Book: History of Modern Europe 1792 1878

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[Supplementary Act of Vienna, June, 1820.]

These measures were of an exceptional, and purported to be of a temporary,
character. There were, however, other articles which Metternich intended to
raise to the rank of organic laws, and to incorporate with the Act of 1815,
which formed the basis of the German Federation. The conferences of
Ministers were accordingly resumed after a short interval, but at Vienna
instead of at Carlsbad. They lasted for several months, a stronger
opposition being now made by the Minor States than before. A second body of
federal law was at length drawn up, and accepted by the Diet on the 8th of
June, 1820. [296] The most important of its provisions was that which
related to the Constitutions admissible within the German League. It was
declared that in every State, with the exception of the four free cities,
supreme power resided in the Sovereign and in him alone, and that no
Constitution might do more than bind the Sovereign to co-operate with the
Estates in certain definite acts of government. [297]

In cases where a Government either appealed for help against rebellious
subjects, or was notoriously unable to exert authority, the Diet charged
itself with the duty of maintaining public order.

[The reaction in Prussia.]

From this time whatever liberty existed in Germany was to be found in the
Minor States, in Bavaria and Baden, and in Wuertemberg, which received a
Constitution a few days before the enrolment of the decrees of Carlsbad. In
Prussia the reaction carried everything before it. Humboldt, the best and
most liberal of the Ministers, resigned, protesting in vain against the
ignominious part which the King had determined to play. He was followed by
those of his colleagues whose principles were dearer to them than their
places. Hardenberg remained in office, a dying man, isolated, neglected,
thwarted; clinging to some last hope of redeeming his promises to the
Prussian people, yet jealous of all who could have given him true aid;
dishonouring by tenacity of place a career associated with so much of his
country's glory, and ennobled in earlier days by so much fortitude in time
of evil. There gathered around the King a body of men who could see in the
great patriotic efforts and reforms of the last decade nothing but an
encroachment of demagogues on the rights of power. They were willing that
Prussia should receive its orders from Metternich and serve a foreign Court
in the work of repression, rather than that it should take its place at the
head of all Germany on the condition of becoming a free and constitutional
State. [298] The stigma of disloyalty was attached to all who had kindled
popular enthusiasm in 1808 and 1812. To have served the nation was to have
sinned against the Government. Stein was protected by his great name from
attack, but not from calumny. His friend Arndt, whose songs and addresses
had so powerfully moved the heart of Germany during the War of Liberation,
was subjected to repeated legal process, and, although unconvicted of any
offence, was suspended from the exercise of his professorship for twenty
years. Other persons, whose fault at the most was to have worked for German
unity, were brought before special tribunals, and after long trial either
refused a public acquittal or sentenced to actual imprisonment. Free
teaching, free discussion, ceased. The barrier of authority closed every
avenue of political thought. Everywhere the agent of the State prescribed
an orthodox opinion, and took note of those who raised a dissentient voice.

[The Commission at Mainz.]

The pretext made at Carlsbad for this crusade against liberty, which was
more energetically carried out in Prussia than elsewhere, was the existence
of a conspiracy or agitation for the overthrow of Governments and of the
present constitution of the German League. It was stated that proofs
existed of the intention to establish by force a Republic one and
indivisible, like that of France in 1793. But the very Commission which was
instituted by the Carlsbad Ministers to investigate the origin and nature
of this conspiracy disproved its existence. The Commission assembled at
Mainz, examined several hundred persons and many thousand documents, and
after two years' labour delivered a report to the Diet. The report went
back to the time of Fichte's lectures and the formation of the Tugendbund
in 1808, traced the progress of all the students' associations and other
patriotic societies from that time to 1820; and, while exhibiting in the
worst possible light the aims and conduct of the advocates of German unity,
acknowledged that scarcely a single proof had been discovered of
treasonable practice, and that the loyalty of the mass of the people was
itself a sufficient guarantee against the impulses of the evil-minded.
[299] Such was the impression of triviality and imposture produced at the
Diet by this report, that the representatives of several States proposed
that the Commission should forthwith be dissolved as useless and
unnecessary. This, however, could not be tolerated by Metternich and his
new disciples. The Commission was allowed to continue in existence, and
with it the regime of silence and repression. The measures which had been
accepted at Carlsbad as temporary and provisional became more and more a
part of the habitual system of government. Prosecutions succeeded one
another; letters were opened; spies attended the lectures of professors and
the meetings of students; the newspapers were everywhere prohibited from
discussing German affairs. In a country where there were so many printers
and so many readers journalism could not altogether expire. It was still
permissible to give the news and to offer an opinion about foreign lands:
and for years to come the Germans, like beggars regaling themselves with
the scents from rich men's kitchens, [300] followed every stage of the
political struggles that were agitating France, England, and Spain, while
they were not allowed to express a desire or to formulate a grievance of
their own.

