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A History of Modern Europe, 1792-1878

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Title: A History of Modern Europe, 1792-1878

Author: Charles Alan Fyffe


        
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*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK A HISTORY OF MODERN EUROPE, 1792-1878 ***




Produced by Tom Allen, Charles Franks, David Gundry and
the Online Distributed Proofreading Team.











HISTORY

OF

MODERN EUROPE

1792-1878


BY

C. A. FYFFE, M.A.

Barrister-at-Law; Fellow of University College, Oxford;
Vice-President of the Royal Historical Society


POPULAR EDITION

With Maps




PREFACE.


In acceding to the Publishers' request for a re-issue of the "History of
Modern Europe," in the form of a popular edition, I feel that I am only
fulfilling what would have been the wish of the Author himself. A few
manuscript corrections and additions found in his own copy of the work have
been adopted in the present edition; in general, however, my attention in
revising each sheet for the press has been devoted to securing an accurate
reproduction of the text and notes as they appeared in the previous
editions in three volumes. I trust that in this cheaper and more portable
form the work will prove, both to the student and the general reader, even
more widely acceptable than heretofore.

HENRIETTA F. A. FYFFE.

London, November, 1895.




PREFACE TO THE FIRST EDITION.


The object of this work is to show how the States of Europe have gained the
form and character which they possess at the present moment. The outbreak
of the Revolutionary War in 1792, terminating a period which now appears
far removed from us, and setting in motion forces which have in our own day
produced a united Germany and a united Italy, forms the natural
starting-point of a history of the present century. I have endeavoured to
tell a simple story, believing that a narrative in which facts are chosen
for their significance, and exhibited in their real connection, may be made
to convey as true an impression as a fuller history in which the writer is
not forced by the necessity of concentration to exercise the same rigour
towards himself and his materials. The second volume of the work will bring
the reader down to the year 1848: the third, down to the present time.

London, 1880.




PREFACE TO THE SECOND EDITION OF THE FIRST VOLUME. [1]


In revising this volume for the second edition I have occupied myself
mainly with two sources of information--the unpublished Records of the
English Foreign Office, and the published works which have during recent
years resulted from the investigation of the Archives of Vienna. The
English Records from 1792 to 1814, for access to which I have to express my
thanks to Lord Granville, form a body of first-hand authority of
extraordinary richness, compass, and interest. They include the whole
correspondence between the representatives of Great Britain at Foreign
Courts and the English Foreign Office; a certain number of private
communications between Ministers and these representatives; a quantity of
reports from consuls, agents, and "informants" of every description; and in
addition to these the military reports, often admirably vivid and full of
matter, sent by the British officers attached to the head-quarters of our
Allies in most of the campaigns from 1792 to 1814. It is impossible that
any one person should go through the whole of this material, which it took
the Diplomatic Service a quarter of a century to write. I have endeavoured
to master the correspondence from each quarter of Europe which, for the
time being, had a preponderance in political or military interest, leaving
it when its importance became obviously subordinate to that of others; and
although I have no doubt left untouched much that would repay
investigation, I trust that the narrative has gained in accuracy from a
labour which was not a light one, and that the few short extracts which
space has permitted me to throw into the notes may serve to bring the
reader nearer to events. At some future time I hope to publish a selection
from the most important documents of this period. It is strange that our
learned Societies, so appreciative of every distant and trivial chronicle
of the Middle Ages, should ignore the records of a time of such surpassing
interest, and one in which England played so great a part. No just
conception can be formed of the difference between English statesmanship
and that of the Continental Courts in integrity, truthfulness, and public
spirit, until the mass of diplomatic correspondence preserved at London has
been studied; nor, until this has been done, can anything like an adequate
biography of Pitt be written.

The second and less important group of authorities with which I have busied
myself during the work of revision comprises the works of Hüffer, Vivenot,
Beer, Helfert, and others, based on Austrian documents, along with the
Austrian documents and letters that have been published by Vivenot. The
last-named writer is himself a partizan, but the material which he has
given to the world is most valuable. The mystery in which the Austrian
Government until lately enveloped all its actions caused some of these to
be described as worse than they really were; and I believe that in the
First Edition I under-estimated the bias of Prussian and North-German
writers. Where I have seen reasons to alter any statements, I have done so
without reserve, as it appears to me childish for any one who attempts to
write history to cling to an opinion after the balance of evidence seems to
be against it. The publication of the second volume of this work has been
delayed by the revision of the first; but I hope that it will appear before
many months more. I must express my obligations to Mr. Oscar Browning, a
fellow-labourer in the same field, who not only furnished me with various
corrections, but placed his own lectures at my disposal; and to Mr. Alfred
Kingston, whose unfailing kindness and courtesy make so great a difference
to those whose work lies in the department of the Record Office which is
under his care.

London, 1883.




PREFACE TO THE SECOND VOLUME. [2]


In writing this volume I have not had the advantage of consulting the
English Foreign Office Records for a later period than the end of 1815. A
rule not found necessary at Berlin and some other foreign capitals still
closes to historical inquirers the English documents of the last seventy
years. Restrictions are no doubt necessary in the case of transactions of
recent date, but the period of seventy years is surely unnecessarily long.
Public interests could not be prejudiced, nor could individuals be even
remotely affected, by the freest examination of the papers of 1820 or 1830.

The London documents of 1814-1815 are of various degrees of interest and
importance. Those relating to the Congress of Vienna are somewhat
disappointing. Taken all together, they add less to our knowledge on the
one or two points still requiring elucidation than the recently-published
correspondence of Talleyrand with Louis XVIII. The despatches from Italy
are on the other hand of great value, proving, what I believe was not
established before, that the Secret Treaty of 1815, whereby Austria gained
a legal right to prevent any departure from absolute Government at Naples,
was communicated to the British Ministry and received its sanction. This
sanction explains the obscure and embarrassed language of Castlereagh in
1820, which in its turn gave rise to the belief in Italy that England was
more deeply committed to Austria than it actually was, and probably
occasioned the forgery of the pretended Treaty of July 27, 1813, exposed in
vol. i. of this work, p. 538, 2nd edit. [3] The papers from France and
Spain are also interesting, though not establishing any new conclusions.

While regretting that I have not been able to use the London archives later
than 1815, I believe that it is nevertheless possible, without recourse to
unpublished papers, to write the history of the succeeding thirty years
with substantial correctness. There exist in a published form, apart from
documents printed officially, masses of first-hand material of undoubtedly
authentic character, such as the great English collection known by the
somewhat misleading name of Wellington Despatches, New Series; or again,
the collection printed as an appendix to Prokesch von Osten's History of
the Greek Rebellion, or the many volumes of Gentz' Correspondence belonging
to the period about 1820, when Gentz was really at the centre of affairs.
The Metternich papers, interesting as far as they go, are a mere selection.
The omissions are glaring, and scarcely accidental. Many minor collections
bearing on particular events might be named, such as those in Guizot's
Mémoires. Frequent references will show my obligation to the German series
of historical works constituting the Leipzig Staatengeschichte, as well as
to French authors who, like Viel-Castel, have worked with original sources
of information before them. There exist in English literature singularly
few works on this period of Continental history.

A greater publicity was introduced into political affairs on the Continent
by the establishment of Parliamentary Government in France in 1815, and
even by the attempts made to introduce it in other States. In England we
have always had freedom of discussion, but the amount of information made
public by the executive in recent times has been enormously greater than it
was at the end of the last century. The only documents published at the
outbreak of the war of 1793 were, so far as I can ascertain, the well-known
letters of Chauvelin and Lord Grenville. During the twenty years' struggle
with France next to nothing was known of the diplomatic transactions
between England and the Continental Powers. But from the time of the Reform
Bill onwards the amount of information given to the public has been
constantly increasing, and the reader of Parliamentary Papers in our own
day is likely to complain of diffusiveness rather than of reticence.
Nevertheless the perusal of published papers can never be quite the same
thing as an examination of the originals; and the writer who first has
access to the English archives after 1815 will have an advantage over those
who have gone before him.

The completion of this volume has been delayed by almost every circumstance
adverse to historical study and production, including a severe
Parliamentary contest. I trust, however, that no trace of partisanship or
unrest appears in the work, which I have valued for the sake of the mental
discipline which it demanded. With quieter times the third volume will, I
trust, advance more rapidly.

LONDON, October, 1886.

NOTE.--The third volume was published in 1889.




CONTENTS.


CHAPTER I.

FRANCE AND GERMANY AT THE OUTBREAK OF THE REVOLUTIONARY WAR.

Outbreak of the Revolutionary War in 1792--Its immediate causes--
Declaration of Pillnitz made and withdrawn--Agitation of the Priests and
Emigrants--War Policy of the Gironde--Provocations offered to France by the
Powers--State of Central Europe in 1792--The Holy Roman Empire--Austria--
Rule of the Hapsburgs--The Reforms of Maria Theresa and Joseph II.--Policy
of Leopold II.--Government and Foreign Policy of Francis II.--Prussia--
Government of Frederick William II.--Social Condition of Prussia--Secondary
States of Germany--Ecclesiastical States--Free Cities--Knights--Weakness of
Germany

CHAPTER II.

THE WAR, DOWN TO THE TREATIES OF BASLE AND THE ESTABLISHMENT OF THE
DIRECTORY.

French and Austrian Armies on the Flemish Frontier--Prussia enters the
War--Brunswick invades France--His Proclamation--Insurrection of Aug. 10 at
Paris--Massacres of September--Character of the War--Brunswick, checked at
Valmy, retreats--The War becomes a Crusade of France--Neighbours of
France--Custine enters Mainz--Dumouriez conquers the Austrian Netherlands--
Nice and Savoy annexed--Decree of the Convention against all Governments--
Execution of Louis XVI.--War with England, followed by war with the
Mediterranean States--Condition of England--English Parties, how affected
by the Revolution--The Gironde and the Mountain--Austria recovers the
Netherlands--The Allies invade France--La Vendée--Revolutionary System of
1793--Errors of the Allies--New French Commanders and Democratic
Army--Victories of Jourdan, Hoche, and Pichegru--Prussia withdrawing from
the War--Polish Affairs--Austria abandons the Netherlands--Treaties of
Basle--France in 1795--Insurrection of 13 Vendémiaire--Constitution of
1795--The Directory--Effect of the Revolution on the Spirit of Europe up to
1795

CHAPTER III.

ITALIAN CAMPAIGNS: TREATY OF CAMPO FORMIO.

Triple attack on Austria--Moreau, Jourdan--Bonaparte in Italy--Condition
of the Italian States--Professions and real intentions of Bonaparte and the
Directory--Battle of Montenotte--Armistice with Sardinia--Campaign in
Lombardy--Treatment of the Pope, Naples, Tuscany--Siege of Mantua--
Castiglione--Moreau and Jourdan in Germany--Their retreat--Secret Treaty
with Prussia--Negotiations with England--Cispadane Republic--Rise of the
idea of Italian Independence--Battles of Arcola and Rivoli--Peace with the
Pope at Tolentino--Venice--Preliminaries of Leoben--The French in
Venice--The French take the Ionian Islands and give Venice to
Austria--Genoa--Coup d'état of 17 Fructidor in Paris--Treaty of Campo
Formio--Victories of England at Sea--Bonaparte's project against Egypt

CHAPTER IV.

FROM THE CONGRESS OF RASTADT TO THE ESTABLISHMENT OF THE CONSULATE.

Congress of Rastadt--The Rhenish Provinces ceded--Ecclesiastical States of
Germany suppressed--French Intervention in Switzerland--Helvetic
Republic--The French invade the Papal States--Roman Republic--Expedition to
Egypt--Battle of the Nile--Coalition of 1798--Ferdinand of Naples enters
Rome--Mack's defeats--French enter Naples--Parthenopean Republic--War with
Austria and Russia--Battle of Stockach--Murder of the French Envoys at
Rastadt--Campaign in Lombardy--Reign of Terror at Naples--Austrian designs
upon Italy--Suvaroff and the Austrians--Campaign in Switzerland--Campaign
in Holland--Bonaparte returns from Egypt--Coup d'état of 18 Brumaire--
Constitution of 1799--System of Bonaparte in France--Its effect on the
influence of France abroad

CHAPTER V.

FROM MARENGO TO THE RUPTURE OF THE PEACE OF AMIENS.

Overtures of Bonaparte to Austria and England--The War continues--Massena
besieged in Genoa--Moreau invades Southern Germany--Bonaparte crosses the
St. Bernard, and descends in the rear of the Austrians--Battle of
Marengo--Austrians retire behind the Mincio--Treaty between England and
Austria--Austria continues the War--Battle of Hohenlinden--Peace of
Lunéville--War between England and the Northern Maritime League--Battle
of Copenhagen--Murder of Paul--End of the Maritime War--English Army
enters Egypt--French defeated at Alexandria--They capitulate at Cairo and
Alexandria--Preliminaries of Peace between England and France signed at
London, followed by Peace of Amiens--Pitt's Irish Policy and his
retirement--Debates on the Peace--Aggressions of Bonaparte during the
Continental Peace--Holland, Italy, Switzerland--Settlement of Germany
under French and Russian influence--Suppression of Ecclesiastical States
and Free Cities--Its effects--Stein--France under the Consulate--The
Civil Code--The Concordat

CHAPTER VI.

THE EMPIRE, TO THE PEACE OF PRESBURG.

England claims Malta--War renewed--Bonaparte occupies Hanover, and
blockades the Elbe--Remonstrances of Prussia--Cadoudal's Plot--Murder
of the Duke of Enghien--Napoleon Emperor--Coalition of 1805--Prussia
holds aloof--State of Austria--Failure of Napoleon's Attempt to gain
Naval Superiority in the Channel--Campaign in Western Germany--
Capitulation of Ulm--Trafalgar--Treaty of Potsdam between Prussia and
the Allies--The French enter Vienna--Haugwitz sent to Napoleon with
Prussian Ultimatum--Battle of Austerlitz--Haugwitz signs a Treaty of
Alliance with Napoleon--Peace--Treaty of Presburg--End of the Holy
Roman Empire--Naples given to Joseph Bonaparte--Battle of Maida--The
Napoleonic Empire and Dynasty--Federation of the Rhine--State of
Germany--Possibility of maintaining the Empire of 1806

CHAPTER VII.

DEATH OF PITT, TO THE PEACE OF TILSIT.

Death of Pitt--Ministry of Fox and Grenville--Napoleon forces Prussia into
war with England, and then offers Hanover to England--Prussia resolves on
war with Napoleon--State of Prussia--Decline of the Army--Southern Germany
with Napoleon--Austria neutral--England and Russia about to help Prussia,
but not immediately--Campaign of 1806--Battles of Jena and Auerstädt--Ruin
of the Prussian Army--Capitulation of Fortresses--Demands of Napoleon--The
War continues--Berlin Decree--Exclusion of English goods from the
Continent--Russia enters the war--Campaign in Poland and East
Prussia--Eylau--Treaty of Bartenstein--Friedland--Interview at
Tilsit--Alliance of Napoleon and Alexander--Secret Articles--English
expedition to Denmark--The French enter Portugal--Prussia after the Peace
of Tilsit--Stein's Edict of Emancipation--The Prussian Peasant--Reform of
the Prussian Army, and creation of Municipalities--Stein's other projects
of Reform, which are not carried out

CHAPTER VIII.

