Book: History of Modern Europe 1792 1878

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The work was carried a step further by Napoleon's return from Elba.
Napoleon understood the impatience of the English people, and believed that
he could make no higher bid for its friendship than by abandoning the
reserves made by Talleyrand at the Congress, and abolishing the French
slave-trade at once and for all. This was accomplished; and the Bourbon
ally of England, on his second restoration could not undo what had been
done by the usurper. Spain and Portugal alone continued to pursue--the
former country without restriction, the latter on the south of the line--a
commerce branded by the united voice of Europe as infamous. The Governments
of these countries alleged in their justification that Great Britain itself
had resisted the passing of the prohibitory law until its colonies were far
better supplied with slaves than those of its rivals now were. This was
true, but it was not the whole truth. The whole truth was not known, the
sincerity of English feeling was not appreciated, until, twenty years
later, the nation devoted a part of its wealth to release the slave from
servitude, and the English race from the reproach of slave holding. Judged
by the West Indian Emancipation of 1833, the Spanish appeal to English
history sounds almost ludicrous. But the remembrance of the long years
throughout which the advocates of justice encountered opposition in England
should temper the severity of our condemnation of the countries which still
defended a bad interest. The light broke late upon ourselves: the darkness
that still lingered elsewhere had too long been our own.




CHAPTER XIII.


Concert of Europe after 1815--Spirit of the Foreign Policy of Alexander, of
Metternich, and of the English Ministry--Metternich's action in Italy,
England's in Sicily and Spain--The Reaction in France--Richelieu and the
New Chamber--Execution of Ney--Imprisonments and persecutions--Conduct of
the Ultra-Royalists in Parliament--Contests on the Electoral Bill and the
Budget--The Chamber prorogued--Affair of Grenoble--Dissolution of the
Chamber--Electoral Law and Financial Settlement of 1817--Character of the
first years of peace in Europe generally--Promise of a Constitution in
Prussia--Hardenberg opposed by the partisans of autocracy and
privilege--Schmalz's Pamphlet--Delay of Constitutional Reform in Germany at
large--The Wartburg Festival--Progress of Reaction--The Czar now inclines
to repression--Congress of Aix la-Chapelle--Evacuation of France--Growing
influence of Metternich in Europe--His action on Prussia--Murder of
Kotzebue--The Carlsbad Conference and measures of repression in
Germany--Richelieu and Decazes--Murder of the Duke of Berry--Progress of
the reaction in France--General causes of the victory of reaction in
Europe.


[Concert of Europe regarding France.]

For nearly twenty years the career of Bonaparte had given to European
history the unity of interest which belongs to a single life. This unity
does not immediately disappear on the disappearance of his mighty figure.
The Powers of Europe had been too closely involved in the common struggle,
their interests were too deeply concerned in the maintenance of the
newly-established order, for the thoughts of Governments to be withdrawn
from foreign affairs, and the currents of national policy to fall at once
apart into separate channels. The Allied forces continued to occupy France
with Wellington as commander-in-chief; the defence of the Bourbon monarchy
had been declared the cause of Europe at large; the conditions under which
the numbers of the army of occupation might be reduced, or the period of
occupation shortened, remained to be fixed by the Allies themselves. France
thus formed the object of a common European deliberation; nor was the
concert of the Powers without its peculiar organ. An International Council
was created at Paris, consisting of the Ambassadors of the four great
Courts. The forms of a coalition were, for the first time, preserved after
the conclusion of peace. Communications were addressed to the Government of
Louis XVIII., in the name of all the Powers together. The Council of
Ambassadors met at regular intervals, and not only transacted business
relating to the army of occupation and the payment of indemnities, but
discussed the domestic policy of the French Government, and the situation
of parties or the signs of political opinion in the Assembly and the
nation.

[Action of the Powers outside France.]

In thus watching over the restored Bourbon monarchy, the Courts of Europe
were doing no more than they had bound themselves to do by treaty. Paris,
however, was not the only field for a busy diplomacy. In most of the minor
capitals of Europe each of the Great Powers had its own supposed interests
to pursue, or its own principles of government to inculcate. An age of
transition seemed to have begun. Constitutions had been promised in many
States, and created in some; in Spain and in Sicily they had reached the
third stage, that of suppression. It was not likely that the statesmen who
had succeeded to Napoleon's power in Europe should hold themselves entirely
aloof from the affairs of their weaker neighbours, least of all when a
neighbouring agitation might endanger themselves. In one respect the
intentions of the British, the Austrian, and the Russian Governments were
identical, and continued to be so, namely, in the determination to
countenance no revolutionary movement. Revolution, owing to the experience
of 1793, had come to be regarded as synonymous with aggressive warfare.
Jacobins, anarchists, disturbers of the public peace, were only different
names for one and the same class of international criminals, who were
indeed indigenous to France, but might equally endanger the peace of
mankind in other countries. Against these fomenters of mischief all the
Courts were at one.