[Prussian Provincial Estates, June, 1823.]

[Redeeming features of Prussian absolutism.]

In the year 1822 Hardenberg died. All hope of a fulfilment of the promises
made in Prussia in 1815 had already become extinct. Not many months after
the Minister's death, King Frederick William established the Provincial
Estates which had been recommended to him by Metternich, and announced that
the creation of a central representative system would be postponed until
such time as the King should think fit to introduce it. This meant that the
project was finally abandoned; and Prussia in consequence remained without
a Parliament until the Revolution of 1848 was at the door. The Provincial
Estates, with which the King affected to temper absolute rule, met only
once in three years. Their function was to express an opinion upon local
matters when consulted by the Government: their enemies said that they were
aristocratic and did harm, their partizans could not pretend that they did
much good. In the bitterness of spirit with which, at a later time, the
friends of liberty denounced the betrayal of the cause of freedom by the
Prussian Court, a darker colour has perhaps been introduced into the
history of this period than really belongs to it. The wrongs sustained by
the Prussian nation have been compared to those inflicted by the despotism
of Spain. But, however contemptible the timidity of King Frederick William,
however odious the ingratitude shown to the truest friends of King and
people, the Government of 1819 is not correctly represented in such a
parallel. To identify the thousand varieties of wrong under the common name
of oppression, is to mistake words for things, and to miss the
characteristic features which distinguish nations from one another. The
greatest evils which a Government can inflict upon its subjects are
probably religious persecution, wasteful taxation, and the denial of
justice in the daily affairs of life. None of these were present in Prussia
during the darkest days of reaction. The hand of oppression fell heavily on
some of the best and some of the most enlightened men; it violated
interests so precious as those of free criticism and free discussion of
public affairs; but the great mass of the action of Government was never on
the side of evil. The ordinary course of justice was still pure, the
administration conscientious and thrifty. The system of popular education,
which for the first time placed Prussia in advance of Saxony and other
German States, dates from these years of warfare against liberty. A
reactionary despotism built the schools and framed the laws whose
reproduction in free England half a century later is justly regarded as the
chief of all the liberal measures of our day. So strong, so lasting, was
that vital tradition which made monarchy in Prussia an instrument for the
execution of great public ends.

[A new Liberalism grows up in Germany after 1820.]

[Interest in France.]

But the old harmony between rulers and subjects in Germany perished in
the system of coercion which Metternich established in 1819. Patient as
the Germans were, loyal as they had proved themselves to Frederick William
and to worse princes through good and evil, the galling disappointment of
noble hopes, the silencing of the Press, the dissolution of societies,--
calumnies, expulsions, prosecutions,--embittered many an honest mind
against authority. The Commission of Mainz did not find conspirators, but
it made them. As years went by, and all the means of legitimately working
for the improvement of German public life were one after another
extinguished, men of ardent character thought of more violent methods.
Secret societies, such as Metternich had imagined, came into actual being.
[301] And among those who neither sank into apathy and despair nor enrolled
themselves against existing power, a new body of ideas supplanted the old
loyal belief in the regeneration of Germany by its princes. The
Parliamentary struggles of France, the revolutionary movements in Italy and
in Spain which began at this epoch, drew the imagination away from that
pictured restoration of a free Teutonic past which had proved so barren of
result, and set in its place the idea of a modern universal or European
Liberalism. The hatred against France, especially among the younger men,
disappeared. A distinction was made between the tyrant Napoleon and the
people who were now giving to the rest of the Continent the example of a
free and animated public life, and illuminating the age with a political
literature so systematic and so ingenious that it seemed almost like a
political philosophy. The debates in the French Assembly, the writings of
French publicists, became the school of the Germans. Paris regained in
foreign eyes something of the interest that it had possessed in 1789. Each
victory or defeat of the French popular cause awoke the joy or the sorrow
of German Liberals, to whom all was blank at home: and when at length the
throne of the Bourbons fell, the signal for deliverance seemed to have
sounded in many a city beyond the Rhine.