SPAIN, TO THE FALL OF SARAGOSSA.

Spain in 1806--Napoleon uses the quarrel between Ferdinand and Godoy--He
affects to be Ferdinand's Protector--Dupont's Army enters Spain--Murat in
Spain--Charles abdicates--Ferdinand King--Savary brings Ferdinand to
Bayonne--Napoleon makes both Charles and Ferdinand resign--Spirit of the
Spanish Nation--Contrast with Germany--Rising of all Spain--The Notables
at Bayonne--Campaign of 1808--Capitulation of Baylen--Wellesley lands in
Portugal--Vimieiro--Convention of Cintra--Effect of the Spanish Rising on
Europe--War Party in Prussia--Napoleon and Alexander at Erfurt--Stein
resigns, and is proscribed--Napoleon in Spain--Spanish Misgovernment--
Campaign on the Ebro--Campaign of Sir John Moore--Corunna--Napoleon
leaves Spain--Siege of Saragossa--Successes of the French

CHAPTER IX.

WAR OF 1809: THE NAPOLEONIC EMPIRE--SPAIN, TO THE BATTLE OF SALAMANCA.

Austria preparing for war--The war to be one on behalf of the German
Nation--Patriotic movement in Prussia--Expected Insurrection in North
Germany--Plans of Campaign--Austrian Manifesto to the Germans--Rising of
the Tyrolese--Defeats of the Archduke Charles in Bavaria--French in
Vienna--Attempts of Dörnberg and Schill--Battle of Aspern--Second passage
of the Danube--Battle of Wagram--Armistice of Znaim--Austria waiting for
Events--Wellesley in Spain--He gains the Battle of Talavera, but
retreats--Expedition against Antwerp fails--Austria makes Peace--Treaty of
Vienna--Real Effects of the War of 1809--Austria after 1809--Metternich--
Marriage of Napoleon with Marie Louise--Severance of Napoleon and
Alexander--Napoleon annexes the Papal States, Holland, Le Valais, and the
North German Coast--The Napoleonic Empire: its benefits and wrongs--The
Czar withdraws from Napoleon's Commercial System--War with Russia
imminent--Wellington in Portugal; Lines of Torres Vedras; Massena's
Campaign of 1810, and retreat--Soult in Andalusia--Wellington's Campaign
of 1811--Capture of Ciudad Rodrigo and Badajoz--Salamanca

CHAPTER X.

RUSSIAN CAMPAIGN, TO THE TREATY OF KALISCH.

War approaching between France and Russia--Policy of Prussia--Hardenberg's
Ministry--Prussia forced into Alliance with Napoleon--Austrian Alliance--
Napoleon's Preparations--He enters Russia--Alexander and Bernadotte--Plan
of Russians to fight a battle at Drissa frustrated--They retreat on
Witepsk--Sufferings of the French--French enter Smolensko--Battle of
Borodino--Evacuation of Moscow--Moscow fired--The Retreat from Moscow--
French at Smolensko--Advance of Russian Armies from North and South--Battle
of Krasnoi--Passage of the Beresina--The French reach the Niemen--York's
Convention with the Russians--The Czar and Stein--Russian Army enters
Prussia--Stein raises East Prussia--Treaty of Kalisch--Prussia declares
War--Enthusiasm of the Nation--Idea of German Unity--The Landwehr

CHAPTER XI.

WAR OF LIBERATION, TO THE PEACE OF PARIS.

The War of Liberation--Blücher crosses the Elbe--Battle of Lützen--The
Allies retreat to Silesia--Battle of Bautzen--Armistice--Napoleon intends
to intimidate Austria--Mistaken as to the Forces of Austria--Metternich's
Policy--Treaty of Reichenbach--Austria offers its Mediation--Congress of
Prague--Austria enters the War--Armies and Plans of Napoleon and the
Allies--Campaign of August--Battles of Dresden, Grosbeeren, the Katzbach,
and Kulm--Effect of these Actions--Battle of Dennewitz--German Policy of
Austria favourable to the Princes of the Rhenish Confederacy--Frustrated
hopes of German Unity--Battle of Leipzig--The Allies reach the Rhine--
Offers of Peace at Frankfort--Plan of Invasion of France--Backwardness of
Austria--The Allies enter France--Campaign of 1814--Congress of
Châtillon--Napoleon moves to the rear of the Allies--The Allies advance
on Paris--Capitulation of Paris--Entry of the Allies--Dethronement of
Napoleon--Restoration of the Bourbons--The Charta--Treaty of Paris--
Territorial effects of the War, 1792-1814--Every Power except France had
gained--France relatively weaker in Europe--Summary of the permanent
effects of this period on Europe

END OF VOL. I. (ORIGINAL EDITION).


CHAPTER XII.

THE RESTORATION.

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 Lyons, 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
Fouché--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

CHAPTER XIII.

THE PROGRESS OF REACTION.

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' 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

CHAPTER XIV.

THE MEDITERRANEAN MOVEMENTS OF 1820.

Movements in the Mediterranean States beginning in 1820--Spain from
1814 to 1820--The South American Colonies--The Army at Cadiz: Action
of Quiroga and Riego--Movement at Corunna--Ferdinand accepts the
Constitution of 1812--Naples from 1815 to 1820--The Court-party, the
Muratists, the Carbonari--The Spanish Constitution proclaimed at
Naples--Constitutional movement in Portugal--Alexander's proposal with
regard to Spain--The Conference and Declaration of Troppau--Protest of
England--Conference of Laibach--The Austrians invade Naples and restore
absolute Monarchy--Insurrection in Piedmont, which fails--Spain from
1820 to 1822--Death of Castlereagh--The Congress of Verona--Policy of
England--The French invade Spain--Restoration of absolute Monarchy, and
violence of the reaction--England prohibits the conquest of the Spanish
Colonies by France, and subsequently recognises their independence--
Affairs in Portugal--Canning sends troops to Lisbon--The Policy of
Canning--Estimate of his place in the history of Europe

CHAPTER XV.

GREECE AND EASTERN AFFAIRS.

Condition of Greece: its Races and Institutions--The Greek Church
--Communal System--The Ægæan Islands--The Phanariots--Greek intellectual
revival: Koraes--Beginning of Greek National Movement; Contact of Greece
with the French Revolution and Napoleon--The Hetæria Philike--Hypsilanti's
Attempt in the Danubian Provinces: its failure--Revolt of the Morea:
Massacres: Execution of Gregorius, and Terrorism at Constantinople
--Attitude of Russia, Austria, and England--Extension of the Revolt:
Affairs at Hydra--The Greek Leaders--Fall of Tripolitza--The Massacre of
Chios--Failure of the Turks in the Campaign of 1822--Dissensions of the
Greeks--Mahmud calls upon Mehemet Ali for Aid--Ibrahim conquers Crete and
invades the Morea--Siege of Missolonghi--Philhellenism in Europe--Russian
proposal for Intervention--Conspiracies in Russia: Death of Alexander:
Accession of Nicholas--Military Insurrection at St. Petersburg--
Anglo-Russian Protocol--Treaty between England, Russia, and France--Death
of Canning--Navarino--War between Russia and Turkey--Campaigns of 1828 and
1829--Treaty of Adrianople--Capodistrias President of Greece--Leopold
accepts and then declines the Greek Crown--Murder of Capodistrias--Otho,
King of Greece

CHAPTER XVI.

THE MOVEMENTS OF 1830.

France before 1830--Reign of Charles X.--Ministry of Martignac--Ministry
of Polignac--The Duke of Orleans--War in Algiers--The July Ordinances--
Revolution of July--Louis Philippe King--Nature and effects of the July
Revolution--Affairs in Belgium--The Belgian Revolution--The Great
Powers--Intervention, and establishment of the Kingdom of Belgium--Affairs
of Poland--Insurrection at Warsaw--War between Russia and Poland--Overthrow
of the Poles: End of the Polish Constitution--Affairs of Italy--
Insurrection in the Papal States--France and Austria--Austrian
Intervention--Ancona occupied by the French--Affairs of Germany--Prussia;
the Zollverein--Brunswick, Hanover, Saxony--The Palatinate--Reaction in
Germany--The exiles in Switzerland: Incursion into Savoy--Dispersion of the
Exiles--France under Louis Philippe: Successive risings--Period of
Parliamentary activity--England after 1830: The Reform Bill

CHAPTER XVII.

SPANISH AND EASTERN AFFAIRS.

France and England after 1830--Affairs of Portugal--Don Miguel--Don Pedro
invades Portugal--Ferdinand of Spain--The Pragmatic Sanction--Death of
Ferdinand: Regency of Christina--The Constitution--Quadruple
Alliance--Miguel and Carlos expelled from Portugal--Carlos enters
Spain--The Basque Provinces--Carlist War: Zumalacarregui--The Spanish
Government seeks French assistance, which is refused--Constitution of
1837--End of the War--Regency of Espartero--Isabella Queen--Affairs of
the Ottoman Empire--Ibrahim invades Syria; his victories--Rivalry of
France and Russia at Constantinople--Peace of Kutaya and Treaty of Unkiar
Skelessi--Effect of this Treaty--France and Mehemet Ali--Commerce of the
Levant--Second War between Mehemet and the Porte--Ottoman disasters--The
Policy of the Great Powers--Quadruple Treaty without France--Ibrahim
expelled from Syria--Final Settlement--Turkey after 1840--Attempted
reforms of Reschid Pasha

CHAPTER XVIII.

EUROPE BEFORE 1848.

Europe during the Thirty-years' Peace--Italy and Austria--Mazzini--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 reforms 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

END OF VOL. II. (ORIGINAL EDITION).


CHAPTER XIX.

THE MARCH REVOLUTION, 1848.

Europe in 1789 and in 1848--Agitation in Western Germany before and
after the Revolution at Paris--Austria and Hungary--The March Revolution
at Vienna--Flight of Metternich--The Hungarian Diet--Hungary wins its
independence--Bohemian movement--Autonomy promised to Bohemia--
Insurrection of Lombardy--Of Venice--Piedmont makes war on Austria--A
general Italian war against Austria imminent--The March Days at
Berlin--Frederick William IV.--A National Assembly promised--
Schleswig-Holstein--Insurrection in Holstein--War between Germany and
Denmark--The German Ante-Parliament--Republican Rising in Baden--Meeting
of the German National Assembly at Frankfort--Europe generally in March,
1848--The French Provisional Government--The National Workshops--The
Government and the Red Republicans--French National Assembly--Riot of
May 15--Measures against the National Workshops--The Four Days of
June--Cavaignac--Louis Napoleon--He is elected to the Assembly--Elected
President

CHAPTER XX.

THE PERIOD OF CONFLICT, DOWN TO THE ESTABLISHMENT OF THE SECOND FRENCH
EMPIRE.

Austria and Italy--Vienna from March to May--Flight of the Emperor
--Bohemian National Movement--Windischgrätz subdues Prague--Campaign around
Verona--Papal Allocution--Naples in May--Negotiations as to Lombardy--
Reconquest of Venetia--Battle of Custozza--The Austrians enter
Milan--Austrian Court and Hungary--The Serbs in Southern Hungary--Serb
Congress at Carlowitz--Jellacic--Affairs of Croatia--Jellacic, the Court
and the Hungarian Movement--Murder of Lamberg--Manifesto of October 3--
Vienna on October 6--The Emperor at Olmütz--Windischgrätz conquers
Vienna--The Parliament at Kremsier--Schwarzenberg Minister--Ferdinand
abdicates--Dissolution of the Kremsier Parliament--Unitary Edict--Hungary
--The Roumanians in Transylvania--The Austrian Army occupies Pesth--
Hungarian Government at Debreczin--The Austrians driven out of
Hungary--Declaration of Hungarian Independence--Russian Intervention--The
Hungarian Summer Campaign--Capitulation of Vilagos--Italy--Murder of
Rossi--Tuscany--The March Campaign in Lombardy--Novara--Abdication of
Charles Albert--Victor Emmanuel--Restoration in Tuscany--French
Intervention in Rome--Defeat of Oudinot--Oudinot and Lesseps--The French
enter Rome--The Restored Pontifical Government--Fall of Venice--Ferdinand
reconquers Sicily--Germany--The National Assembly at Frankfort--The
Armistice of Malmö--Berlin from April to September--The Prussian Army--Last
Days of the Prussian Parliament--Prussian Constitution granted by
Edict--The German National Assembly and Austria--Frederick William IV.
elected Emperor--He refuses the Crown--End of the National Assembly--
Prussia attempts to form a separate Union--The Union Parliament at
Erfurt--Action of Austria--Hesse-Cassel--The Diet of Frankfort
restored--Olmütz--Schleswig-Holstein--Germany after 1849--Austria after
1851--France after 1848--Louis Napoleon--The October Message--Law Limiting
the Franchise--Louis Napoleon and the Army--Proposed Revision of the
Constitution--The Coup d'Etat--Napoleon III. Emperor

CHAPTER XXI.

THE CRIMEAN WAR.

England and France in 1851--Russia under Nicholas--The Hungarian
Refugees--Dispute between France and Russia on the Holy Places--Nicholas
and the British Ambassador--Lord Stratford de Redcliffe--Menschikoff's
Mission--Russian troops enter the Danubian Principalities--Lord Aberdeen's
Cabinet--Movements of the Fleets--The Vienna Note--The Fleets pass the
Dardanelles--Turkish Squadron destroyed at Sinope--Declaration of
War--Policy of Austria--Policy of Prussia--The Western Powers and the
European Concert--Siege of Silistria--The Principalities evacuated--
Further objects of the Western Powers--Invasion of the Crimea--Battle of
the Alma--The Flank March--Balaclava--Inkermann--Winter in the
Crimea--Death of Nicholas--Conference of Vienna--Austria--Progress of the
Siege--Plans of Napoleon III.--Canrobert and Pélissier--Unsuccessful
Assault--Battle of the Tchernaya--Capture of the Malakoff--Fall of
Sebastopol--Fall of Kars--Negotiations for Peace--The Conference of
Paris--Treaty of Paris--The Danubian Principalities--Continued discord in
the Ottoman Empire--Revision of the Treaty of Paris in 1871

CHAPTER XXII.

THE CREATION OF THE ITALIAN KINGDOM.

Piedmont after 1849--Ministry of Azeglio--Cavour Prime Minister--Designs
of Cavour--His Crimean Policy--Cavour at the Conference of Paris--Cavour
and Napoleon III.--The Meeting at Plombières--Preparations in Italy--Treaty
of January, 1859--Attempts at Mediation--Austrian Ultimatum--Campaign of
1859--Magenta--Movement in Central Italy--Solferino--Napoleon and
Prussia--Interview of Villafranca--Cavour resigns--Peace of Zürich--Central
Italy after Villafranca--The Proposed Congress--"The Pope and the
Congress"--Cavour resumes office--Cavour and Napoleon--Union of the Duchies
and the Romagna with Piedmont--Savoy and Nice added to France--Cavour on
this cession--European opinion--Naples--Sicily--Garibaldi lands at
Marsala--Capture of Palermo--The Neapolitans evacuate Sicily--Cavour and
the Party of Action--Cavour's Policy as to Naples--Garibaldi on the
mainland--Persano and Villamarina at Naples--Garibaldi at Naples--The
Piedmontese Army enters Umbria and the Marches--Fall of Ancona--Garibaldi
and Cavour--The Armies on the Volturno--Fall of Gaeta--Cavour's Policy
with regard to Rome and Venice--Death of Cavour--The Free Church in the
Free State

CHAPTER XXIII.