[Alexander.]

Here, however, agreement ceased. It was admitted that between revolutionary
disturbance and the enjoyment of constitutional liberty a wide interval
existed, and the statesmen of the leading Powers held by no means the same
views as to the true relation between nations and their rulers. The most
liberal in theory among the Sovereigns of 1815 was the Emperor Alexander.
Already, in the summer of 1815, he had declared the Duchy of Warsaw to be
restored to independence and nationality, under the title of the Kingdom of
Poland; and before the end of the year he had granted it a Constitution,
which created certain representative assemblies, and provided the new
kingdom with an army and an administration of its own, into which no person
not a Pole could enter. The promised introduction of Parliamentary life
into Poland was but the first of a series of reforms dimly planned by
Alexander, which was to culminate in the bestowal of a Constitution upon
Russia itself, and the emancipation of the serf. [251] Animated by hopes
like these for his own people, hopes which, while they lasted, were not
merely sincere but ardent, Alexander was also friendly to the cause of
constitutional government in other countries. Ambition mingled with
disinterested impulses in the foreign policy of the Czar. It was impossible
that Alexander should forget the league into which England and Austria had
so lately entered against him. He was anxious to keep France on his side;
he was not inclined to forego the satisfaction of weakening Austria by
supporting national hopes in Italy; [252] and he hoped to create some
counterpoise to England's maritime power by allying Russia with a
strengthened and better-administered Spain. Agents of the Czar abounded in
Italy and in Germany, but in no capital was the Ambassador of Russia more
active than in Madrid. General Tatistcheff, who was appointed to this post
in 1814, became the terror of all his colleagues and of the Cabinet of
London from his extraordinary activity in intrigue; but in relation to the
internal affairs of Spain his influence was beneficial; and it was
frequently directed towards the support of reforming Ministers, whom King
Ferdinand, if free from foreign pressure, would speedily have sacrificed to
the pleasure of his favourites and confessors.

[Metternich.]

[Metternich's policy in Germany.]

[In Italy.]

In the eyes of Prince Metternich, the all-powerful Minister of Austria,
Alexander was little better than a Jacobin. The Austrian State, though its
frontiers had been five times changed since 1792, had continued in a
remarkable degree free from the impulse to internal change. The Emperor
Francis was the personification of resistance to progress; the Minister
owed his unrivalled position not more to his own skilful statesmanship in
the great crisis of 1813 than to a genuine accord with the feelings of his
master. If Francis was not a man of intellect, Metternich was certainly a
man of character; and for a considerable period they succeeded in
impressing the stamp of their own strongly-marked Austrian policy upon
Europe. The force of their influence sprang from no remote source; it was
due mainly to a steady intolerance of all principles not their own.
Metternich described his system with equal simplicity and precision as an
attempt neither to innovate nor to go back to the past, but to keep things
as they were. In the old Austrian dominions this was not difficult to do,
for things had no tendency to move and remained fixed of themselves; [253]
but on the outside, both on the north and on the south, ideas were at work
which, according to Metternich, ought never to have entered the world, but,
having unfortunately gained admittance, made it the task of Governments to
resist their influence by all available means. Stein and the leaders of the
Prussian War of Liberation had agitated Germany with hopes of national
unity, of Parliaments, and of the impulsion of the executive powers of
State by public opinion. Against these northern innovators, Metternich had
already won an important victory in the formation of the Federal
Constitution. The weakness and timidity of the King of Prussia made it
probable that, although he was now promising his subjects a Constitution,
he might at no distant date be led to unite with other German Governments
in a system of repression, and in placing Liberalism under the ban of the
Diet. In Italy, according to the conservative statesman, the same dangers
existed and the same remedies were required. Austria, through the
acquisition of Venice, now possessed four times as large a territory beyond
the Alps as it had possessed before 1792; but the population was no longer
the quiescent and contented folk that it had been in the days of Maria
Theresa. Napoleon's kingdom and army of Italy had taught the people
warfare, and given them political aims and a more masculine spirit.
Metternich's own generals had promised the Italians independence when they
entered the country in 1814; Murat's raid a year later had actually been
undertaken in the name of Italian unity. These were disagreeable incidents,
and signs were not wanting of the existence of a revolutionary spirit in
the Italian provinces of Austria, especially among the officers who had
served under Napoleon. Metternich was perfectly clear as to the duties of
his Government. The Italians might have a Viceroy to keep Court at Milan, a
body of native officials to conduct their minor affairs, and a mock
Congregation or Council, without any rights, powers, or functions whatever;
if this did not satisfy them, they were a rebellious people, and government
must be conducted by means of spies, police, and the dungeons of the
Spielberg. [254]