[France after 1818.]

[Richelieu resigns, Dec., 1818. Decazes keeps power.]

We have seen that in Central Europe the balance between liberty and
reaction, wavering in 1815, definitely fell to the side of reaction at the
Congress of Aix-la-Chapelle. It remains to trace the course of events which
in France itself suspended the peaceful progress of the nation, and threw
power for some years into the hands of a faction which belonged to the
past. The measures carried by Decazes in 1817, which gave so much
satisfaction to the French, were by no means viewed with the same approval
either at London or at Vienna. The two principal of these were the
Electoral Law, and a plan of military reorganisation which brought back
great numbers of Napoleon's old officers and soldiers to the army.
Richelieu, though responsible as the head of the Ministry, felt very grave
fears as to the results of this legislation. He had already become anxious
and distressed when the Congress of Aix-la-Chapelle met; and the events
which took place in France during his absence, as well as the
communications which passed between himself and the foreign Ministers,
convinced him that a change of internal policy was necessary. The busy mind
of Metternich had already been scheming against French Liberalism. Alarmed
at the energy shown by Decazes, the Austrian statesman had formed the
design of reconciling Artois and the Ultra-Royalists to the King's
Government; and he now urged Richelieu, if his old opponents could be
brought to reason, to place himself at the head of a coalition of all the
conservative elements in the State. [302] While the Congress of
Aix-la-Chapelle was sitting, the partial elections for the year 1818, the
second under the new Electoral Law, took place. Among the deputies returned
there were some who passed for determined enemies of the Bourbon
restoration, especially Lafayette, whose name was so closely associated
with the humiliations of the Court in 1789. Richelieu received the news
with dismay, and on his return to Paris took steps which ended in the
dismissal of Decazes, and the offer of a seat in the Cabinet to Villele,
the Ultra-Royalist leader. But the attempted combination failed. Richelieu
accordingly withdrew from office; and a new Ministry was formed, of which
Decazes, who had proved himself more powerful than his assailants, was the
real though not the nominal chief.

[Election of Gregoire, Sept., 1819.]

The victory of the young and popular statesman was seen with extreme
displeasure by all the foreign Courts, nor was his success an enduring one.
For awhile the current of Liberal opinion in France and the favour of King
Louis XVIII. enabled Decazes to hold his own against the combinations of
his opponents and the ill-will of all the most powerful men in Europe. An
attack made on the Electoral Law by the Upper House was defeated by the
creation of sixty new Peers, among whom there were several who had been
expelled in 1815. But the forces of Liberalism soon passed beyond the
Minister's own control, and his steady dependence upon Louis XVIII. now
raised against him as resolute an opposition among the enemies of the House
of Bourbon as among the Ultra-Royalists. In the elections of 1819 the
candidates of the Ministry were beaten by men of more pronounced opinions.
Among the new members there was one whose victory caused great astonishment
and alarm. The ex-bishop Gregoire, one of the authors of the destruction of
the old French Church in 1790, and mover of the resolution which
established the Republic in 1792, was brought forward from his retirement
and elected Deputy by the town of Grenoble. To understand the panic caused
by this election we must recall, not the events of the Revolution, but the
legends of them which were current in 1819. The history of Gregoire by no
means justifies the outcry which was raised against him; his real actions,
however, formed the smallest part of the things that were alleged or
believed by his enemies. It was said he had applauded the execution of King
Louis XVI., when he had in fact protested against it: [303] his courageous
adherence to the character of a Christian priest throughout the worst days
of the Convention, his labours in organising the Constitutional Church when
the choice lay between that and national atheism, were nothing, or worse
than nothing, in the eyes of men who felt themselves to be the despoiled
heirs of that rich and aristocratic landed society, called the Feudal
Church, which Gregoire had been so active in breaking up. Unluckily for
himself, Gregoire, though humane in action, had not abstained from the
rhodomontades against kings in general which were the fashion in 1793.
Louis XVIII., forgetting that he had himself lately made the regicide
Fouche a Minister, interpreted Gregoire's election by the people of
Grenoble, to which the Ultra-Royalists had cunningly contributed, as a
threat against the Bourbon family. He showed the displeasure usual with him
when any slight was offered to his personal dignity, and drew nearer to his
brother Artois and the Ultra-Royalists, whom he had hitherto shunned as his
favourite Minister's worst enemies. Decazes, true to his character as the
King's friend, now confessed that he had gone too far in the legislation of
1817, and that the Electoral Law, under which such a monster as Gregoire
could gain a seat, required to be altered. A project of law was sketched,
designed to restore the preponderance in the constituencies to the landed
aristocracy. Gregoire's election was itself invalidated; and the Ministers
who refused to follow Decazes in his new policy of compromise were
dismissed from their posts.