GERMAN ASCENDENCY WON BY PRUSSIA.

Germany after 1858--The Regency in Prussia--Army-reorganisation--King
William I.--Conflict between the Crown and the Parliament--Bismarck--The
struggle continued--Austria from 1859--The October Diploma--Resistance of
Hungary--The Reichsrath--Russia under Alexander II.--Liberation of the
Serfs--Poland--The Insurrection of 1863--Agrarian measures in Poland--
Schleswig-Holstein--Death of Frederick VII.--Plans of Bismarck--Campaign
in Schleswig--Conference of London--Treaty of Vienna--England and Napoleon
III.--Prussia and Austria--Convention of Gastein--Italy--Alliance of
Prussia with Italy--Proposals for a Congress fail--War between Austria and
Prussia--Napoleon III.--Königgrätz--Custozza--Mediation of Napoleon
--Treaty of Prague--South Germany--Projects for compensation to
France--Austria and Hungary--Deák--Establishment of the Dual System in
Austria-Hungary

CHAPTER XXIV.

THE WAR BETWEEN FRANCE AND GERMANY.

Napoleon III.--The Mexican Expedition--Withdrawal of the French and death
of Maximilian--The Luxemburg Question--Exasperation in France against
Prussia--Austria--Italy--Mentana--Germany after 1866--The Spanish
Candidature of Leopold of Hohenzollern--French declaration--Benedetti and
King William--Withdrawal of Leopold and demand for guarantees--The telegram
from Ems--War--Expected Alliances of France--Austria--Italy--Prussian
plans--The French army--Causes of French inferiority--Weissenburg--Wörth--
Spicheren--Borny--Mars-la-Tour--Gravelotte--Sedan--The Republic proclaimed
at Paris--Favre and Bismarck--Siege of Paris--Gambetta at Tours--The Army
of the Loire--Fall of Metz--Fighting at Orleans--Sortie of Champigny--The
Armies of the North, of the Loire, of the East--Bourbaki's ruin--
Capitulation of Paris and Armistice--Preliminaries of Peace--Germany--
Establishment of the German Empire--The Commune of Paris--Second Siege--
Effects of the war as to Russia and Italy--Rome

CHAPTER XXV.

EASTERN AFFAIRS.

France after 1871--Alliance of the Three Emperors--Revolt of Herzegovina--
The Andrássy Note--Murder of the Consuls at Salonika--The Berlin
Memorandum--Rejected by England--Abdul Aziz deposed--Massacres in
Bulgaria--Servia and Montenegro declare War--Opinion in England--Disraeli--
Meeting of Emperors at Reichstadt--Servian Campaign--Declaration of the
Czar--Conference at Constantinople--Its Failure--The London Protocol--
Russia declares War--Advance on the Balkans--Osman at Plevna--Second Attack
on Plevna--The Shipka Pass--Roumania--Third Attack on Plevna--Todleben--
Fall of Plevna--Passage of the Balkans--Armistice--England--The Fleet
passes the Dardanelles--Treaty of San Stefano--England and Russia--Secret
Agreement--Convention with Turkey--Congress of Berlin--Treaty of
Berlin--Bulgaria


MAPS.

EUROPEAN STATES IN 1792

CENTRAL EUROPE IN 1812




MODERN EUROPE.




CHAPTER I.


Outbreak of the Revolutionary War in 1792--Its immediate causes--
Declaration of Pillnitz made and withdrawn--Agitation of the Priests and
Emigrants--War Policy of the Gironde--Provocations offered to France by
the Powers--State of Central Europe in 1792--The Holy Roman Empire--
Austria--Rule of the Hapsburgs--The Reforms of Maria Theresa and Joseph
II.--Policy of Leopold II.--Government and Foreign Policy of Francis
II.--Prussia--Government of Frederick William II.--Social condition or
Prussia--Secondary States of Germany--Ecclesiastical States--Free
Cities--Knights--Weakness of Germany


On the morning of the 19th of April, 1792, after weeks of stormy agitation
in Paris, the Ministers of Louis XVI. brought down a letter from the King
to the Legislative Assembly of France. The letter was brief but
significant. It announced that the King intended to appear in the Hall of
Assembly at noon on the following day. Though the letter did not disclose
the object of the King's visit, it was known that Louis had given way to
the pressure of his Ministry and the national cry for war, and that a
declaration of war against Austria was the measure which the King was about
to propose in person to the Assembly. On the morrow the public thronged the
hall; the Assembly broke off its debate at midday in order to be in
readiness for the King. Louis entered the hall in the midst of deep
silence, and seated himself beside the President in the chair which was now
substituted for the throne of France. At the King's bidding General
Dumouriez, Minister of Foreign Affairs, read a report to the Assembly upon
the relations of France to foreign Powers. The report contained a long
series of charges against Austria, and concluded with the recommendation of
war. When Dumouriez ceased reading Louis rose, and in a low voice declared
that he himself and the whole of the Ministry accepted the report read to
the Assembly; that he had used every effort to maintain peace, and in vain;
and that he was now come, in accordance with the terms of the Constitution,
to propose that the Assembly declare war against the Austrian Sovereign. It
was not three months since Louis himself had supplicated the Courts of
Europe for armed aid against his own subjects. The words which he now
uttered were put in his mouth by men whom he hated, but could not resist:
the very outburst of applause that followed them only proved the fatal
antagonism that existed between the nation and the King. After the
President of the Assembly had made a short answer, Louis retired from the
hall. The Assembly itself broke up, to commence its debate on the King's
proposal after an interval of some hours. When the House re-assembled in
the evening, those few courageous men who argued on grounds of national
interest and justice against the passion of the moment could scarcely
obtain a hearing. An appeal for a second day's discussion was rejected; the
debate abruptly closed; and the declaration of war was carried against
seven dissentient votes. It was a decision big with consequences for France
and for the world. From that day began the struggle between Revolutionary
France and the established order of Europe. A period opened in which almost
every State on the Continent gained some new character from the aggressions
of France, from the laws and political changes introduced by the conqueror,
or from the awakening of new forces of national life in the crisis of
successful resistance or of humiliation. It is my intention to trace the
great lines of European history from that time to the present, briefly
sketching the condition of some of the principal States at the outbreak of
the Revolutionary War, and endeavouring to distinguish, amid scenes of
ever-shifting incident, the steps by which the Europe of 1792 has become
the Europe of to-day.

[First threats of foreign Courts against France, 1791.]

The first two years of the Revolution had ended without bringing France
into collision with foreign Powers. This was not due to any goodwill that
the Courts of Europe bore to the French people, or to want of effort on the
part of the French aristocracy to raise the armies of Europe against their
own country. The National Assembly, which met in 1789, had cut at the roots
of the power of the Crown; it had deprived the nobility of their privileges,
and laid its hand upon the revenues of the Church. The brothers of King
Louis XVI., with a host of nobles too impatient to pursue a course of
steady political opposition at home, quitted France, and wearied foreign
Courts with their appeals for armed assistance. The absolute monarchs of
the Continent gave them a warm and even ostentatious welcome; but they
confined their support to words and tokens of distinction, and until the
summer of 1791 the Revolution was not seriously threatened with the
interference of the stranger. The flight of King Louis from Paris in June,
1791, followed by his capture and his strict confinement within the
Tuileries, gave rise to the first definite project of foreign intervention.
[4] Louis had fled from his capital and from the National Assembly; he
returned, the hostage of a populace already familiar with outrage and
bloodshed. For a moment the exasperation of Paris brought the Royal Family
into real jeopardy. The Emperor Leopold, brother of Marie Antoinette,
trembled for the safety of his unhappy sister, and addressed a letter to
the European Courts from Padua, on the 6th of July, proposing that the
Powers should unite to preserve the Royal Family of France from popular
violence. Six weeks later the Emperor and King Frederick William II. of
Prussia met at Pillnitz, in Saxony. A declaration was published by the two
Sovereigns, stating that they considered the position of the King of France
to be matter of European concern, and that, in the event of all the other
great Powers consenting to a joint action, they were prepared to supply an
armed force to operate on the French frontier.

[Declaration of Pillnitz withdrawn.]

Had the National Assembly instantly declared war on Leopold and Frederick
William, its action would have been justified by every rule of
international law. The Assembly did not, however, declare war, and for a
good reason. It was known at Paris that the manifesto was no more than a
device of the Emperor's to intimidate the enemies of the Royal Family.
Leopold, when he pledged himself to join a coalition of all the Powers, was
in fact aware that England would be no party to any such coalition. He was
determined to do nothing that would force him into war; and it did not
occur to him that French politicians would understand the emptiness of his
threats as well as he did himself. Yet this turned out to be the case; and
whatever indignation the manifesto of Pillnitz excited in the mass of the
French people, it was received with more derision than alarm by the men who
were cognisant of the affairs of Europe. All the politicians of the
National Assembly knew that Prussia and Austria had lately been on the
verge of war with one another upon the Eastern question; they even
underrated the effect of the French revolution in appeasing the existing
enmities of the great Powers. No important party in France regarded the
Declaration of Pillnitz as a possible reason for hostilities; and the
challenge given to France was soon publicly withdrawn. It was withdrawn
when Louis XVI., by accepting the Constitution made by the National
Assembly, placed himself, in the sight of Europe, in the position of a free
agent. On the 14th September, 1791, the King, by a solemn public oath,
identified his will with that of the nation. It was known in Paris that he
had been urged by the emigrants to refuse his assent, and to plunge the
nation into civil war by an open breach with the Assembly. The frankness
with which Louis pledged himself to the Constitution, the seeming sincerity
of his patriotism, again turned the tide of public opinion in his favour.
His flight was forgiven; the restrictions placed upon his personal liberty
were relaxed. Louis seemed to be once more reconciled with France, and
France was relieved from the ban of Europe. The Emperor announced that the
circumstances which had provoked the Declaration of Pillnitz no longer
existed, and that the Powers, though prepared to revive the League if
future occasion should arise, suspended all joint action in reference to
the internal affairs of France.

[Priests and emigrants keep France in agitation.]

The National Assembly, which, in two years, had carried France so far
towards the goal of political and social freedom, now declared its work
ended. In the mass of the nation there was little desire for further
change. The grievances which pressed most heavily upon the common course of
men's lives--unfair taxation, exclusion from public employment, monopolies
among the townspeople, and the feudal dues which consumed the produce of
the peasant--had been swept away. It was less by any general demand for
further reform than by the antagonisms already kindled in the Revolution
that France was forced into a new series of violent changes. The King
himself was not sincerely at one with the nation; in everything that most
keenly touched his conscience he had unwillingly accepted the work of the
Assembly. The Church and the noblesse were bent on undoing what had already
been done. Without interfering with doctrine or ritual, the National
Assembly had re-organised the ecclesiastical system of France, and had
enforced that supremacy of the State over the priesthood to which,
throughout the eighteenth century, the Governments of Catholic Europe had
been steadily tending. The Civil Constitution of the Clergy, which was
created by the National Assembly in 1790, transformed the priesthood from a
society of landowners into a body of salaried officers of the State, and
gave to the laity the election of their bishops and ministers. The change,
carried out in this extreme form, threw the whole body of bishops and a
great part of the lower clergy into revolt. Their interests were hurt by
the sale of the Church lands; their consciences were wounded by the system
of popular election, which was condemned by the Pope. In half the pulpits
of France the principles of the Revolution were anathematised, and the
vengeance of heaven denounced against the purchasers of the secularised
Church lands. Beyond the frontier the emigrant nobles, who might have
tempered the Revolution by combining with the many liberal men of their
order who remained at home, gathered in arms, and sought the help of
foreigners against a nation in which they could see nothing but rebellious
dependents of their own. The head-quarters of the emigrants were at
Coblentz in the dominions of the Elector of Trèves. They formed themselves
into regiments, numbering in all some few thousands, and occupied
themselves with extravagant schemes of vengeance against all Frenchmen who
had taken part in the destruction of the privileges of their caste.

[Legislative Assembly. Oct. 1791.]

[War policy of the Gironde.]

Had the elections which followed the dissolution of the National Assembly
sent to the Legislature a body of men bent only on maintaining the
advantages already won, it would have been no easy task to preserve the
peace of France in the presence of the secret or open hostility of the
Court, the Church, and the emigrants. But the trial was not made. The
leading spirits among the new representatives were not men of compromise.
In the Legislative Body which met in 1791 there were all the passions of
the Assembly of 1789, without any of the experience which that Assembly had
gained. A decree, memorable among the achievements of political folly, had
prohibited members of the late Chamber from seeking re-election. The new
Legislature was composed of men whose political creed had been drawn almost
wholly from literary sources; the most dangerous theorists of the former
Assembly were released from Parliamentary restraints, and installed, like
Robespierre, as the orators of the clubs. Within the Chamber itself the
defenders of the Monarchy and of the Constitution which had just been given
to France were far outmatched by the party of advance. The most conspicuous
of the new deputies formed the group named after the district of the
Gironde, where several of their leaders had been elected. The orator
Vergniaud, pre-eminent among companions of singular eloquence, the
philosopher Condorcet, the veteran journalist Brissot, gave to this party
an ascendancy in the Chamber and an influence in the country the more
dangerous because it appeared to belong to men elevated above the ordinary
regions of political strife. Without the fixed design of turning the
monarchy into a republic, the orators of the Gironde sought to carry the
revolutionary movement over the barrier erected against it in the
Constitution of 1791. From the moment of the opening of the Assembly it was
clear that the Girondins intended to precipitate the conflict between the
Court and the nation by devoting all the wealth of their eloquence to the
subjects which divided France the most. To Brissot and the men who
furnished the ideas of the party, it would have seemed a calamity that the
Constitution of 1791, with its respect for the prerogative of the Crown and
its tolerance of mediæval superstition, should fairly get underway. In
spite of Robespierre's prediction that war would give France a strong
sovereign in the place of a weak one, the Girondins persuaded themselves
that the best means of diminishing or overthrowing monarchical power in
France was a war with the sovereigns of Europe; and henceforward they
laboured for war with scarcely any disguise. [5]

[Notes of Kaunitz, Dec. 21, Feb. 17.]

