Book: History of Modern Europe 1792 1878

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[Relations of the Powers to Mehemet.]

[Quadruple Treaty without France. July, 1840.]

The very suddenness of these disasters, which left the Ottoman Empire
rulerless and without defence by land or sea, contributed ultimately to its
preservation, inasmuch as it impelled the Powers to combined action, which,
under less urgent pressure, would probably not have been attainable. On the
announcement of the exorbitant conditions of peace demanded by Mehemet, the
ambassadors addressed a collective note to the Divan, requesting that no
answer might be made until the Courts had arrived at some common
resolution. Soon afterwards the French and English fleets appeared at the
Dardanelles, nominally to protect Constantinople against the attack of the
Viceroy, in reality to guard against any sudden movement on the part of
Russia. This display of force was, however, not necessary, for the Czar, in
spite of some expressions to the contrary, had already convinced himself
that it was impossible to act upon the Treaty of Unkiar Skelessi and to
make the protectorate of Turkey the affair of Russia alone. The tone which
had been taken by the English Government during the last preceding years
proved that any attempt to exercise exclusive power at Constantinople would
have been followed by war with Great Britain, in which most, if not all, of
the European Powers would have stood on the side of the latter. Abandoning
therefore the hope of attaining sole control, the Russian Government
addressed itself to the task of widening as far as possible the existing
divergence between England and France. Nor was this difficult. The Cabinet
of the Tuileries desired to see Mehemet Ali issue with increased strength
from the conflict, or even to establish his dynasty at Constantinople in
place of the House of Osman. Lord Palmerston, always jealous and suspicious
of Louis Philippe, refused to believe that the growth of Russian power
could be checked by dividing the Ottoman Empire, or that any system of
Eastern policy could be safely based on the personal qualities of a ruler
now past his seventieth year. [402] He had moreover his own causes of
discontent with Mehemet. The possibility of establishing an overland route
to India either by way of the Euphrates or of the Red Sea had lately been
engaging the attention of the English Government, and Mehemet had not
improved his position by raising obstacles to either line of passage. It
was partly in consequence of the hostility of Mehemet, who was now master
of a great part of Arabia, and of his known devotion to French interests,
that the port of Aden in the Red Sea was at this time occupied by England.
If, while Russia accepted the necessity of combined European action and
drew nearer to its rival, France persisted in maintaining the claim of
the Viceroy to extended dominion, the exclusion of France from the
European concert was the only possible result. There was no doubt as to
the attitude of the remaining Powers. Metternich, whether from genuine
pedantry, or in order to avoid the expression of those fears of Russia
which really governed his Eastern policy, repeated his threadbare
platitudes on the necessity of supporting legitimate dynasties against
rebels, and spoke of the victor of Konieh and Nissib as if he had been a
Spanish constitutionalist or a recalcitrant German professor. The Court
of Berlin followed in the same general course. In all Europe Mehemet Ali
had not a single ally, with the exception of the Government of Louis
Philippe. Under these circumstances it was of little avail to the Viceroy
that his army stood on Turkish soil without a foe before it, and that the
Sultan's fleet lay within his own harbour of Alexandria. The intrigues by
which he hoped to snatch a hasty peace from the inexperience of the young
Sultan failed, and he learnt in October that no arrangement which he
might make with the Porte without the concurrence of the Powers would be
recognised as valid. In the meantime Russia was suggesting to the English
Government one project after another for joint military action with the
object of driving Mehemet from Syria and restoring this province to the
Porte; and at the beginning of the following year it was determined on
Metternich's proposition that a Conference should forthwith be held in
London for the settlement of Eastern affairs. The irreconcilable
difference between the intentions of France and those of the other Powers
at once became evident. France proposed that all Syria and Egypt should
be given in hereditary dominion to Mehemet Ali, with no further
obligation towards the Porte than the payment of a yearly tribute. The
counter-proposal of England was that Mehemet, recognising the Sultan's
authority, should have the hereditary government of Egypt alone, that he
should entirely withdraw from all Northern Syria, and hold Palestine only
as an ordinary governor appointed by the Porte for his lifetime. To this
proposition all the Powers with the exception of France gave their
assent. Continued negotiation only brought into stronger relief the
obstinacy of Lord Palmerston, and proved the impossibility of attaining
complete agreement. At length, when it had been discovered that the
French Cabinet was attempting to conduct a separate mediation, the Four
Powers, without going through the form of asking for French sanction,
signed on the 15th of July a Treaty with the Sultan pledging themselves
to enforce upon Mehemet Ali the terms arranged. The Sultan undertook in
the first instance to offer Mehemet Egypt in perpetuity and southern
Syria for his lifetime. If this offer was not accepted within ten days,
Egypt alone was to be offered. If at the end of twenty days Mehemet still
remained obstinate, that offer in its turn was to be withdrawn, and the
Sultan and the Allies were to take such measures as the interests of the
Ottoman Empire might require. [403]

[Warlike spirit in France, 1840.]