[Scheme of an Austrian Protectorate over Italy.]

On this system, backed by great military force, there was nothing to fear
from the malcontents of Lombardy and Venice: it remained for Metternich to
extend the same security to the rest of the peninsula, and by a series of
treaties to effect the double end of exterminating constitutional
government and of establishing an Austrian Protectorate over the entire
country, from the Alps to the Sicilian Straits. The design was so ambitious
that Metternich had not dared to disclose it at the Congress of Vienna; it
was in fact a direct violation of the Treaty of Paris, and of the
resolution of the Congress, that Italy, outside the possessions of Austria,
should consist of independent States. The first Sovereign over whom the net
was cast was Ferdinand of Naples. On the 15th of June, 1815, immediately
after the overthrow of Murat, King Ferdinand signed a Treaty of Alliance
with Austria, which contained a secret clause, pledging the King to
introduce no change into his recovered kingdom inconsistent with its own
old monarchical principles, or with the principles which had been adopted
by the Emperor of Austria for the government of his Italian provinces.
[255] Ferdinand, two years before, had been compelled by Great Britain to
grant Sicily a Constitution, and was at this very moment promising one to
Naples. The Sicilian Constitution was now tacitly condemned; the
Neapolitans were duped. By a further secret clause, the two contracting
Sovereigns undertook to communicate to one another everything that should
come to their knowledge affecting the security and tranquillity of the
Italian peninsula; in other words, the spies and the police of Ferdinand
were now added to Metternich's staff in Lombardy. Tuscany, Modena, and
Parma entered into much the same condition of vassalage; but the scheme for
a universal federation of Italy under Austria's leadership failed through
the resistance of Piedmont and of the Pope. Pius VII. resented the attempts
of Austria, begun in 1797 and repeated at the Congress of Vienna, to
deprive the Holy See of Bologna and Ravenna. The King of Sardinia, though
pressed by England to accept Metternich's offer of alliance, maintained
with great decision the independence of his country, and found in the
support of the Czar a more potent argument than any that he could have
drawn from treaties. [256]

[Spirit of England's foreign policy.]

The part played by the British Government at this epoch has been severely
judged not only by the later opinion of England itself, but by the
historical writers of almost every nation in Europe. It is perhaps
fortunate for the fame of Pitt that he did not live to witness the
accomplishment of the work in which he had laboured for thirteen years. The
glory of a just and courageous struggle against Napoleon's tyranny remains
with Pitt; the opprobrium of a settlement hostile to liberty has fallen on
his successors. Yet there is no good ground for believing that Pitt would
have attached a higher value to the rights or inclinations of individual
communities than his successors did in re-adjusting the balance of power;
on the contrary, he himself first proposed to destroy the Republic of
Genoa, and to place Catholic Belgium under the Protestant Crown of Holland;
nor was any principle dearer to him than that of aggrandising the House of
Austria as a counterpoise to the power of France. [257] The Ministry of
1815 was indeed but too faithfully walking in the path into which Pitt had
been driven by the King and the nation in 1793. Resistance to France had
become the one absorbing care, the beginning and end of English
statesmanship. Government at home had sunk to a narrow and unfeeling
opposition to the attempts made from time to time to humanise the mass of
the people, to reform an atrocious criminal law, to mitigate the civil
wrongs inflicted in the name and the interest of a State-religion. No one
in the Cabinet doubted that authority, as such, must be wiser than
inexperienced popular desire, least of all the statesman who now, in
conjunction with the Duke of Wellington, controlled the policy of Great
Britain upon the Continent. Lord Castlereagh had no sympathy with cruelty
or oppression in Continental rulers; he had just as little belief in the
value of free institutions to their subjects. [258] The nature of his
influence, which has been drawn sometimes in too dark colours, may be
fairly gathered from the course of action which he followed in regard to
Sicily and to Spain.