Nor were occasions wanting, if war was needful for France. The protection
which the Elector of Trèves gave to the emigrant army at Coblentz was so
flagrant a violation of international law that the Gironde had the support
of the whole nation when they called upon the King to demand the dispersal
of the emigrants in the most peremptory form. National feeling was keenly
excited by debates in which the military preparations of the emigrants and
the encouragement given to them by foreign princes were denounced with all
the energy of southern eloquence. On the 13th of December Louis declared to
the Electors of Trèves and Mainz that he would treat them as enemies unless
the armaments within their territories were dispersed by January 15th; and
at the same time he called upon the Emperor Leopold, as head of the
Germanic body, to use his influence in bringing the Electors to reason. The
demands of France were not resisted. On the 16th January, 1792, Louis
informed the Assembly that the emigrants had been expelled from the
electorates, and acknowledged the good offices of Leopold in effecting this
result. The substantial cause of war seemed to have disappeared; but
another had arisen in its place. In a note of December 21st the Austrian
Minister Kaunitz used expressions which implied that a league of the Powers
was still in existence against France. Nothing could have come more
opportunely for the war-party in the Assembly. Brissot cried for an
immediate declaration of war, and appealed to the French nation to
vindicate its honour by an attack both upon the emigrants and upon their
imperial protector. The issue depended upon the relative power of the Crown
and the Opposition. Leopold saw that war was inevitable unless the
Constitutional party, which was still in office, rallied for one last
effort, and gained a decisive victory over its antagonists. In the hope of
turning public opinion against the Gironde, he permitted Kaunitz to send a
despatch to Paris which loaded the leaders of the war-party with abuse, and
exhorted the French nation to deliver itself from men who would bring upon
it the hostility of Europe. (Feb. 17.) [6] The despatch gave singular proof
of the inability of the cleverest sovereign and the most experienced
minister of the age to distinguish between the fears of a timid cabinet and
the impulses of an excited nation. Leopold's vituperations might have had
the intended effect if they had been addressed to the Margrave of Baden or
the Doge of Venice; addressed to the French nation and its popular Assembly
in the height of civil conflict, they were as oil poured upon the flames.
Leopold ruined the party which he meant to reinforce; he threw the nation
into the arms of those whom he attacked. His despatch was received in the
Assembly with alternate murmurs and bursts of laughter; in the clubs it
excited a wild outburst of rage. The exchange of diplomatic notes continued
for a few weeks more; but the real answer of France to Austria was the
"Marseillaise," composed at Strasburg almost simultaneously with Kaunitz'
attack upon the Jacobins. The sudden death of the Emperor on March 1st
produced no pause in the controversy. Delessart, the Foreign Minister of
Louis, was thrust from office, and replaced by Dumouriez, the
representative of the war-party.

[War declared, April 20th, 1792.]

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

[Pretended grounds of war.]

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

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

[Germany follows Austria into the war.]

[State of Germany.]

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

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

[Holy Roman Empire.]

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

[Austria.]

[Catholic policy of the Hapsburgs.]

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

[Reforms of Maria Theresa, 1740-1780.]

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

[Joseph II., 1780-1790.]

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

[Leopold II., 1790-1792.]

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

[Death of Leopold, March 1, 1792.]

[Francis II., 1792.]

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

From the moment when Kaunitz retired from office, territorial extension
became the great object of the Austrian Court. To prudent statesmen the
scattered provinces and varied population of the Austrian State would have
suggested that Austria had more to lose than any European Power; to the men
of 1792 it appeared that she had more to gain. The Netherlands might be
increased with a strip of French Flanders; Bavaria, Poland, and Italy were
all weak neighbours, who might be made to enrich Austria in their turn. A
sort of magical virtue was attached to the acquisition of territory. If so
many square miles and so many head of population were gained, whether of
alien or kindred race, mutinous or friendly, the end of all statesmanship
was realised, and the heaviest sacrifice of life and industry repaid.
Austria affected to act as the centre of a defensive alliance, and to fight
for the common purpose of giving a Government to France which would respect
the rights of its neighbours. In reality, its own military operations were
too often controlled, and an effective common warfare frustrated, at one
moment by a design upon French Flanders, at another by the course of Polish
or Bavarian intrigue, at another by the hope of conquests in Italy. Of all
the interests which centred in the head of the House of Hapsburg, the least
befriended at Vienna was the interest of the Empire and of Germany.

[Prussia.]

Nor, if Austria was found wanting, had Germany any permanent safeguard in
the rival Protestant State. Prussia, the second great German Power and the
ancient enemy of Austria, had been raised to an influence in Europe quite
out of proportion to its scanty resources by the genius of Frederick the
Great and the earlier Princes of the House of Hohenzollern. Its population
was not one-third of that of France or Austria; its wealth was perhaps not
superior to that of the Republic of Venice. That a State so poor in men and
money should play the part of one of the great Powers of Europe was
possible only so long as an energetic ruler watched every movement of that
complicated machinery which formed both army and nation after the prince's
own type. Frederick gave his subjects a just administration of the law; he
taught them productive industries; he sought to bring education to their
doors [11]; but he required that the citizen should account himself before
all the servant of the State. Every Prussian either worked in the great
official hierarchy or looked up to it as the providence which was to direct
all his actions and supply all his judgments. The burden of taxation
imposed by the support of an army relatively three times as great as that
of any other Power was wonderfully lightened by Frederick's economy: far
more serious than the tobacco-monopoly and the forage-requisitions, at
which Frederick's subjects grumbled during his life-time, was the danger
that a nation which had only attained political greatness by its obedience
to a rigorous administration should fall into political helplessness, when
the clear purpose and all-controlling care of its ruler no longer animated
a system which, without him, was only a pedantic routine. What in England
we are accustomed to consider as the very substance of national life,--the
mass of political interest and opinion, diffused in some degree amongst all
classes, at once the support and the judge of the servants of the
State,--had in Prussia no existence. Frederick's subjects obeyed and
trusted their Monarch; there were probably not five hundred persons outside
the public service who had any political opinions of their own. Prussia did
not possess even the form of a national representation; and, although
certain provincial assemblies continued to meet, they met only to receive
the instructions of the Crown-officers of their district. In the absence of
all public criticism, the old age of Frederick must in itself have
endangered the efficiency of the military system which had raised Prussia
to its sudden eminence. [12] The impulse of Frederick's successor was
sufficient to reverse the whole system of Prussian foreign policy, and to
plunge the country in alliance with Austria into a speculative and
unnecessary war.

[Frederick William II., 1786.]

[Alliance with Austria against France, Feb., 1792.]

On the death of Frederick in 1786, the crown passed to Frederick William
II., his nephew. Frederick William was a man of common type, showy and
pleasure-loving, interested in public affairs, but incapable of acting on
any fixed principle. His mistresses gave the tone to political society. A
knot of courtiers intrigued against one another for the management of the
King; and the policy of Prussia veered from point to point as one unsteady
impulse gave place to another. In countries less dependent than Prussia
upon the personal activity of the monarch, Frederick William's faults might
have been neutralised by able Ministers; in Prussia the weakness of the
King was the decline of the State. The whole fabric of national greatness
had been built up by the royal power; the quality of the public service,
apart from which the nation was politically non-existent, was the quality
of its head. When in the palace profusion and intrigue took the place of
Frederick the Great's unflagging labour, the old uprightness, industry, and
precision which had been the pride of Prussian administration fell out of
fashion everywhere. Yet the frivolity of the Court was a less active cause
of military decline than the abandonment of the first principles of
Prussian policy. [13] If any political sentiment existed in the nation, it
was the sentiment of antagonism to Austria. The patriotism of the army,
with all the traditions of the great King, turned wholly in this direction.
When, out of sympathy with the Bourbon family and the emigrant French
nobles, Frederick William allied himself with Austria (Feb. 1792), and
threw himself into the arms of his ancient enemy in order to attack a
nation which had not wronged him, he made an end of all zealous obedience
amongst his servants. Brunswick, the Prussian Commander-in-Chief, hated the
French emigrants as much as he did the Revolution; and even the generals
who did not originally share Brunswick's dislike to the war recovered their
old jealousy of Austria after the first defeat, and exerted themselves only
to get quit of the war at the first moment that Prussia could retire from
it without disgrace. The very enterprise in which Austria had consented
that the Court of Berlin should seek its reward--the seizure of a part of
Poland--proved fatal to the coalition. The Empress Catherine was already
laying her hand for the second time upon this unfortunate country. It was
easy for the opponents of the Austrian alliance who surrounded King
Frederick William to contrast the barren effort of a war against France
with the cheap and certain advantages to be won by annexation, in concert
with Russia, of Polish territory. To pursue one of these objects with
vigour it was necessary to relinquish the other. Prussia was not rich
enough to maintain armies both on the Vistula and the Rhine. Nor, in the
opinion of its rulers, was it rich enough to be very tender of its honour
or very loyal towards its allies. [14]

[Social system of Prussia.]

In the institutions of Prussia two opposite systems existed side by side,
exhibiting in the strongest form a contrast which in a less degree was
present in most Continental States. The political independence of the
nobility had long been crushed; the King's Government busied itself with
every detail of town and village administration; yet along with this
rigorous development of the modern doctrine of the unity and the authority
of the State there existed a social order more truly archaic than that of
the Middle Ages at their better epochs. The inhabitants of Prussia were
divided into the three classes of nobles, burghers, and peasants, each
confined to its own stated occupations, and not marrying outside its own
order. The soil of the country bore the same distinction; peasant's land
could not be owned by a burgher; burgher's land could not be owned by a
noble. No occupation was lawful for the noble, who was usually no more than
a poor gentleman, but the service of the Crown; the peasant, even where
free, might not practise the handicraft of a burgher. But the mass of the
peasantry in the country east of the Elbe were serfs attached to the soil;
and the noble, who was not permitted to exercise the slightest influence
upon the government of his country, inherited along with his manor a
jurisdiction and police-control over all who were settled within it.
Frederick had allowed serfage to continue because it gave him in each
manorial lord a task-master whom he could employ in his own service. System
and obedience were the sources of his power; and if there existed among his
subjects one class trained to command and another trained to obey, it was
so much the easier for him to force the country into the habits of industry
which he required of it. In the same spirit, Frederick officered his army
only with men of the noble caste. They brought with them the habit of
command ready-formed; the peasants who ploughed and threshed at their
orders were not likely to disobey them in the presence of the enemy. It was
possible that such a system should produce great results so long as
Frederick was there to guard against its abuses; Frederick gone, the
degradation of servitude, the insolence of caste, was what remained. When
the army of France, led by men who had worked with their fathers in the
fields, hunted a King of Prussia amidst his capitulating grandees from the
centre to the verge of his dominions, it was seen what was the permanent
value of a system which recognised in the nature of the poor no capacity
but one for hereditary subjection. The French peasant, plundered as he was
by the State, and vexed as he was with feudal services, knew no such
bondage as that of the Prussian serf, who might not leave the spot where he
was born; only in scattered districts in the border-provinces had serfage
survived in France. It is significant of the difference in self-respect
existing in the peasantry of the two countries that the custom of striking
the common soldier, universal in Germany, was in France no more than an
abuse, practised by the admirers of Frederick, and condemned by the better
officers themselves.

[Minor States of Germany.]

[Ecclesiastical States.]

In all the secondary States of Germany the government was an absolute
monarchy; though, here and there, as in Würtemberg, the shadow of the old
Assembly of the Estates survived; and in Hanover the absence of the
Elector, King George III., placed power in the hands of a group of nobles
who ruled in his name. Society everywhere rested on a sharp division of
classes similar in kind to that of Prussia; the condition of the peasant
ranging from one of serfage, as it existed in Mecklenburg, [15] to one of
comparative freedom and comfort in parts of the southern and western
States. The sovereigns differed widely in the enlightenment or selfishness
of their rule; but, on the whole, the character of government had changed
for the better of late years; and, especially in the Protestant States,
efforts to improve the condition of the people were not wanting. Frederick
the Great had in fact created a new standard of monarchy in Germany. Forty
years earlier, Versailles, with its unfeeling splendours, its glorification
of the personal indulgence of the monarch, had been the ideal which, with a
due sense of their own inferiority, the German princes had done their best
to imitate. To be a sovereign was to cover acres of ground with state
apartments, to lavish the revenues of the country upon a troop of
mistresses and adventurers, to patronise the arts, to collect with the same
complacency the masterpieces of ancient painting that adorn the Dresden
Gallery, or an array of valuables scarcely more interesting than the chests
of treasure that were paid for them. In the ecclesiastical States, headed
by the Electorates of Mainz, Trèves, and Cologne, the affectations of a
distinctive Christian or spiritual character had long been abandoned. The
prince-bishop and canons, who were nobles appointed from some other
province, lived after the gay fashion of the time, at the expense of a land
in which they had no interest extending beyond their own lifetime. The only
feature distinguishing the ecclesiastical residence from that of one of the
minor secular princes was that the parade of state was performed by monks
in the cathedral instead of by soldiers on the drill-ground, and that even
the pretence of married life was wanting among the flaunting harpies who
frequented a celibate Court. Yet even on the Rhine and on the Moselle the
influence of the great King of Prussia had begun to make itself felt. The
intense and penetrating industry of Frederick was not within the reach of
every petty sovereign who might envy its results; but the better spirit of
the time was seen under some of the ecclesiastical princes in the
encouragement of schools, the improvement of the roads, and a retrenchment
in courtly expenditure. That deeply-seated moral disease which resulted
from centuries of priestly rule was not to be so lightly shaken off. In a
district where Nature most bountifully rewards the industry of man,
twenty-four out of every hundred of the population were monks, nuns, or
beggars. [16]

[Petty States. Free Cities. Knights.]

Two hundred petty principalities, amongst which Weimar, the home of Goethe,
stood out in the brightest relief from the level of princely routine and
self-indulgence; fifty imperial cities, in most of which the once vigorous
organism of civic life had shrivelled to the type of the English rotten
borough, did not exhaust the divisions of Germany. Several hundred Knights
of the Empire, owing no allegiance except to the Emperor, exercised, each
over a domain averaging from three to four hundred inhabitants, all the
rights of sovereignty, with the exception of the right to make war and
treaties. The districts in which this order survived were scattered over
the Catholic States of the south-west of Germany, where the knights
maintained their prerogatives by federations among themselves and by the
support of the Emperor, to whom they granted sums of money. There were
instances in which this union of the rights of the sovereign and the
landlord was turned to good account; but the knight's land was usually the
scene of such poverty and degradation that the traveller needed no guide to
inform him when he entered it. Its wretched tracks interrupted the great
lines of communication between the Rhine and further Germany; its hovels
were the refuge of all the criminals and vagabonds of the surrounding
country; for no police existed but the bailiffs of the knight, and the only
jurisdiction was that of the lawyer whom the knight brought over from the
nearest town. Nor was the disadvantage only on the side of those who were
thus governed. The knight himself, even if he cherished some traditional
reverence for the shadow of the Empire, was in the position of a man who
belongs to no real country. If his sons desired any more active career than
that of annuitants upon the family domains, they could obtain it only by
seeking employment at one or other of the greater Courts, and by
identifying themselves with the interests of a land which they entered as
strangers.

Such was in outline the condition of Germany at the moment when it was
brought into collision with the new and unknown forces of the French
Revolution. A system of small States, which in the past of Greece and Italy
had produced the finest types of energy and genius, had in Germany resulted
in the extinction of all vigorous life, and in the ascendancy of all that
was stagnant, little, and corrupt. If political disorganisation, the decay
of public spirit, and the absence of a national idea, are the signs of
impending downfall, Germany was ripe for foreign conquest. The obsolete and
dilapidated fabric of the Empire had for a century past been sustained only
by the European tradition of the Balance of Power, or by the absence of
serious attack from without. Austria once overpowered, the Empire was ready
to fall to pieces by itself: and where, among the princes or the people of
Germany, were the elements that gave hope of its renovation in any better
form of national life?




CHAPTER II.