[Murder of the Duke of Berry, Feb. 13, 1820.]

[Reaction sets in.]

[Fall of Decazes. Richelieu Minister, Feb., 1820.]

A few months more passed, and an event occurred which might have driven a
stronger Government than that of Louis XVIII. into excesses of reaction.
The heirs to the Crown next in succession to the Count of Artois were his
two sons, the Dukes of Angouleme and Berry. Angouleme was childless; the
Duke of Berry was the sole hope of the elder Bourbon line, which, if he
should die without a son, would, as a reigning house, become extinct, the
Crown of France not descending to a female. [304] The circumstance which
made Berry's life so dear to Royalists made his destruction the
all-absorbing purpose of an obscure fanatic, who abhorred the Bourbon
family as the lasting symbol of the foreigner's victory over France.
Louvel, a working man, had followed Napoleon to exile in Elba. After
returning to his country he had dogged the footsteps of the Bourbon princes
for years together, waiting for the chance of murder. On the night of the
13th of February, 1820, he seized the Duke of Berry as he was leaving the
Opera House, and plunged a knife into his breast. The Duke lingered for
some hours, and expired early the next morning in the presence of King
Louis XVIII., the Princes, and all the Ministers. Terrible as the act was,
it was the act of a single resolute mind: no human being had known of
Louvel's intention. But it was impossible that political passion should
await the quiet investigation of a law-court. No murder ever produced a
stronger outburst of indignation among the governing classes, or was more
skilfully turned to the advantage of party. The Liberals felt that their
cause was lost. While fanatical Ultra-Royalists, abandoning themselves to a
credulity worthy of the Reign of Terror, accused Decazes himself of
complicity with the assassin, their leaders fixed upon the policy which was
to be imposed on the King. It was in vain that Decazes brought forward his
reactionary Electoral Law, and proposed to invest the officers of State
with arbitrary powers of arrest and to re-establish the censorship of the
Press. The Count of Artois insisted upon the dismissal of the Minister, as
the only consolation which could be given to him for the murder of his son
The King yielded; and, as an Ultra-Royalist administration was not yet
possible, Richelieu unwillingly returned to office, assured by Artois that
his friends had no other desire than to support his own firm and temperate
rule.

[Progress of the reaction in France.]

[Ultra-Royalist Ministry, Dec., 1821.]

[The Congregation.]