[In Sicily.]

In Sicily the representative of Great Britain, Lord William Bentinck, had
forced King Ferdinand, who could not have maintained himself for an hour
without the arms and money of England, to establish in 1813 a Parliament
framed on the model of our own. The Parliament had not proved a wise or a
capable body, but its faults were certainly not equal to those of King
Ferdinand, and its re-construction under England's auspices would have been
an affair of no great difficulty. Ferdinand, however, had always detested
free institutions, and as soon as he regained the throne of Naples he
determined to have done with the Sicilian Parliament. A correspondence on
the intended change took place between Lord Castlereagh and A'Court, the
Ambassador who had now succeeded Lord William Bentinck. [259] That the
British Government, which had protected the Sicilian Crown against Napoleon
at the height of his power, could have protected the Sicilian Constitution
against King Ferdinand's edicts without detaching a single man-of-war's
boat, is not open to doubt. Castlereagh, however, who for years past had
been paying, stimulating, or rebuking every Government in Europe, and who
had actually sent the British fleet to make the Norwegians submit to
Bernadotte, now suddenly adopted the principle of non-intervention, and
declared that, so long as Ferdinand did not persecute the Sicilians who at
the invitation of England had taken part in political life, or reduce the
privileges of Sicily below those which had existed prior to 1813, Great
Britain would not interfere with his action. These stipulations were
inserted in order to satisfy the House of Commons, and to avert the charge
that England had not only abandoned the Sicilian Constitution, but
consented to a change which left the Sicilians in a worse condition than if
England had never intervened in their affairs. Lord Castlereagh shut his
eyes to the confession involved, that he was leaving the Sicilians to a
ruler who, but for such restraint, might be expected to destroy every
vestige of public right, and to take the same bloody and unscrupulous
revenge upon his subjects which he had taken when Nelson restored him to
power in 1799.

[Action of England in Spain.]

The action of the British Government in Spain showed an equal readiness to
commit the future to the wisdom of Courts. Lord Castlereagh was made
acquainted with the Spanish Ferdinand's design of abolishing the
Constitution on his return in the year 1814. "So far," he replied, "as the
mere existence of the Constitution is at stake, it is impossible to believe
that any change tranquilly effected can well be worse." [260] In this case
the interposition of England would perhaps not have availed against a
reactionary clergy and nation: Castlereagh, was, moreover, deceived by
Ferdinand's professions that he had no desire to restore absolute
government. He credited the King with the same kind of moderation which had
led Louis XVIII. to accept the Charta in France, and looked forward to the
maintenance of a constitutional regime, though under conditions more
favourable to the executive power and to the influence of the great landed
proprietors and clergy. [261] Events soon proved what value was to be
attached to the word of the King; the flood of reaction and vengeance broke
over the country; and from this time the British Government, half
confessing and half excusing Ferdinand's misdeeds, exerted itself to check
the outrages of despotism, and to mitigate the lot of those who were now
its victims. In the interest of the restored monarchies themselves, as much
as from a regard to the public opinion of Great Britain, the Ambassadors of
England urged moderation upon all the Bourbon Courts. This, however, was
also done by Metternich, who neither took pleasure in cruelty, nor desired
to see new revolutions produced by the extravagances of priests and
emigrants. It was not altogether without cause that the belief arose that
there was little to choose, in reference to the constitutional liberties of
other States, between the sentiments of Austria and those of the Ministers
of free England. A difference, however, did exist. Metternich actually
prohibited the Sovereigns over whom his influence extended from granting
their subjects liberty: England, believing the Sovereigns to be more
liberal than they were, did not interfere to preserve constitutions from
destruction.

[Outrages of the Royalists in the south of France, June-August.]