French and Austrian armies on the Flemish frontier--Prussia enters the
war--Brunswick invades France--His Proclamation--Insurrection of Aug. 10
at Paris--Massacres of September--Character of the war--Brunswick, checked
at Valmy, retreats--The War becomes a Crusade of France--Neighbours of
France--Custine enters Mainz--Dumouriez conquers the Austrian Netherlands
--Nice and Savoy annexed--Decree of the Convention against all Governments
--Execution of Louis XVI.--War with England, followed by war with the
Mediterranean States--Condition of England--English Parties, how affected
by the Revolution--The Gironde and the Mountain--Austria recovers the
Netherlands--The Allies invade France--La Vendée--Revolutionary System of
1793--Errors of the Allies--New French Commanders and Democratic Army--
Victories of Jourdan, Hoche, and Pichegru--Prussia withdrawing from the War
--Polish Affairs--Austria abandons the Netherlands--Treaties of
Basle--France in 1795--Insurrection of 13 Vendémiaire--Constitution of
1795--The Directory--Effect of the Revolution on the spirit of Europe up
to 1795.


[Fighting on Flemish frontier, April, 1792.]

[Prussian army invades France, July, 1792. Proclamation.]

The war between France and Austria opened in April, 1792, on the Flemish
frontier. The first encounters were discreditable to the French soldiery,
who took to flight and murdered one of their generals. The discouragement
with which the nation heard of these reverses deepened into sullen
indignation against the Court, as weeks and months passed by, and the
forces lay idle on the frontier or met the enemy only in trifling
skirmishes which left both sides where they were before. If at this crisis
of the Revolution, with all the patriotism, all the bravery, all the
military genius of France burning for service, the Government conducted the
war with results scarcely distinguishable from those of a parade, the
suggestion of treason on the part of the Court was only too likely to be
entertained. The internal difficulties of the country were increasing. The
Assembly had determined to banish from France the priests who rejected the
new ecclesiastical system, and the King had placed his veto upon their
decree. He had refused to permit the formation of a camp of volunteers in
the neighbourhood of Paris. He had dismissed the popular Ministry forced
upon him by the Gironde. A tumult on the 20th of June, in which the mob
forced their way into the Tuileries, showed the nature of the attack
impending upon the monarchy if Louis continued to oppose himself to the
demands of the nation; but the lesson was lost upon the King. Louis was as
little able to nerve himself for an armed conflict with the populace as to
reconcile his conscience to the Ecclesiastical Decrees, and he surrendered
himself to a pious inertia at a moment when the alarm of foreign invasion
doubled revolutionary passion all over France. Prussia, in pursuance of a
treaty made in February, united its forces to those of Austria. Forty
thousand Prussian troops, under the Duke of Brunswick, the best of
Frederick's surviving generals, advanced along the Moselle. From Belgium
and the upper Rhine two Austrian armies converged upon the line of
invasion; and the emigrant nobles were given their place among the forces
of the Allies.

On the 25th of July the Duke of Brunswick, in the name of the Emperor and
the King of Prussia, issued a proclamation to the French people, which, but
for the difference between violent words and violent deeds, would have left
little to be complained of in the cruelties that henceforward stained the
popular cause. In this manifesto, after declaring that the Allies entered
France in order to deliver Louis from captivity, and that members of the
National Guard fighting against the invaders would be punished as rebels
against their king, the Sovereigns addressed themselves to the city of
Paris and to the representatives of the French nation:--"The city of Paris
and its inhabitants are warned to submit without delay to their King; to
set that Prince at entire liberty, and to show to him and to all the Royal
Family the inviolability and respect which the law of nature and of nations
imposes on subjects towards their Sovereigns. Their Imperial and Royal
Majesties will hold all the members of the National Assembly, of the
Municipality, and of the National Guard of Paris responsible for all events
with their heads, before military tribunals, without hope of pardon. They
further declare that, if the Tuileries be forced or insulted, or the least
violence offered to the King, the Queen, or the Royal Family, and if
provision be not at once made for their safety and liberty, they will
inflict a memorable vengeance, by delivering up the city of Paris to
military execution and total overthrow, and the rebels guilty of such
crimes to the punishment they have merited." [17]

[Insurrection August 10, 1792.]

This challenge was not necessary to determine the fate of Louis. Since the
capture of the Bastille in the first days of the Revolution the National
Government had with difficulty supported itself against the populace of the
capital; and, even before the foreigner threatened Paris with fire and
sword, Paris had learnt to look for the will of France within itself. As
the columns of Brunswick advanced across the north-eastern frontier, Danton
and the leaders of the city-democracy marshalled their army of the poor and
the desperate to overthrow that monarchy whose cause the invader had made
his own. The Republic which had floated so long in the thoughts of the
Girondins was won in a single day by the populace of Paris, amid the roar
of cannons and the flash of bayonets. On the 10th of August Danton let
loose the armed mob upon the Tuileries. Louis quitted the Palace without
giving orders to the guard either to fight or to retire; but the guard were
ignorant that their master desired them to offer no resistance, and one
hundred and sixty of the mob were shot down before an order reached the
troops to abandon the Palace. The cruelties which followed the victory of
the people indicated the fate in store for those whom the invader came to
protect. It is doubtful whether the foreign Courts would have made any
serious attempt to undo the social changes effected by the Revolution in
France; but no one supposed that those thousands of self-exiled nobles who
now returned behind the guns of Brunswick had returned in order to take
their places peacefully in the new social order. In their own imagination,
as much as in that of the people, they returned with fire and sword to
repossess themselves of rights of which they had been despoiled, and to
take vengeance upon the men who were responsible for the changes made in
France since 1789. [18] In the midst of a panic little justified by the
real military situation, Danton inflamed the nation with his own passionate
courage and resolution; he unhappily also thought it necessary to a
successful national defence that the reactionary party at Paris should be
paralysed by a terrible example. The prisons were filled with persons
suspected of hostility to the national cause, and in the first days of
September many hundreds of these unfortunate persons were massacred by
gangs of assassins paid by a committee of the Municipality. Danton did not
disguise his approval of the act. He had made up his mind that the work of
the Revolution could only be saved by striking terror into its enemies, and
by preventing the Royalists from co-operating with the invader. But the
multitudes who flocked to the standards of 1792 carried with them the
patriotism of Danton unstained by his guilt. Right or wrong in its origin,
the war was now unquestionably a just one on the part of France, a war
against a privileged class attempting to recover by force the unjust
advantages that they had not been able to maintain, a war against the
foreigner in defence of the right of the nation to deal with its own
government. Since the great religious wars there had been no cause so
rooted in the hearts, so close to the lives of those who fought for it.
Every soldier who joined the armies of France in 1792 joined of his own
free will. No conscription dragged the peasant to the frontier. Men left
their homes in order that the fruit of the poor man's labour should be his
own, in order that the children of France should inherit some better
birthright than exaction and want, in order that the late-won sense of
human right should not be swept from the earth by the arms of privilege and
caste. It was a time of high-wrought hope, of generous and pathetic
self-sacrifice; a time that left a deep and indelible impression upon those
who judged it as eye-witnesses. Years afterwards the poet Wordsworth, then
alienated from France and cold in the cause of liberty, could not recall
without tears the memories of 1792. [19]

[Brunswick checked at Valmy, Sept. 20.]

[Retreat of Brunswick.]

The defence of France rested on General Dumouriez. The fortresses of Longwy
and Verdun, covering the passage of the Meuse, had fallen after the
briefest resistance; the troops that could be collected before Brunswick's
approach were too few to meet the enemy in the open field. Happily for
France the slow advance of the Prussian general permitted Dumouriez to
occupy the difficult country of the Argonne, where, while waiting for his
reinforcements, he was able for some time to hold the invaders in check. At
length Brunswick made his way past the defile which Dumouriez had chosen
for his first line of defence; but it was only to find the French posted in
such strength on his flank that any further advance would imperil his own
army. If the advance was to be continued, Dumouriez must be dislodged.
Accordingly, on the 20th of September, Brunswick directed his artillery
against the hills of Valmy, where the French left was encamped. The
cannonade continued for some hours, but it was followed by no general
attack. The firmness of the French under Brunswick's fire made it clear
that they would not be displaced without an obstinate battle; and,
disappointed of victory, the King of Prussia began to listen to proposals
of peace sent to him by Dumouriez. [20] A week spent in negotiation served
only to strengthen the French and to aggravate the scarcity and sickness
within the German camp. Dissensions broke out between the Prussian and
Austrian commanders; a retreat was ordered; and to the astonishment of
Europe the veteran forces of Brunswick fell back before the mutinous
soldiery and unknown generals of the Revolution, powerless to delay for a
single month the evacuation of France and the restoration of the fortresses
which they had captured.

[The Convention meets. Proclaims Republic, Sept. 21.]

[The war becomes a crusade of democracy.]

In the meantime the Legislative Assembly had decreed its own dissolution in
consequence of the overthrow of the monarchy on August both, and had
ordered the election of representatives to frame a constitution for France.
The elections were held in the crisis of invasion, in the height of
national indignation against the alliance of the aristocracy with the
foreigner, and, in some districts, under the influence of men who had not
shrunk from ordering the massacres in the prisons. At such a moment a
Constitutional Royalist had scarcely more chance of election than a
detected spy from the enemy's camp. The Girondins, who had been the party
of extremes in the Legislative Assembly, were the party of moderation and
order in the Convention. By their side there were returned men whose whole
being seemed to be compounded out of the forces of conflict, men who,
sometimes without conscious depravity, carried into political and social
struggles that direct, unquestioning employment of force which has
ordinarily been reserved for war or for the diffusion of religious
doctrines. The moral differences that separated this party from the Gironde
were at once conspicuous: the political creed of the two parties appeared
at first to be much the same. Monarchy was abolished, and France declared a
Republic (Sept. 21). Office continued in the hands of the Gironde; but the
vehement, uncompromising spirit of their rivals, the so-called party of the
Mountain, quickly made itself felt in all the relations of France to
foreign Powers. The intention of conquest might still be disavowed, as it
had been five months before; but were the converts to liberty to be denied
the right of uniting themselves to the French people by their own free
will? When the armies of the Republic had swept its assailants from the
border-provinces that gave them entrance into France, were those provinces
to be handed back to a government of priests and nobles? The scruples which
had condemned all annexation of territory vanished in that orgy of
patriotism which followed the expulsion of the invader and the discovery
that the Revolution was already a power in other lands than France. The
nation that had to fight the battle of European freedom must appeal to the
spirit of freedom wherever it would answer the call: the conflict with
sovereigns must be maintained by arming their subjects against them in
every land. In this conception of the universal alliance of the nations,
the Governments with which France was not yet at war were scarcely
distinguished from those which had pronounced against her. The
frontier-lines traced by an obsolete diplomacy, the artificial guarantees
of treaties, were of little account against the living and inalienable
sovereignty of the people. To men inflamed with the passions of 1792 an
argument of international law scarcely conveyed more meaning than to Peter
the Hermit. Among the statesmen of other lands, who had no intention of
abandoning all the principles recognised as the public right of Europe, the
language now used by France could only be understood as the avowal of
indiscriminate aggression.

[The neighbors of France.]

The Revolution had displayed itself in France as a force of union as well
as of division. It had driven the nobles across the frontier; it had torn
the clergy from their altars; but it had reconciled sullen Corsica; and by
abolishing feudal rights it had made France the real fatherland of the
Teutonic peasant in Alsace and Lorraine. It was now about to prove its
attractive power in foreign lands. At the close of the last century the
nationalities of Europe were far less consolidated than they are at
present; only on the Spanish and the Swiss frontier had France a neighbour
that could be called a nation. On the north, what is now the kingdom of
Belgium was in 1792 a collection of provinces subject to the House of
Austria. The German population both of the districts west of the Rhine and
of those opposite to Alsace was parcelled out among a number of petty
principalities. Savoy, though west of the chain of the Alps and French in
speech, formed part of the kingdom of Piedmont, which was itself severed by
history and by national character from the other States of Northern Italy.
Along the entire frontier, from Dunkirk to the Maritime Alps, France
nowhere touched a strong, united, and independent people; and along this
entire frontier, except in the country opposite Alsace, the armed
proselytism of the French Revolution proved a greater force than the
influences on which the existing order of things depended. In the Low
Countries, in the Principalities of the Rhine, in Switzerland, in Savoy, in
Piedmont itself, the doctrines of the Revolution were welcomed by a more or
less numerous class, and the armies of France appeared, though but for a
moment, as the missionaries of liberty and right rather than as an invading
enemy.

[Custine enters Mainz, Oct. 20.]

No sooner had Brunswick been brought to a stand by Dumouriez at Valmy than
a French division under Custine crossed the Alsatian frontier and advanced
upon Spires, where Brunswick had left large stores of war. The garrison was
defeated in an encounter outside the town; Spires and Worms surrendered to
Custine. In the neighbouring fortress of Mainz, the key to Western Germany,
Custine's advance was watched by a republican party among the inhabitants,
from whom the French general learnt that he had only to appear before the
city to become its master. Brunswick had indeed apprehended the failure of
his invasion of France, but he had never given a thought to the defence of
Germany; and, although the King of Prussia had been warned of the
defenceless state of Mainz, no steps had been taken beyond the payment of a
sum of money for the repair of the fortifications, which money the
Archbishop expended in the purchase of a wood belonging to himself and the
erection of a timber patchwork. On news arriving of the capture of Spires,
the Archbishop fled, leaving the administration to the Dean, the
Chancellor, and the Commandant. The Chancellor made a speech, calling upon
his "beloved brethren" the citizens to defend themselves to the last
extremity, and daily announced the overthrow of Dumouriez and the
approaching entry of the Allies into Paris, until Custine's soldiers
actually came into sight. [21] Then a council of war declared the city to
be untenable; and before Custine had brought up a single siege-gun the
garrison capitulated, and the French were welcomed into Mainz by the
partisans of the Republic (Oct. 20). With the French arms came the French
organisation of liberty. A club was formed on the model of the Jacobin Club
of Paris; existing officers and distinctions of rank were abolished; and
although the mass of the inhabitants held aloof, a Republic was finally
proclaimed, and incorporated with the Republic of France.

[Dumouriez invades the Netherlands.]

[Battle of Jemappes, Nov. 6.]

The success of Custine's raid into Germany did not divert the Convention
from the design of attacking Austria in the Netherlands, which Dumouriez
had from the first pressed upon the Government. It was not three years
since the Netherlands had been in revolt against the Emperor Joseph. In its
origin the revolt was a reactionary movement of the clerical party against
Joseph's reforms; but there soon sprang up ambitions and hopes at variance
with the first impulses of the insurrection; and by the side of monks and
monopolists a national party came into existence, proclaiming the
sovereignty of the people, and imitating all the movements of the French
Revolution. During the brief suspension of Austrian rule the popular and
the reactionary parties attacked one another; and on the restoration of
Leopold's authority in 1791 the democratic leaders, with a large body of
their followers, took refuge beyond the frontier, looking forward to the
outbreak of war between Austria and France. Their partisans formed a French
connection in the interior of the country; and by some strange illusion,
the priests themselves and the close corporations which had been attacked
by Joseph supposed that their interests would be respected by Revolutionary
France. [22] Thus the ground was everywhere prepared for a French invasion.
Dumouriez crossed the frontier. The border fortresses no longer existed;
and after a single battle won by the French at Jemappes on the 6th of
November, [23] the Austrians, finding the population universally hostile,
abandoned the Netherlands without a struggle.