The publication of this Treaty, excluding France as it did from the concert
of Europe, produced a storm of indignation at Paris. Thiers, who more than
any man had by his writings stimulated the spirit of aggressive warfare
among the French people and revived the worship of Napoleon, was now at the
head of the Government. His jealousy for the prestige of France, his
comparative indifference to other matters when once the national honour
appeared to be committed, his sanguine estimate of the power of his
country, rendered him a peculiarly dangerous Minister at the existing
crisis. It was not the wrongs or the danger of Mehemet Ali, but the slight
offered to France, and the revived League of the Powers which had humbled
it in 1814, that excited the passion of the Minister and the nation. Syria
was forgotten; the cry was for the recovery of the frontier of the Rhine,
and for revenge for Waterloo. New regiments were enrolled, the fleet
strengthened, and the long-delayed fortification of Paris begun. Thiers
himself probably looked forward to a campaign in Italy, anticipating that
successfully conducted by Napoleon III. in 1859, rather than to an attack
upon Prussia; but the general opinion both in France itself and in other
states was that, if war should break out, an invasion of Germany was
inevitable. The prospect of this invasion roused in a manner little
expected the spirit of the German people. Even in the smaller states, and
in the Rhenish provinces themselves, which for twenty years had shared the
fortunes of France, and in which the introduction of Prussian rule in 1814
had been decidedly unpopular, a strong national movement carried everything
before it; and the year 1840 added to the patriotic minstrelsy of Germany a
war-song, written by a Rhenish citizen, not less famous than those of 1813
and 1870. [404] That there were revolutionary forces smouldering throughout
Europe, from which France might in a general war have gained some
assistance, the events of 1848 sufficiently proved; but to no single
Government would a revolutionary war have been fraught with more imminent
peril than to that of France itself, and to no one was this conviction more
habitually present than to King Louis Philippe. Relying upon his influence
within the Chamber of Deputies, itself a body representing the wealth and
the caution rather than the hot spirit of France, the King refused to read
at the opening of the session in October the speech drawn up for him by
Thiers, and accepted the consequent resignation of the Ministry. Guizot,
who was ambassador in London, and an advocate for submission to the will of
Europe, was called to office, and succeeded after long debate in gaining a
vote of confidence from the Chamber. Though preparations for war continued,
a policy of peace was now assured. Mehemet Ali was left to his fate; and
the stubborn assurance of Lord Palmerston, which had caused so much
annoyance to the English Ministry itself, received a striking justification
in the face of all Europe.

[Ibrahim expelled from Syria, Sept.-Nov., 1840.]

[Final settlement, Feb., 1841.]

[The Dardanelles.]

