1812. His empire had already attained dimensions that
rendered its ultimate disruption certain: less depended upon the
postponement or the acceleration of its downfall than on the order of
things ready to take its place. The victory of Napoleon in 1812 would have
been followed by the establishment of a Polish kingdom in the provinces
taken from Russia. From no generosity in the conqueror, from no sympathy on
his part with a fallen people, but from the necessities of his political
situation, Poland must have been so organised as to render it the bulwark
of French supremacy in the East. The serf would have been emancipated. The
just hatred of the peasant to the noble, which made the partition of 1772
easy, and has proved fatal to every Polish uprising from that time to the
present, would have been appeased by an agrarian reform executed with
Napoleon's own unrivalled energy and intelligence, and ushered in with
brighter hopes than have at any time in the history of Poland lit the dark
shades of peasant-life. The motives which in 1807 had led Napoleon to stay
his hand, and to content himself with half-measures of emancipation in the
Duchy of Warsaw [197], could have had no place after 1812, when Russia
remained by his side, a mutilated but inexorable enemy, ever on the watch
to turn to its own advantage the first murmurs of popular discontent beyond
the border. Political independence, the heritage of the Polish noble, might
have been withheld, but the blessing of landed independence would have been
bestowed on the mass of the Polish people. In the course of some years this
restored kingdom, though governed by a member of the house of Bonaparte,
would probably have gained sufficient internal strength to survive the
downfall of Napoleon's Empire or his own decease. England, Austria, and
Turkey would have found it no impossible task to prevent its absorption by
Alexander at the re-settlement of Europe, if indeed the collapse of Russia
had not been followed by the overthrow of the Porte, and the establishment
of a Greek, a Bulgarian, and a Roumanian Kingdom under the supremacy of
France. By the side of the three absolute monarchs of Central and Eastern
Europe there would have remained, upon Napoleon's downfall, at least one
people in possession of the tradition of liberty: and from the example of
Poland, raised from the deep but not incurable degradation of its social
life, the rulers of Russia might have gained courage to emancipate the
serf, without waiting for the lapse of another half-century and the
occurrence of a second ruinous war. To compare a possible sequence of
events with the real course of history, to estimate the good lost and evil
got through events which at the time seemed to vindicate the moral
governance of the world, is no idle exercise of the imagination. It may
serve to give caution to the judgment: it may guard us against an arbitrary
and fanciful interpretation of the actual. The generation which witnessed
the fall of Napoleon is not the only one which has seen Providence in the
fulfilment of its own desire, and in the storm-cloud of nature and history
has traced with too sanguine gaze the sacred lineaments of human equity and
love.

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