[Nice and Savoy annexed.]

[Decree of Dec. 15.]

The victory of Jemappes, the first pitched battle won by the Republic,
excited an outburst of revolutionary fervour in the Convention which deeply
affected the relations of France to Great Britain, hitherto a neutral
spectator of the war. A manifesto was published declaring that the French
nation offered its alliance to all peoples who wished to recover their
freedom, and charging the generals of the Republic to give their protection
to all persons who might suffer in the cause of liberty (Nov. 19). A week
later Savoy and Nice were annexed to France, the population of Savoy having
declared in favour of France and Sardinia. On the 15th of December the
Convention proclaimed that social and political revolution was henceforth
to accompany every movement of its armies on foreign soil. "In every
country that shall be occupied by the armies of the French Republic"--such
was the substance of the Decree of December 15th--"the generals shall
announce the abolition of all existing authorities; of nobility, of
serfage, of every feudal right and every monopoly; they shall proclaim the
sovereignty of the people, and convoke the inhabitants in assemblies to
form a provisional Government, to which no officer of a former Government,
no noble, nor any member of the former privileged corporations shall be
eligible. They shall place under the charge of the French Republic all
property belonging to the Sovereign or his adherents, and the property of
every civil or religious corporation. The French nation will treat as
enemies any people which, refusing liberty and equality, desires to
preserve its prince and privileged castes, or to make any accommodation
with them."

[England arms.]

[The Schelde.]

[Execution of Louis XVI., Jan. 21, 1793.]

This singular announcement of a new crusade caused the Government of Great
Britain to arm. Although the decree of the Convention related only to
States with which France was at war, the Convention had in fact formed
connections with the English revolutionary societies; and the French
Minister of Marine informed his sailors that they were about to carry fifty
thousand caps of liberty to their English brethren. No prudent statesman
would treat a mere series of threats against all existing authorities as
ground for war; but the acts of the French Government showed that it
intended to carry into effect the violent interference in the affairs of
other nations announced in its manifestoes. Its agents were stirring up
dissatisfaction in every State; and although the annexation of Savoy and
the occupation of the Netherlands might be treated as incidental to the
conflict with Austria and Sardinia, in which Great Britain had pledged
itself to neutrality, other acts of the Convention were certainly
infringements of the rights of allies of England. A series of European
treaties, oppressive according to our own ideas, but in keeping with the
ideas of that age, prohibited the navigation of the River Schelde, on which
Antwerp is situated, in order that the commerce of the North Sea might flow
exclusively into Dutch ports. On the conquest of Belgium the French
Government gave orders to Dumouriez to send a flotilla down the river, and
to declare Antwerp an open port in right of the law of nature, which
treaties cannot abrogate. Whatever the folly of commercial restraints, the
navigation of the Schelde was a question between the Antwerpers and the
Dutch, and one in which France had no direct concern. The incident, though
trivial, was viewed in England as one among many proofs of the intention of
the French to interfere with the affairs of neighbouring States at their
pleasure. In ordinary times it would not have been easy to excite much
interest in England on behalf of a Dutch monopoly; but the feeling of this
country towards the French Revolution had been converted into a passionate
hatred by the massacres of September, and by the open alliance between the
Convention and the Revolutionary societies in England itself. Pitt indeed,
whom the Parisians imagined to be their most malignant enemy, laboured
against the swelling national passion, and hoped against all hope for
peace. Not only was Pitt guiltless of the desire to add this country to the
enemies of France, but he earnestly desired to reconcile France with
Austria, in order that the Western States, whose embroilment left Eastern
Europe at the mercy of Catherine of Russia, might unite to save both Poland
and Turkey from falling into the hands of a Power whose steady aggression
threatened Europe more seriously than all the noisy and outspoken
excitement of the French Convention. Pitt, moreover, viewed with deep
disapproval the secret designs of Austria and Prussia. [24] If the French
executive would have given any assurance that the Netherlands should not be
annexed, or if the French ambassador, Chauvelin, who was connected with
English plotters, had been superseded by a trustworthy negotiator, it is
probable that peace might have been preserved. But when, on the execution
of King Louis (Jan. 21, 1793), Chauvelin was expelled from England as a
suspected alien, war became a question of days. [25]

[Holland and Mediterranean States enter the war.]

[War with England, Feb. 1st, 1793.]

Points of technical right figured in the complaints of both sides; but the
real ground of war was perfectly understood. France considered itself
entitled to advance the Revolution and the Rights of Man wherever its own
arms or popular insurrection gave it the command. England denied the right
of any Power to annul the political system of Europe at its pleasure. No
more serious, no more sufficient, ground of war ever existed between two
nations; yet the event proved that, with the highest justification for war,
the highest wisdom would yet have chosen peace. England's entry into the
war converted it from an affair of two or three campaigns into a struggle
of twenty years, resulting in more violent convulsions, more widespread
misery, and more atrocious crimes, than in all probability would have
resulted even from the temporary triumph of the revolutionary cause in
1793. But in both nations political passion welcomed impending calamity;
and the declaration of war by the Convention on February 1st only
anticipated the desire of the English people. Great Britain once committed
to the struggle, Pitt spared neither money nor intimidation in his efforts
to unite all Europe against France. Holland was included with England in
the French declaration of war. The Mediterranean States felt that the navy
of England was nearer to them than the armies of Austria and Prussia; and
before the end of the summer of 1793, Spain, Portugal, Naples, Tuscany, and
the Papal States had joined the Coalition.

[French wrongly think England inclined to revolution.]

The Jacobins of Paris had formed a wrong estimate of the political
condition of England. At the outbreak of the war they believed that England
itself was on the verge of revolution. They mistook the undoubted
discontent of a portion of the middle and lower classes, which showed
itself in the cry for parliamentary reform, for a general sentiment of
hatred towards existing institutions, like that which in France had swept
away the old order at a single blow. The Convention received the addresses
of English Radical societies, and imagined that the abuses of the
parliamentary system under George III. had alienated the whole nation. What
they had found in Belgium and in Savoy--a people thankful to receive the
Rights of Man from the soldiers of the Revolution--they expected to find
among the dissenting congregations of London and the factory-hands of
Sheffield. The singular attraction exercised by each class in England upon
the one below it, as well as the indifference of the nation generally to
all ideals, was little understood in France, although the Revolutions of
the two countries bore this contrast on their face. A month after the fall
of the Bastille, the whole system of class-privilege and monopoly had
vanished from French law; fifteen years of the English Commonwealth had
left the structure of English society what it had been at the beginning.
But political observation vanished in the delirium of 1793; and the French
only discovered, when it was too late, that in Great Britain the Revolution
had fallen upon an enemy of unparalleled stubbornness and inexhaustible
strength.

[The Whigs not democratic.]

[Political condition of England.]

In the first Assembly of the Revolution it was usual to speak of the
English as free men whom the French ought to imitate; in the Convention it
was usual to speak of them as slaves whom the French ought to deliver. The
institutions of England bore in fact a very different aspect when compared
with the absolute monarchy of the Bourbons and when compared with the
democracy of 1793. Frenchmen who had lived under the government of a Court
which made laws by edict and possessed the right to imprison by
letters-patent looked with respect upon the Parliament of England, its
trial by jury, and its freedom of the press. The men who had sent a king to
prison and confiscated the estates of a great part of the aristocracy could
only feel compassion for a land where three-fourths of the national
representatives were nominees of the Crown or of wealthy peers. Nor, in
spite of the personal sympathy of Fox with the French revolutionary
movement, was there any real affinity between the English Whig party and
that which now ruled in the Convention. The event which fixed the character
of English liberty during the eighteenth century, the Revolution of 1688,
had nothing democratic in its nature. That revolution was directed against
a system of Roman Catholic despotism; it gave political power not to the
mass of the nation, which had no desire and no capacity to exercise it, but
to a group of noble families and their retainers, who, during the reigns of
the first two Georges, added all the patronage and influence of the Crown
to their social and constitutional weight in the country. The domestic
history of England since the accession of George III. had turned chiefly
upon the obstinate struggle of this monarch to deliver himself from all
dependence upon party. The divisions of the Whigs, their jealousies, but,
above all, their real alienation from the mass of the people whose rights
they professed to defend, ultimately gave the King the victory, when, after
twenty years of errors, be found in the younger Pitt a Minister capable of
uniting the interests of the Crown with the ablest and most patriotic
liberal statesmanship. Bribes, threats, and every species of base influence
had been employed by King George to break up the great Coalition of 1783,
which united all sections of the Whigs against him under the Ministry of
Fox and North; but the real support of Pitt, whom the King placed in office
with a minority in the House of Commons, was the temper of the nation
itself, wearied with the exclusiveness, the corruption, and the
party-spirit of the Whigs, and willing to believe that a popular Minister,
even if he had entered upon power unconstitutionally, might do more for the
country than the constitutional proprietors of the rotten boroughs.

[Pitt Minister, 1783.]

[Effect of French Revolution on English Parties.]

From 1783 down to the outbreak of the French Revolution, Pitt, as a Tory
Minister confronted by a Whig Opposition, governed England on more liberal
principles than any statesman who had held power during the eighteenth
century. These years were the last of the party-system of England in its
original form. The French Revolution made an end of that old distinction in
which the Tory was known as the upholder of Crown-prerogative and the Whig
as the supporter of a constitutional oligarchy of great families. It
created that new political antagonism in which, whether under the names of
Whig and Tory, or of Liberal and Conservative, two great parties have
contended, one for a series of beneficial changes, the other for the
preservation of the existing order. The convulsions of France and the dread
of revolutionary agitation in England transformed both Pitt and the Whigs
by whom he was opposed. Pitt sacrificed his schemes of peaceful progress to
foreign war and domestic repression, and set his face against the reform of
Parliament which he had once himself proposed. The Whigs broke up into two
sections, led respectively by Burke and by Fox, the one denouncing the
violence of the Revolution, and ultimately uniting itself with Pitt; the
other friendly to the Revolution, in spite of its excesses, as the cause of
civil and religious liberty, and identifying itself, under the healthy
influence of parliamentary defeat and disappointment, with the defence of
popular rights in England and the advocacy of enlightened reform.

[Burke's "Reflections," Oct. 1790.]

[Most of the Whigs support Pitt against France.]

The obliteration of the old dividing-line in English politics may be said
to date from the day when the ancient friendship of Burke and Fox was
bitterly severed by the former in the House of Commons (May 6, 1791). The
charter of the modern Conservative party was that appeal to the nation
which Burke had already published, in the autumn of 1790, under the title
of "Reflections on the French Revolution." In this survey of the political
forces which he saw in action around him, the great Whig writer, who in
past times had so passionately defended the liberties of America and the
constitutional tradition of the English Parliament against the aggression
of George III., attacked the Revolution as a system of violence and caprice
more formidable to freedom than the tyranny of any Crown. He proved that
the politicians and societies of England who had given it their sympathy
had given their sympathy to measures and to theories opposed to every
principle of 1688. Above all, he laid bare that agency of riot and
destructiveness which, even within the first few months of the Revolution,
filled him with presentiment of the calamities about to fall upon France.
Burke's treatise was no dispassionate inquiry into the condition of a
neighbouring state: it was a denunciation of Jacobinism as fierce and as
little qualified by political charity as were the maledictions of the
Hebrew prophets upon their idolatrous neighbours; and it was intended, like
these, to excite his own countrymen against innovations among themselves.
It completely succeeded. It expressed, and it heightened, the alarm arising
among the Liberal section of the propertied class, at first well inclined
to the Revolution; and, although the Whigs of the House of Commons
pronounced in favour of Fox upon his first rupture with Burke, the tide of
public feeling, rising higher with every new outrage of the Revolution,
soon invaded the legislature, and carried the bulk of the Whig party to the
side of the Minister, leaving to Fox and his few faithful adherents the
task of maintaining an unheeded protest against the blind passions of war,
and the increasing rigour with which Pitt repressed every symptom of
popular disaffection.

[The Gironde and the Mountain in the Convention.]

[The Gironde and the Commune of Paris.]

The character of violence which Burke traced and condemned in the earliest
acts of the Revolution displayed itself in a much stronger light after the
overthrow of the Monarchy by the insurrection of August 10th. That event
was the work of men who commanded the Parisian democracy, not the work of
orators and party-leaders in the Assembly. The Girondins had not hesitated
to treat the victory as their own, by placing the great offices of State,
with one exception, in the hands of their leaders; they instantly found
that the real sovereignty lay elsewhere. The Council of the Commune, or
Municipality, of Paris, whose members had seized their post at the moment
of the insurrection, was the only administrative body that possessed the
power to enforce its commands; in the Ministries of State one will alone
made itself felt, that of Danton, whom the Girondins had unwillingly
admitted to office along with themselves. The massacres of September threw
into full light the powerlessness of the expiring Assembly. For five
successive days it was unable to check the massacres; it was unable to
bring to justice the men who had planned them, and who called upon the rest
of France to follow their example. With the meeting of the Convention,
however, the Girondins, who now regarded themselves as the legitimate
government, and forgot that they owed office to an insurrection, expected
to reduce the capital to submission. They commanded an overwhelming
majority in the new chamber; they were supported by the middle class in all
the great cities of France. The party of the Mountain embraced at first
only the deputies of Paris, and a group of determined men who admitted no
criticism on the measures which the democracy of Paris had thought
necessary for the Revolution. In the Convention they were the assailed, not
the assailants. Without waiting to secure themselves by an armed force, the
orators of the Gironde attempted to crush both the Municipality and the
deputies who ruled at the Clubs. They reproached the Municipality with the
murders of September; they accused Robespierre of aiming at the
Dictatorship. It was under the pressure of these attacks that the party of
the Mountain gathered its strength within the Convention, and that the
populace of Paris transferred to the Gironde the passionate hatred which it
had hitherto borne to the King and the aristocracy. The gulf that lay
between the people and those who had imagined themselves to be its leaders
burst into view. The Girondins saw with dismay that the thousands of hungry
workmen whose victory had placed them in power had fought for something
more tangible than Republican phrases from Tacitus and Plutarch. On one
side was a handful of orators and writers, steeped in the rhetoric and the
commonplace of ancient Rome, and totally strange to the real duties of
government; on the other side the populace of Paris, such as centuries of
despotism, privilege, and priestcraft had made it: sanguinary, unjust,
vindictive; convulsed since the outbreak of the Revolution with every
passion that sways men in the mass; taught no conception of progress but
the overthrow of authority, and acquainted with no title to power but that
which was bestowed by itself. If the Girondins were to remain in power,
they could do so only by drawing an army from the departments, or by
identifying themselves with the multitude. They declined to take either
course. Their audience was in the Assembly alone; their support in the
distant provinces. Paris, daily more violent, listened to men of another
stamp. The Municipality defied the Government; the Mountain answered the
threats and invectives of the majority in the Assembly by displays of
popular menace and tumult. In the eyes of the common people, who after so
many changes of government found themselves more famished and more
destitute than ever, the Gironde was now but the last of a succession of
tyrannies; its statesmen but impostors who stood between the people and the
enjoyment of their liberty.