The operations of the Allies against Mehemet Ali had now begun. While
Prussia kept guard on the Rhine, and Russia undertook to protect
Constantinople against any forward movement of Ibrahim, an Anglo-Austrian
naval squadron combined with a Turkish land-force in attacking the Syrian
coast-towns. The mountain-tribes of the interior were again in revolt. Arms
supplied to them by the Allies, and the insurrection soon spread over the
greater part of Syria. Ibrahim prepared for an obstinate defence, but his
dispositions were frustrated by the extension of the area of conflict, and
he was unable to prevent the coast-towns from falling one after another
into the hands of the Allies. On the capture of Acre by Sir Charles Napier
he abandoned all hope of maintaining himself any longer in Syria, and made
his way with the wreck of his army towards the Egyptian frontier. Napier
had already arrived before Alexandria, and there executed a convention with
the Viceroy, by which the latter, abandoning all claim upon his other
provinces, and undertaking to restore the Turkish fleet, was assured of the
hereditary possession of Egypt. The convention was one which the English
admiral had no authority to conclude, but it contained substantially the
terms which the Allies intended to enforce; and after Mehemet had made a
formal act of submission to the Sultan, the hereditary government of Egypt
was conferred upon himself and his family by a decree published by the
Sultan and sanctioned by the Powers. This compromise had been proposed by
the French Government after the expiry of the twenty days named in the
Treaty of July, and immediately before the fall of M. Thiers, but
Palmerston would not then listen to any demand made under open or implied
threats of war. Since that time a new and pacific Ministry had come into
office; it was no part of Palmerston's policy to keep alive the antagonism
between England and France; and he readily accepted an arrangement which,
while it saved France from witnessing the total destruction of an ally,
left Egypt to a ruler who, whatever his faults, had certainly shown a
greater capacity for government than any Oriental of that age. It remained
for the Powers to place upon record some authoritative statement of the law
recognised by Europe with regard to the Bosphorus and Dardanelles. Russia
had already virtually consented to the abrogation of the Treaty of Unkiar
Skelessi. It now joined with all the other Powers, including France, in a
declaration that the ancient rule of the Ottoman Empire which forbade the
passage of these straits to the war-ships of all nations, except when the
Porte itself should be at war, was accepted by Europe at large. Russia thus
surrendered its chance of gaining by any separate arrangement with Turkey
the permanent right of sending its fleets from the Black Sea into the
Mediterranean, and so becoming a Mediterranean Power. On the other hand,
Sebastopol and the arsenals of the Euxine remained safe against the attack
of any maritime Power, unless Turkey itself should take up arms against the
Czar. Having regard to the great superiority of England over Russia at sea,
and to the accessibility and importance of the Euxine coast towns, it is an
open question whether the removal of all international restrictions upon
the passage of the Bosphorus and Dardanelles would not be more to the
advantage of England than of its rival. This opinion, however, had not been
urged before the Crimean War, nor has it yet been accepted in our own
country.

[Turkey after 1840.]

[Legislation of Reschid.]

The conclusion of the struggle of 1840 marked with great definiteness the
real position which the Ottoman Empire was henceforth to occupy in its
relations to the western world. Rescued by Europe at large from the
alternatives of destruction at the hands of Ibrahim or complete vassalage
under Russia, the Porte entered upon the condition nominally of an
independent European State, really of a State existing under the protection
of Europe, and responsible to Europe as well for its domestic government as
for its alliances and for the conduct of its foreign policy. The necessity
of conciliating the public opinion of the West was well understood by the
Turkish statesman who had taken the leading part in the negotiations which
freed the Porte from dependence upon Russia. Reschid Pasha, the younger,
Foreign Minister at the accession of the new Sultan, had gained in an
unusual degree the regard and the confidence of the European Ministers with
whom, as a diplomatist, he had been brought into contact. As the author of
a wide system of reforms, it was his ambition so to purify and renovate the
internal administration of the Ottoman Empire that the contrasts which it
presented to the civilised order of the West should gradually disappear,
and that Turkey should become not only in name but in reality a member of
the European world. Stimulated no doubt by the achievements of Mehemet Ali,
and anxious to win over to the side of the Porte the interest which
Mehemet's partial adoption of European methods and ideas had excited on his
behalf, Reschid in his scheme of reform paid an ostentatious homage to the
principles of western administration and law, proclaiming the security of
person and property, prohibiting the irregular infliction of punishment,
recognising the civil rights of Christians and Jews, and transferring the
collection of taxes from the provincial governors to the officers of the
central authority. The friends of the Ottoman State, less experienced then
than now in the value of laws made in a society where there exists no power
that can enforce them, and where the agents of government are themselves
the most lawless of all the public enemies, hailed in Reschid's enlightened
legislation the opening of a new epoch in the life of the Christian and
Oriental races subject to the Sultan. But the fall of the Minister before a
palace-intrigue soon proved on how slight a foundation these hopes were
built. Like other Turkish reformers, Reschid had entered upon a hopeless
task; and the name of the man who was once honoured as the regenerator of a
great Empire is now almost forgotten.




CHAPTER XVIII.


Europe during the Thirty-years' Peace--Italy and Austria--Marzini--The
House of Savoy--Gioberti--Election of Pius IX.--Reforms expected--
Revolution at Palermo--Agitation in Northern Italy--Lombardy--State of
the Austrian Empire--Growth of Hungarian National Spirit--The Magyars and
Slavs--Transylvania--Parties among the Magyars--Kossuth--The Slavic
National Movements in Austria--The Government enters on Reform in
Hungary--Policy of the Opposition--The Rural System of Austria--
Insurrection in Galicia: the Nobles and the Peasants--Agrarian
Edict--Public Opinion in Vienna--Prussia--Accession and Character of King
Frederick William IV.--Convocation of the United Diet--Its Debates and
Dissolution--France--The Spanish Marriages--Reform Movement--Socialism--
Revolution of February--End of the Orleanist Monarchy.