Returning to power under such circumstances, Richelieu became, in spite of
himself, the Minister of reaction. The Press was fettered, the legal
safeguards of personal liberty were suspended, the electoral system was
transformed by a measure which gave a double vote to men of large property.
So violent were the passions which this retrograde march of Government
excited, that for a moment Paris seemed to be on the verge of revolution.
Tumultuous scenes occurred in the streets; but the troops, on whom
everything depended, obeyed the orders given to them, and the danger passed
away. The first elections under the new system reduced the Liberal party to
impotence, and brought back to the Chamber a number of men who had sat in
the reactionary Parliament of 1816. Villele and other Ultra-Royalists were
invited to join Richelieu's Cabinet. For awhile it seemed as if the
passions of Church and aristocracy might submit to the curb of a practical
statesmanship, friendly, if not devoted, to their own interests. But
restraint was soon cast aside. The Count of Artois saw the road to power
open, and broke his promise of supporting the Minister who had taken office
at his request. Censured and thwarted in the Chamber of Deputies, Richelieu
confessed that he had undertaken a hopeless task, and bade farewell to
public life. King Louis, now nearing the grave, could struggle no longer
against the brother who was waiting to ascend his throne. The next Ministry
was nominated not by the King but by Artois. Around Villele, the real head
of the Cabinet, there was placed a body of men who represented not the new
France, or even that small portion of it which was called to exercise the
active rights of citizenship, but the social principles of a past age, and
that Catholic or Ultramontane revival which was now freshening the surface
but not stirring the depths of the great mass of French religious
indifference. A religious society known as the Congregation, which had
struck its first roots under the storm of Republican persecution, and grown
up during the Empire, a solitary yet unobserved rallying-place for Catholic
opponents of Napoleon's despotism, now expanded into a great organism of
government. The highest in blood and in office sought membership in it: its
patronage raised ambitious men to the stations they desired, its hostility
made itself felt against the small as well as against the great. The spirit
which now gained the ascendancy in French government was clerical even more
than it was aristocratic. It was monarchical too, but rather from dislike
to the secularist tone of Liberalism and from trust in the orthodoxy of the
Count of Artois than from any fixed belief in absolutist principles. There
might be good reason to oppose King Louis XVIII.; but what priest, what
noble, could doubt the divine right of a prince who was ready to compensate
the impoverished emigrants out of the public funds, and to commit the whole
system of public education to the hands of the clergy?

[Bourbon rule before and after 1821.]

In the middle class of France, which from this time began to feel itself in
opposition to the Bourbon Government, there had been no moral change
corresponding to that which made so great a difference between the
governing authority of 1819 and that of 1822. Public opinion, though
strongly affected, was not converted into something permanently unlike
itself by the murder of the Duke of Berry. The courtiers, the devotees, the
great ladies, who had laid a bold hand upon power, had not the nation on
their side, although for a while the nation bore their sway submissively.
But the fate of the Bourbon monarchy was in fact decided when Artois and
his confidants became its representatives. France might have forgotten that
the Bourbons owed their throne to foreign victories; it could not be
governed in perpetuity by what was called the _Parti Pretre_. Twenty
years taken from the burden of age borne by Louis XVIII., twenty years of
power given to Decazes, might have prolonged the rule of the restored
family perhaps for some generations. If military pride found small
satisfaction in the contrast between the Napoleonic age and that which
immediately succeeded it, there were enough parents who valued the blood of
their children, there were enough speakers and writers who valued the
liberty of discussion, enough capitalists who valued quiet times, for the
new order to be recognised as no unhopeful one. France has indeed seldom
had a better government than it possessed between 1816 and 1820, nor could
an equal period be readily named during which the French nation, as a
whole, enjoyed greater happiness.

[General causes of the victory of reaction in Europe.]

Political reaction had reached its full tide in Europe generally about five
years after the end of the great war. The phenomena were by no means the
same in all countries, nor were the accidents of personal influence without
a large share in the determination of events: yet, underlying all
differences, we may trace the operation of certain great causes which were
not limited by the boundaries of individual States. The classes in which
any fixed belief in constitutional government existed were nowhere very
large; outside the circle of state officials there was scarcely any one who
had had experience in the conduct of public affairs. In some countries, as
in Russia and Prussia, the conception of progress towards self-government
had belonged in the first instance to the holders of power: it had
exercised the imagination of a Czar, or appealed to the understanding of a
Prussian Minister, eager, in the extremity of ruin, to develop every
element of worth and manliness existing within his nation. The cooling of a
warm fancy, the disappearance of external dangers, the very agitation which
arose when the idea of liberty passed from the rulers to their subjects,
sufficed to check the course of reform. And by the side of the Kings and
Ministers who for a moment had attached themselves to constitutional
theories there stood the old privileged orders, or what remained of them,
the true party of reaction, eager to fan the first misgivings and alarms of
Sovereigns, and to arrest a development more prejudicial to their own power
and importance than to the dignity and security of the Crown. Further,
there existed throughout Europe the fatal and ineradicable tradition of the
convulsions of the first Revolution, and of the horrors of 1793. No votary
of absolutism, no halting and disquieted friend of freedom, could ever be
at a loss for images of woe in presaging the results of popular
sovereignty; and the action of one or two infatuated assassins owed its
wide influence on Europe chiefly to the ancient name and memory of
Jacobinism.

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