Among the leaders of the Mountain, Danton aimed at the creation of a
central Revolutionary Government, armed with absolute powers for the
prosecution of the war; and he attacked the Girondins only when they
themselves had rejected his support. Robespierre, himself the author of
little beyond destruction, was the idol of those whom Rousseau's writings
had filled with the idea of a direct exercise of sovereignty by the people.
It was in the trial of the King that the Gironde first confessed its
submission to the democracy of Paris. The Girondins in their hearts desired
to save the King; they voted for his death with the hope of maintaining
their influence in Paris, and of clearing themselves from the charge of
lukewarmness in the cause of the Revolution. But the sacrifice was as vain
as it was dishonourable. The populace and the party of the Mountain took
the act in its true character, as an acknowledgment of their own victory. A
series of measures was brought forward providing for the poorer classes at
the expense of the wealthy. The Gironde, now forced to become the defenders
of property, encountered the fatal charge of deserting the cause of the
people; and from this time nothing but successful foreign warfare could
have saved their party from ruin.

[Defeat and treason of Dumouriez, March, 1793.]

Instead of success came inaction, disaster, and treason. The army of
Flanders lay idle during January and February for want of provisions and
materials of war; and no sooner had Dumouriez opened the campaign against
Holland than he was recalled by intelligence that the Austrians had fallen
upon his lieutenant, Miranda, at Maestricht, and driven the French army
before them. Dumouriez returned, in order to fight a pitched battle before
Brussels. He attacked the Austrians at Neerwinden (March 18), and suffered
a repulse inconsiderable in itself, but sufficient to demoralise an army
composed in great part of recruits and National Guards. [26] His defeat
laid Flanders open to the Austrians; but Dumouriez intended that it should
inflict upon the Republic a far heavier blow. Since the execution of the
King, he had been at open enmity with the Jacobins. He now proposed to the
Austrian commander to unite with him in an attack upon the Convention, and
in re-establishing monarchy in France. The first pledge of Dumouriez's
treason was the surrender of three commissioners sent by the Convention to
his camp; the second was to have been the surrender of the fortress of
Condé. But Dumouriez had overrated his influence with the army. Plainer
minds than his own knew how to deal with a general who intrigues with the
foreigner. Dumouriez's orders were disregarded; his movements watched; and
he fled to the Austrian lines under the fire of his own soldiers. About
thirty officers and eight hundred men passed with him to the enemy.

[Defeats on the North and East. Revolt of La Vendée, March, 1793.]

[The Commune crushes the Gironde, June 2.]

The defeat and treason of Dumouriez brought the army of Austria over the
northern frontier. Almost at the same moment Custine was overpowered in the
Palatinate; and the conquests of the previous autumn, with the exception of
Mainz, were lost as rapidly as they had been won. Custine fell back upon
the lines of Weissenburg, leaving the defence of Mainz to a garrison of
17,000 men, which, alone among the Republican armies, now maintained its
reputation. In France itself civil war broke out. The peasants of La
Vendée, a district destitute of large towns, and scarcely touched either by
the evils which had produced the Revolution or by the hopes which animated
the rest of France, had seen with anger the expulsion of the parish priests
who refused to take the oath to the Constitution. A levy of 300,000 men,
which was ordered by the Convention in February, 1793, threw into revolt
the simple Vendeans, who cared for nothing outside their own parishes, and
preferred to fight against their countrymen rather than to quit their
homes. The priests and the Royalists fanned these village outbreaks into a
religious war of the most serious character. Though poorly armed, and
accustomed to return to their homes as soon as fighting was over, the
Vendean peasantry proved themselves a formidable soldiery in the moment of
attack, and cut to pieces the half-disciplined battalions which the
Government sent against them. On the north, France was now assailed by the
English as well as by the Austrians. The Allies laid siege to Condé and
Valenciennes, and drove the French army back in disorder at Famars. Each
defeat was a blow dealt to the Government of the Gironde at Paris. With
foreign and civil war adding disaster to disaster, with the general to whom
the Gironde had entrusted the defence of the Republic openly betraying it
to its enemies, the fury of the capital was easily excited against the
party charged with all the misfortunes of France. A threatening movement of
the middle classes in resistance to a forced loan precipitated the
struggle. The Girondins were accused of arresting the armies of the
Republic in the midst of their conquests, of throwing the frontier open to
the foreigner, and of kindling the civil war of La Vendée. On the 31st of
May a raging mob invaded the Convention. Two days later the representatives
of France were surrounded by the armed forces of the Commune; the
twenty-four leading members of the Gironde were placed under arrest, and
the victory of the Mountain was completed. [27]

[Civil War. The Committee of Public Safety.]

The situation of France, which was serious before, now became desperate;
for the Girondins, escaping from their arrest, called the departments to
arms against Paris. Normandy, Bordeaux, Marseilles, Lyons, rose in
insurrection against the tyranny of the Mountain, and the Royalists of the
south and west threw themselves into a civil war which they hoped to turn
to their own advantage. But a form of government had now arisen in France
well fitted to cope with extraordinary perils. It was a form of government
in which there was little trace of the constitutional tendencies of 1789,
one that had come into being as the stress of conflict threw into the
background the earlier hopes and efforts of the Revolution. In the two
earlier Assemblies it had been a fixed principle that the representatives
of the people were to control the Government, but were not to assume
executive powers themselves. After the overthrow of Monarchy on the 10th
August, the Ministers, though still nominally possessed of powers distinct
from the representative body, began to be checked by Committees of the
Convention appointed for various branches of the public service; and in
March, 1793, in order to meet the increasing difficulties of the war, a
Committee of Public Safety was appointed, charged with the duty of
exercising a general surveillance over the administration. In this
Committee, however, as in all the others, the Gironde were in the majority;
and the twenty-four members who composed it were too numerous a body to act
with effect. The growing ascendancy of the Mountain produced that
concentration of force which the times required. The Committee was reduced
in April to nine members, and in this form it ultimately became the supreme
central power. It was not until after the revolt of Lyons that the
Committee, exchanging Danton's influence for that of Robespierre, adopted
the principle of Terror which has made the memory of their rule one of the
most sinister in history. Their authority steadily increased. The members
divided among themselves the great branches of government. One directed the
army, another the navy, another foreign affairs; the signature of three
members practically gave to any measure the force of law, for the
Convention accepted and voted their reports as a matter of course.

[Commissioners of the Convention]

Whilst the Committee gave orders as the supreme executive, eighty of the
most energetic of the Mountain spread themselves over France, in parties of
two and three, with the title of Commissioners of the Convention, and with
powers over-riding those of all the local authorities. They were originally
appointed for the purpose of hastening on the levy ordered by the
Convention in March, but their powers were gradually extended over the
whole range of administration. Their will was absolute, their authority
supreme. Where the councillors of the Departments or the municipal officers
were good Jacobins, the Commissioners availed themselves of local
machinery; where they suspected their principles, they sent them to the
scaffold, and enforced their own orders by whatever means were readiest.
They censured and dismissed the generals; one of them even directed the
movements of a fleet at sea. What was lost by waste and confusion and by
the interference of the Commissioners in military movements was more than
counterbalanced by the vigour which they threw into all the preparations of
war, and by the unity of purpose which, at the price of unsparing
bloodshed, they communicated to every group where Frenchmen met together.

[Local revolutionary system of 1793]

But no individual energy could have sustained these dictatorships without
the support of a popular organisation. All over France a system of
revolutionary government sprang up, which superseded all existing
institutions just as the authority of the Commissioners of the Convention
superseded all existing local powers. The local revolutionary
administration consisted of a Committee, a Club, and a Tribunal. [28] In
each of 21,000 communes a committee of twelve was elected by the people,
and entrusted by the Convention, as the Terror gained ground, with
boundless powers of arrest and imprisonment. Popular excitement was
sustained by clubs, where the peasants and labourers assembled at the close
of their day's work, and applauded the victories or denounced the enemies
of the Revolution. A Tribunal with swift procedure and powers of life and
death sat in each of the largest towns, and judged the prisoners who were
sent to it by the committees of the neighbouring district. Such was the
government of 1793--an executive of uncontrolled power drawn from the
members of a single Assembly, and itself brought into immediate contact
with the poorest of the people in their assemblies and clubs. The balance
of interests which creates a constitutional system, the security of life,
liberty, and property, which is the essence of every recognised social
order, did not now exist in France. One public purpose, the defence of the
Revolution, became the law before which all others lost their force.
Treating all France like a town in a state of siege, the Government took
upon itself the duty of providing support for the poorest classes by
enactments controlling the sale and possession of the necessaries of life.

[Law of the Maximum]

The price of corn and other necessaries was fixed; and, when the traders
and producers consequently ceased to bring their goods to market, the
Commissioners of the Convention were empowered to make requisition of a
certain quantity of corn for every acre of ground. Property was thus placed
at the disposal of the men who already exercised absolute political power.
"The state of France," said Burke, "is perfectly simple. It consists of but
two descriptions, the oppressors and the oppressed." It is in vain that the
attempt has been made to extenuate the atrocious and senseless cruelties of
this time by extolling the great legislative projects of the Convention, or
pleading the dire necessity of a land attacked on every side by the
foreigner, and rent with civil war. The more that is known of the Reign of
Terror, the more hateful, the meaner and more disgusting is the picture
unveiled. France was saved not by the brutalities, but by the energy, of
the faction that ruled it. It is scarcely too much to say that the cause of
European progress would have been less injured by the military overthrow of
the Republic, by the severance of the border provinces from France and the
restoration of some shadow of the ancient _régime_, than by the traditions
of horror which for the next fifty years were inseparably associated in
men's minds with the victory of the people over established power.

[French disasters, March-Sept., 1793.]

The Revolutionary organisation did not reach its full vigour till the
autumn of 1793, when the prospects of France were at their worst. Custine,
who was brought up from Alsace to take command of the Army of the North,
found it so demoralised that he was unable to attempt the relief of the
fortresses which were now besieged by the Allies. Condé surrendered to the
Austrians on the 10th of July; Valenciennes capitulated to the Duke of York
a fortnight later. In the east the fortune of war was no better. An attack
made on the Prussian army besieging Mainz totally failed; and on the 23rd
of July this great fortress, which had been besieged since the middle of
April, passed back into the hands of the Germans. On every side the
Republic seemed to be sinking before its enemies. Its frontier defences had
fallen before the victorious Austrians and English; Brunswick was ready to
advance upon Alsace from conquered Mainz; Lyons and Toulon were in revolt;
La Vendée had proved the grave of the forces sent to subdue it. It was in
this crisis of misfortune that the Convention placed the entire male
population of France between the ages of eighteen and twenty-five at the
disposal of the Government, and turned the whole country into one great
camp and arsenal of war. Nor was there wanting a mind equal to the task of
giving order to this vast material. The appointment of Carnot, an officer
of engineers, to a seat on the Committee of Public Safety placed the
military administration of France in the hands of a man who, as an
organiser, if not as a strategist, was soon to prove himself without equal
in Europe.

[The Allies seek each their separate ends.]

Nevertheless, it was to the dissensions and to the bad policy of the Allies
more than to the energy of its own Government that France owed its safety.
The object for which the Allies professed to be carrying on the war, the
establishment of a pacific Government in France, was subordinated to
schemes of aggrandisement, known as the acquisition of just indemnities.
While Prussia, bent chiefly on preventing the Emperor from gaining Bavaria
in exchange for Belgium, kept its own army inactive on the Rhine, [29]
Austria, with the full approval of Pitt's Cabinet, claimed annexations in
Northern France, as well as Alsace, and treated the conquered town of Condé
as Austrian territory. [30] Henceforward all the operations of the northern
army were directed to the acquisition of frontier territory, not to the
pursuit and overthrow of the Republican forces. The war was openly
converted from a war of defence into a war of spoliation. It was a change
which mocked the disinterested professions with which the Allies had taken
up arms; in its military results it was absolutely ruinous. In face of the
immense levies which promised the French certain victory in a long war, the
only hope for the Allies lay in a rapid march to Paris; they preferred the
extreme of division and delay. No sooner had the advance of their united
armies driven Custine from his stronghold at Famars, than the English
commander led off his forces to besiege Dunkirk, while the Austrians, under
Prince Coburg, proceeded to invest Cambray and Le Quesnoy. The line of the
invaders thus extended from the Channel to Brunswick's posts at Landau, on
the border of Alsace; the main armies were out of reach of one another, and
their strength was diminished by the corps detached to keep up their
communications. The French held the inner circle; and the advantage which
this gave them was well understood by Carnot, who now inspired the measures
of the Committee. In steadiness and precision the French recruits were no
match for the trained armies of Germany; but the supply of them was
inexhaustible, and Carnot knew that when they were thrown in sufficient
masses upon the enemy their courage and enthusiasm would make amends for
their inexperience. The successes of the Allies, unbroken from February to
August, now began to alternate with defeats; the flood of invasion was
first slowly and obstinately repelled, then swept away before a victorious
advance.

[York driven from Dunkirk Sept. 8.]

It was on the British commander that the first blow was struck. The forces
that could be detached from the French Northern army were not sufficient to
drive York from before Dunkirk; but on the Moselle there were troops
engaged in watching an enemy who was not likely to advance; and the
Committee did not hesitate to leave this side of France open to the
Prussians in order to deal a decisive stroke in the north. Before the
movement was noticed by the enemy, Carnot had transported 30,000 men from
Metz to the English Channel; and in the first week of September the German
corps covering York was assailed by General Houchard with numbers double
its own. The Germans were driven back upon Dunkirk; York only saved his own
army from destruction by hastily raising the siege and abandoning his heavy
artillery. The victory of the French, however, was ill followed up.
Houchard was sent before the Revolutionary Tribunal, and he paid with his
life for his mistakes. Custine had already perished, unjustly condemned for
the loss of Mainz and Valenciennes.

[Commands given to men of the people.]

[Jourdan's victory at Wattignies, Oct 15.]

It was no unimportant change for France when the successors of Custine and
Houchard received their commands from the Committee of Public Safety. The
levelling principle of the Reign of Terror left its effect on France
through its operation in the army, and through this almost alone. Its
executions produced only horror and reaction; its confiscations were soon
reversed; but the creation of a thoroughly democratic army, the work of the
men who overthrew the Gironde, gave the most powerful and abiding impulse
to social equality in France. The first generals of the Revolution had been
officers of the old army, men, with a few exceptions, of noble birth, who,
like Custine, had enrolled themselves on the popular side when most of
their companions quitted the country. These generals were connected with
the politicians of the Gironde, and were involved in its fall. The victory
of the Mountain brought men of another type into command. Almost all the
leaders appointed by the Committee of Public Safety were soldiers who had
served in the ranks. In the levies of 1792 and 1793 the officers of the
newly-formed battalions were chosen by the recruits themselves. Patriotism,
energy of character, acquaintance with warfare, instantly brought men into
prominence. Soldiers of the old army, like Massena, who had reached middle
life with their knapsacks on their backs; lawyers, like the Breton Moreau;
waiters at inns, like Murat, found themselves at the head of their
battalions, and knew that Carnot was ever watching for genius and ability
to call it to the highest commands. With a million of men under arms, there
were many in whom great natural gifts supplied the want of professional
training. It was also inevitable that at the outset command should
sometimes fall into the hands of mere busy politicians; but the character
of the generals steadily rose as the Committee gained the ascendancy over a
knot of demagogues who held the War Ministry during the summer of 1793; and
by the end of the year there was scarcely one officer in high command who
had not proved himself worthy of his post. In the investigation into
Houchard's conduct at Dunkirk, Carnot learnt that the victory had in fact
been won by Jourdan, one of the generals of division. Jourdan had begun
life as a common soldier fifteen years before. Discharged at the end of the
American War, he had set up a draper's shop in Limoges, his native town. He
joined the army a second time on the outbreak of the Revolutionary War, and
the men of his battalion elected him captain. His ability was noticed; he
was made successively general of brigade and general of division; and, upon
the dismissal of Houchard, Carnot summoned him to the command of the Army
of the North. The Austrians were now engaged in the investment of Maubeuge.
On the 15th of October Jourdan attacked and defeated their covering army at
Wattignies. His victory forced the Austrians to raise the siege, and
brought the campaign to an end for the winter.