The characteristic of Continental history during the second quarter of this
century is the sense of unrest. The long period of European peace which
began in 1815 was not one of internal repose; the very absence of those
engrossing and imperious interests which belong to a time of warfare gave
freer play to the feelings of discontent and the vague longings for a
better political order which remained behind after the convulsions of the
revolutionary epoch and the military rule of Napoleon had passed away.
During thirty years of peace the breach had been widening between those
Governments which still represented the system of 1815, and the peoples
over whom they ruled. Ideas of liberty, awakenings of national sense, were
far more widely diffused in Europe than at the time of the revolutionary
war. The seed then prematurely forced into an atmosphere of storm and
reaction had borne its fruit: other growths, fertilised or accelerated by
Western Liberalism, but not belonging to the same family, were springing up
in unexpected strength, and in regions which had hitherto lain outside the
movement of the modern world. New forces antagonistic to Government had
come into being, penetrating an area unaffected by the constitutional
struggles of the Mediterranean States, or by the weaker political efforts
of Germany. In the homes of the Magyar and the Slavic subjects of Austria,
so torpid throughout the agitation of an earlier time, the passion of
nationality was every hour gaining new might. The older popular causes,
vanquished for the moment by one reaction after another, had silently
established a far stronger hold on men's minds. Working, some in exile and
conspiracy, others through such form of political literature as the
jealousy of Governments permitted, the leaders of the democratic movement
upon the Continent created a power before which the established order at
length succumbed. They had not created, nor was it possible under the
circumstances that they should create, an order which was capable of taking
its place.

[Italy. 1831-1848.]

Italy, rather than France, forms the central figure in any retrospect of
Europe immediately before 1848 in which the larger forces at work are not
obscured by those for the moment more prominent. The failure of the
insurrection of 1831 had left Austria more visibly than before master over
the Italian people even in those provinces in which Austria was not
nominally sovereign. It had become clear that no effort after reform could
be successful either in the Papal States or in the kingdom of Naples so
long as Austria held Lombardy and Venice. The expulsion of the foreigner
was therefore not merely the task of those who sought to give the Italian
race its separate and independent national existence, it was the task of
all who would extinguish oppression and misgovernment in any part of the
Italian peninsula. Until the power of Austria was broken, it was vain to
take up arms against the tyranny of the Duke of Modena or any other
contemptible oppressor. Austria itself had twice taught this lesson; and if
the restoration of Neapolitan despotism in 1821 could be justified by the
disorderly character of the Government then suppressed, the circumstances
attending the restoration of the Pope's authority in 1831 had extinguished
Austria's claim to any sort of moral respect; for Metternich himself had
united with the other European Courts in declaring the necessity for
reforms in the Papal Government, and of these reforms, though a single
earnest word from Austria would have enforced their execution, not one had
been carried into effect. Gradually, but with increasing force as each
unhappy year passed by, the conviction gained weight among all men of
serious thought that the problem to be faced was nothing less than the
destruction of the Austrian yoke. Whether proclaimed as an article of faith
or veiled in diplomatic reserve, this belief formed the common ground among
men whose views on the immediate future of Italy differed in almost every
other particular.

[Mazzini.]

Three main currents of opinion are to be traced in the ferment of ideas
which preceded the Italian revolution of 1848. At a time not rich in
intellectual or in moral power, the most striking figure among those who
are justly honoured as the founders of Italian independence is perhaps that
of Mazzini. Exiled during nearly the whole of his mature life, a
conspirator in the eyes of all Governments, a dreamer in the eyes of the
world, Mazzini was a prophet or an evangelist among those whom his
influence led to devote themselves to the one cause of their country's
regeneration. No firmer faith, no nobler disinterestedness, ever animated
the saint or the patriot; and if in Mazzini there was also something of the
visionary and the fanatic, the force with which he grasped the two vital
conditions of Italian revival--the expulsion of the foreigner and the
establishment of a single national Government--proves him to have been a
thinker of genuine political insight. Laying the foundation of his creed
deep in the moral nature of man, and constructing upon this basis a fabric
not of rights but of duties, he invested the political union with the
immediateness, the sanctity, and the beauty of family life. With him, to
live, to think, to hope, was to live, to think, to hope for Italy; and the
Italy of his ideal was a Republic embracing every member of the race,
purged of the priestcraft and the superstition which had degraded the man
to the slave, indebted to itself alone for its independence, and
consolidated by the reign of equal law. The rigidity with which Mazzini
adhered to his own great project in its completeness, and his impatience
with any bargaining away of national rights, excluded him from the work of
those practical politicians and men of expedients who in 1859 effected with
foreign aid the first step towards Italian union; but the influence of his
teaching and his organisation in preparing his countrymen for independence
was immense; and the dynasty which has rendered to United Italy services
which Mazzini thought impossible, owes to this great Republican scarcely
less than to its ablest friends.