Such was the general character of the influence now exercised by the three
leading Powers of Europe. Prussia, which had neither a fleet like England,
an Italian connection like Austria, nor an ambitious Sovereign like Russia,
concerned itself little with distant States, and limited its direct action
to the affairs of France, in which it possessed a substantial interest,
inasmuch as the indemnities due from Louis XVIII. had yet to be paid. The
possibility of recovering these sums depended upon the maintenance of peace
and order in France; and from the first it was recognised by every
Government in Europe that the principal danger to peace and order arose
from the conduct of the Count of Artois and his friends, the party of
reaction. The counterrevolutionary movement began in mere riot and outrage.
No sooner had the news of the battle of Waterloo reached the south of
France than the Royalist mob of Marseilles drove the garrison out of the
town, and attacked the quarter inhabited by the Mameluke families whom
Napoleon had brought from Egypt. Thirteen of these unfortunate persons, and
about as many Bonapartist citizens, were murdered. [262] A few weeks later
Nismes was given over to anarchy and pillage. Religious fanaticism here
stimulated the passion of political revenge. The middle class in Nismes
itself and a portion of the surrounding population were Protestant, and had
hailed Napoleon's return from Elba as a deliverance from the ascendancy of
priests, and from the threatened revival of the persecutions which they had
suffered under the old Bourbon monarchy. The Catholics, who were much more
numerous, included the lowest class in the town, the larger landed
proprietors of the district, and above half of the peasantry. Bands of
volunteers had been formed by the Duke of Angouleme at the beginning of the
Hundred Days, in the hope of sustaining a civil war against Napoleon. After
capitulating to the Emperor's generals, some companies had been attacked by
villagers and hunted down like wild beasts. The bands now reassembled and
entered Nismes. The garrison, after firing upon them, were forced to give
up their arms, and in this defenceless state a considerable number of the
soldiers were shot down (July 17). On the next day the leaders of the armed
mob began to use their victory. For several weeks murder and outrage,
deliberately planned and publicly announced, kept not only Nismes itself,
but a wide extent of the surrounding country in constant terror. The
Government acted slowly and feebly; the local authorities were intimidated;
and, in spite of the remonstrances of Wellington and the Russian
Ambassador, security was not restored until the Allies took the matter into
their own hands, and a detachment of Austrian troops occupied the
Department of the Gard. Other districts in the south of France witnessed
the same outbreaks of Royalist ferocity. Avignon was disgraced by the
murder of Marshal Brune, conqueror of the Russians and English in the Dutch
campaign of 1799, an honest soldier, who after suffering Napoleon's neglect
in the time of prosperity, had undertaken the heavy task of governing
Marseilles during the Hundred Days. At Toulouse, General Ramel, himself a
Royalist, was mortally wounded by a band of assassins, and savagely
mutilated while lying disabled and expiring.

[Elections of 1815.]

Crimes like these were the counterpart of the September massacres of 1792;
and the terrorism exercised by the Royalists in 1815 has been compared, as
a whole, with the Republican Reign of Terror twenty-two years earlier. But
the comparison does little credit to the historical sense of those who
suggested it. The barbarities of 1815 were strictly local: shocking as they
were, they scarcely amounted in all to an average day's work of Carrier or
Fouche in 1794; and the action of the established Government, though
culpably weak, was not itself criminal. A second and more dangerous stage
of reaction began, however, when the work of popular vengeance closed.
Elections for a new Chamber of Deputies were held at the end of August. The
Liberals and the adherents of Napoleon, paralysed by the disasters of
France and the invaders' presence, gave up all as lost: the Ministers of
Louis XVIII. abstained from the usual electoral manoeuvres, Talleyrand
through carelessness, Fouche from a desire to see parties evenly balanced:
the ultra-Royalists alone had extended their organisation over France, and
threw themselves into the contest with the utmost passion and energy.
Numerically weak, they had the immense forces of the local administration
on their side. The Prefets had gone over heart and soul to the cause of the
Count of Artois, who indeed represented to them that he was acting under
the King's own directions. The result was that an Assembly was elected to
which France has seen only one parallel since, namely in the Parliament of
1871, elected when invaders again occupied the country, and the despotism
of a second Bonaparte had ended in the same immeasurable calamity. The bulk
of the candidates returned were country gentlemen whose names had never
been heard of in public life since 1789, men who had resigned themselves to
inaction and obscurity under the Republic and the Empire, and whose one
political idea was to reverse the injuries done by the Revolution to their
caste and to their Church. They were Royalists because a Bourbon monarchy
alone could satisfy their claims: they called themselves ultra-Royalists,
but they were so only in the sense that they required the monarchy to
recognise no ally but themselves. They had already shown before Napoleon's
return that their real chief was the Count of Artois, not the King; in what
form their ultra-Royalism would exhibit itself in case the King should not
submit to be their instrument remained to be proved.

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