[Hopes of Piedmont.]

Widely separated from the school of Mazzini in temper and intention was the
group of politicians and military men, belonging mostly to Piedmont, who
looked to the sovereign and the army of this State as the one hope of Italy
in its struggle against foreign rule. The House of Savoy, though foreign in
its origin, was, and had been for centuries, a really national dynasty. It
was, moreover, by interest and traditional policy, the rival rather than
the friend of Austria in Northern Italy. If the fear of revolution had at
times brought the Court of Turin into close alliance with Vienna, the
connection had but thinly veiled the lasting antagonism of two States
which, as neighbours, had habitually sought expansion each at the other's
cost. Lombardy, according to the expression of an older time, was the
artichoke which the Kings of Piedmont were destined to devour leaf by leaf.
Austria, on the other hand, sought extension towards the Alps: it had in
1799 clearly shown its intention of excluding the House of Savoy altogether
from the Italian mainland; and the remembrance of this epoch had led the
restored dynasty in 1815 to resist the plans of Metternich for establishing
a league of all the princes of Italy under Austria's protection. The
sovereign, moreover, who after the failure of the constitutional movement
of 1821 had mounted the throne surrounded by Austrian bayonets, was no
longer alive. Charles Albert of Carignano, who had at that time played so
ambiguous a part, and whom Metternich had subsequently endeavoured to
exclude from the succession, was on the throne. He had made his peace with
absolutism by fighting in Spain against the Cortes in 1823; and since his
accession to the throne he had rigorously suppressed the agitation of
Mazzini's partizans within his own dominions. But in spite of strong
clerical and reactionary influences around him, he had lately shown an
independence of spirit in his dealings with Austria which raised him in the
estimation of his subjects; and it was believed that his opinions had been
deeply affected by the predominance which the idea of national independence
was now gaining over that of merely democratic change. If the earlier
career of Charles Albert himself cast some doubt upon his personal
sincerity, and much more upon his constancy of purpose, there was at least
in Piedmont an army thoroughly national in its sentiment, and capable of
taking the lead whenever the opportunity should arise for uniting Italy
against the foreigner. In no other Italian State was there an effective
military force, or one so little adulterated with foreign elements.

[Hopes of the Papacy.]

A third current of opinion in these years of hope and of illusion was that
represented in the writings of Gioberti, the depicter of a new and glorious
Italy, regenerated not by philosophic republicanism or the sword of a
temporal monarch, but by the moral force of a reformed and reforming
Papacy. The conception of the Catholic Church as a great Liberal power,
strange and fantastic as it now appears, was no dream of an isolated
Italian enthusiast; it was an idea which, after the French Revolution of
1830, and the establishment of a government at once anti-clerical and
anti-democratic, powerfully influenced some of the best minds in France,
and found in Montalembert and Lamennais exponents who commanded the ear of
Europe. If the corruption of the Papacy had been at once the spiritual and
the political death of Italy, its renovation in purity and in strength
would be also the resurrection of the Italian people. Other lands had
sought, and sought in vain, to work out their problems under the guidance
of leaders antagonistic to the Church, and of popular doctrines divorced
from religious faith. To Italy belonged the prerogative of spiritual power.
By this power, aroused from the torpor of ages, and speaking, as it had
once spoken, to the very conscience of mankind, the gates of a glorious
future would be thrown open. Conspirators might fret, and politicians
scheme, but the day on which the new life of Italy would begin would be
that day when the head of the Church, taking his place as chief of a
federation of Italian States, should raise the banner of freedom and
national right, and princes and people alike should follow the
all-inspiring voice.

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