[Lyons, Toulon, La Vendée, conquered, Oct.-Dec. 1793.]

Thus successful on the northern frontier, the Republic carried on war
against its internal enemies without pause and without mercy. Lyons
surrendered in October; its citizens were slaughtered by hundreds in cold
blood. Toulon had thrown itself into the hands of the English, and
proclaimed King Louis XVII. It was besieged by land; but the operations
produced no effect until Napoleon Bonaparte, captain of artillery, planned
the capture of a ridge from which the cannon of the besiegers would command
the English fleet in the harbour. Hood, the British admiral, now found his
position hopeless. He took several thousands of the inhabitants on board
his ships, and put out to sea, blowing up the French ships which he left in
the harbour. Hood had received the fleet from the Royalists in trust for
their King; its destruction gave England command of the Mediterranean and
freed Naples from fear of attack; and Hood thought too little of the
consequences which his act would bring down upon those of the inhabitants
of Toulon whom he left behind. [31]

The horrors that followed the entry of the Republican army into the city
did not prevent Pitt from including among the subjects of congratulation in
the King's Speech of 1794 "the circumstances attending the evacuation of
Toulon." It was perhaps fortunate for the Royalists in other parts of
France that they failed to receive the assistance of England. Help was
promised to the Vendeans, but it arrived too late. The appearance of Kleber
at the head of the army which had defended Mainz had already turned the
scale. Brave as they were, the Vendeans could not long resist trained
armies. The war of pitched battles ended on the Loire with the year 1793.
It was succeeded by a war of merciless and systematic destruction on the
one side, and of ambush and surprises on the other.

[Prussia withdrawing from the war on account of Polish affairs.]

At home the foes of the Republic were sinking; its invaders were too much
at discord with one another to threaten it any longer with serious danger.
Prussia was in fact withdrawing from the war. It has been seen that when
King Frederick William and the Emperor concerted the autumn campaign of
1792, the understanding was formed that Prussia, in return for its efforts
against France, should be allowed to seize part of western Poland, if the
Empress Catherine should give her consent. With this prospect before it,
the thoughts of the Prussian Government had been from the first busied more
with Poland, where it hoped to enter into possession, than with France,
where it had only to fight Austria's battles. Negotiations on the Polish
question had been actively carried on between Berlin and St. Petersburg
during the first months of the war; and in January, 1793, the Empress
Catherine had concluded a Treaty of Partition with King Frederick William,
in virtue of which a Prussian army under General Möllendorf immediately
entered western Poland. It was thought good policy to keep the terms of
this treaty secret from Austria, as it granted a much larger portion of
Poland to Prussia than Austria was willing that it should receive. Two
months passed before the Austrian Sovereign learnt how he had been treated
by his ally. He then denounced the treaty, and assumed so threatening an
attitude that the Prussians thought it necessary to fortify the territory
that they had seized. [32] The Ministers who had been outwitted by the
Court of Berlin were dismissed; Baron Thugut, who from the first had
prophesied nothing but evil of the Prussian alliance, was called to power.
The history of this statesman, who for the next eight years directed the
war-policy of Austria, and filled a part in Europe subordinate only to
those of Pitt and Bonaparte, has until a recent date been drawn chiefly
from the representations of his enemies. Humbly born, scornful and
inaccessible, Thugut was detested by the Viennese aristocracy; the French
emigrants hated and maligned him on account of his indifference to their
cause; the public opinion of Austria held him responsible for unparalleled
military disasters; Prussian generals and ambassadors, whose reports have
formed the basis of Prussian histories, pictured him as a Satanic
antagonist. It was long believed of Thugut that while ambassador at
Constantinople he had sold the Austrian cypher to the French; that in 1794
he prevented his master's armies from winning victories because he had
speculated in the French funds; and that in 1799 he occasioned the murder
of the French envoys at Rastadt, in order to recover documents
incriminating himself. Better sources of information are now opened, and a
statesman, jealous, bitter, and over-reaching, but not without great
qualities of character, stands in the place of the legendary criminal. It
is indeed clear that Thugut's hatred of Prussia amounted almost to mania;
it is also clear that his designs of aggression, formed in the school of
the Emperor Joseph, were fatally in conflict with the defensive principles
which Europe ought to have opposed to the aggressions of France. Evidence
exists that during the eight years of Thugut's ministry he entertained,
together or successively, projects for the annexation of French Flanders,
Bavaria, Alsace, part of Poland, Venice and Dalmatia, Salzburg, the Papal
Legations, the Republic of Genoa, Piedmont, and Bosnia; and to this list
Tuscany and Savoy ought probably to be added. But the charges brought
against Thugut of underhand dealings with France, and of the willing
abandonment of German interests in return for compensation to Austria in
Italy, rest on insufficient ground. Though, like every other politician at
Vienna and Berlin, he viewed German affairs not as a matter of nationality
but in subordination to the general interests of his own Court, Thugut
appears to have been, of all the Continental statesmen of that time, the
steadiest enemy of French aggression, and to have offered the longest
resistance to a peace that was purchased by the cession of German soil.
[33]

[Victories of Hoche and Pichegru at Wörth and Weissenburg, Dec. 23, 26.]

Nevertheless, from the moment when Thugut was called to power the alliance
between Austria and Prussia was doomed. Others might perhaps have averted a
rupture; Thugut made no attempt to do so. The siege of Mainz was the last
serious operation of war which the Prussian army performed. The mission of
an Austrian envoy, Lehrbach, to the Prussian camp in August, 1793, and his
negotiations on the Polish and the Bavarian questions, only widened the
breach between the two Courts. It was known that the Austrians were
encouraging the Polish Diet to refuse the cession of the provinces occupied
by Prussia; and the advisers of King Frederick William in consequence
recommended him to quit the Rhine, and to place himself at the head of an
army in Poland. At the headquarters of the Allies, between Mainz and the
Alsatian frontier, all was dissension and intrigue. The impetuosity of the
Austrian general, Wurmser, who advanced upon Alsace without consulting the
King, was construed as a studied insult. On the 29th of September, after
informing the allied Courts that Prussia would henceforth take only a
subordinate part in the war, King Frederick William quitted the army,
leaving orders with the Duke of Brunswick to fight no great battle. It was
in vain that Wurmser stormed the lines of Weissenburg (Oct. 13), and
victoriously pushed forward into Alsace. The hopes of a Royalist
insurrection in Strasburg proved illusory. The German sympathies shown by a
portion of the upper and middle classes of Alsace only brought down upon
them a bloody vengeance at the hands of St. Just, commissioner of the
Convention. The peasantry, partly from hatred of the feudal burdens of the
old _régime_, partly from fear of St. Just and the guillotine, thronged to
the French camp. In place of the beaten generals came Hoche and Pichegru:
Hoche, lately a common soldier in the Guards, earning by a humble industry
little sums for the purchase of books, now, at the age of twenty-six, a
commander more than a match for the wrangling veterans of Germany;
Pichegru, six years older, also a man sprung from the people, once a
teacher in the military school of Brienne, afterwards a private of
artillery in the American War. A series of harassing encounters took place
during December. At length, with St. Just cheering on the Alsatian peasants
in the hottest of the fire, these generals victoriously carried the
Austrian positions at Wörth and at Weissenburg (Dec. 23, 26). The Austrian
commander declared his army to be utterly ruined; and Brunswick, who had
abstained from rendering his ally any real assistance, found himself a
second time back upon the Rhine. [34]

[Pitt's bargain with Prussia, April, 1794.]

[Revolt of Kosciusko. April, 1794.]

[Möllendorf refuses to help in Flanders.]

The virtual retirement of Prussia from the Coalition was no secret to the
French Government: amongst the Allies it was viewed in various lights. The
Empress Catherine, who had counted on seeing her troublesome Prussian
friend engaged with her detested French enemy, taunted the King of Prussia
with the loss of his personal honour. Austria, conscious of the antagonism
between Prussian and Austrian interests and of the hollow character of the
Coalition, would concede nothing to keep Prussia in arms. Pitt alone was
willing to make a sacrifice, in order to prevent the rupture of the
alliance. The King of Prussia was ready to continue the struggle with
France if his expenses were paid, but not otherwise. Accordingly, after
Austria had refused to contribute the small sum which Pitt asked, a bargain
was struck between Lord Malmesbury and the Prussian Minister Haugwitz, by
which Great Britain undertook to furnish a subsidy, provided that 60,000
Prussian troops, under General Möllendorf, were placed at the disposal of
the Maritime Powers. [35] It was Pitt's intention that the troops which he
subsidised should be massed with Austrian and English forces for the
defence of Belgium: the Prussian Ministry, availing themselves of an
ambiguous expression in the treaty, insisted on keeping them inactive upon
the Upper Rhine. Möllendorf wished to guard Mainz: other men of influence
longed to abandon the alliance with Austria, and to employ the whole of
Prussia's force in Poland. At the moment when Haugwitz was contracting to
place Möllendorf's army at Pitt's disposal, Poland had risen in revolt
under Kosciusko, and the Russian garrison which occupied Warsaw had been
overpowered and cut to pieces. Catherine called upon the King of Prussia
for assistance; but it was not so much a desire to rescue the Empress from
a momentary danger that excited the Prussian Cabinet as the belief that her
vengeance would now make an absolute end of what remained of the Polish
kingdom. The prey was doomed; the wisdom of Prussia was to be the first to
seize and drag it to the ground. So large a prospect offered itself to the
Power that should crush Poland during the brief paralysis of the Russian
arms, that, on the first news of the outbreak, the King's advisers urged
him instantly to make peace with France and to throw his whole strength
into the Polish struggle. Frederick William could not reconcile himself to
making peace with the Jacobins; but he ordered an army to march upon
Warsaw, and shortly afterwards placed himself at its head (May, 1794). When
the King, who was the only politician in Prussia who took an interest in
the French war, thus publicly acknowledged the higher importance of the
Polish campaign, his generals upon the Rhine made it their only object to
do nothing which it was possible to leave undone without actually
forfeiting the British subsidy. Instead of fighting, Möllendorf spent his
time in urging other people to make peace. It was in vain that Malmesbury
argued that the very object of Pitt's bargain was to keep the French out of
the Netherlands: Möllendorf had made up his mind that the army should not
be committed to the orders of Pitt and the Austrians. He continued in the
Palatinate, alleging that any movement of the Prussian army towards the
north would give the French admittance to southern Germany. Pitt's hope of
defending the Netherlands now rested on the energy and on the sincerity of
the Austrian Cabinet, and on this alone.

[Battles on the Sambre, May-June, 1794.]

After breaking up from winter quarters in the spring of 1794, the Austrian
and English allied forces had successfully laid siege to Landrecies, and
defeated the enemy in its neighbourhood. [36] Their advance, however, was
checked by a movement of the French Army of the North, now commanded by
Pichegru, towards the Flemish coast. York and the English troops were
exposed to the attack, and suffered a defeat at Turcoing. The decision of
the campaign lay, however, not in the west of Flanders, but at the other
end of the Allies' position, at Charleroi on the Sambre, where a French
victory would either force the Austrians to fall back eastwards, leaving
York to his fate, or sever their communications with Germany. This became
evident to the French Government; and in May the Commissioners of the
Convention forced the generals on the Sambre to fight a series of battles,
in which the French repeatedly succeeded in crossing the Sambre, and were
repeatedly driven back again. The fate of the Netherlands depended,
however, on something beside victory or defeat on the Sambre. The Emperor
had come with Baron Thugut to Belgium in the hope of imparting greater
unity and energy to the allied forces, but his presence proved useless.
Among the Austrian generals and diplomatists there were several who desired
to withdraw from the contest in the Netherlands, and to follow the example
of Prussia in Poland. The action of the army was paralysed by intrigues.
"Every one," wrote Thugut, "does exactly as he pleases: there is absolute
anarchy and disorder." [37] At the beginning of June the Emperor quitted
the army; the combats on the Sambre were taken up by Jourdan and 50,000
fresh troops brought from the army of the Moselle; and on the 26th of June
the French defeated Coburg at Fleurus, as he advanced to the relief of
Charleroi, unconscious that Charleroi had surrendered on the day before.
Even now the defence of Belgium was not hopeless; but after one council of
war had declared in favour of fighting, a second determined on a retreat.
It was in vain that the representatives of England appealed to the good
faith and military honour of Austria. Namur and Louvain were abandoned; the
French pressed onwards; and before the end of July the Austrian army had
fallen back behind the Meuse. York, forsaken by the allies, retired
northwards before the superior forces of Pichegru, who entered Antwerp and
made himself master of the whole of the Netherlands up to the Dutch
frontier. [38]

[England disappointed by the Allies.]

Such was the result of Great Britain's well-meant effort to assist the two
great military Powers to defend Europe against the Revolution. To the aim
of the English Minister, the defence of existing rights against democratic
aggression, most of the public men alike of Austria and Prussia were now
absolutely indifferent. They were willing to let the French seize and
revolutionise any territory they pleased, provided that they themselves
obtained their equivalent in Poland. England was in fact in the position of
a man who sets out to attack a highway robber, and offers each of his arms
to a pickpocket. The motives and conduct of these politicians were justly
enough described by the English statesmen and generals who were brought
into closest contact with them. In the councils of Prussia, Malmesbury
declared that he could find no quality but "great and shabby art and
cunning; ill-will, jealousy, and every sort of dirty passion." From the
head quarters of Möllendorf he wrote to a member of Pitt's Cabinet: "Here I
have to do with knavery and dotage.... If we listened only to our feelings,
it would be difficult to keep any measure with Prussia. We must consider it
an alliance with the Algerians, whom it is no disgrace to pay, or any
impeachment of good sense to be cheated by." To the Austrian commander the
Duke of York addressed himself with royal plainness: "Your Serene Highness,
the British nation, whose public opinion is not to be despised, will
consider that it has been bought and sold." [39]

[French reach the Rhine, Oct., 1794.]

[Pichegru conquers Holland, Dec., 1794.]

The sorry concert lasted for a few months longer. Coburg, the Austrian
commander, was dismissed at the peremptory demand of Great Britain; his
successor, Clerfayt, after losing a battle on the Ourthe, offered no
further resistance to the advance of the Republican army, and the campaign
ended in the capture of Cologne by the French, and the disappearance of the
Austrians behind the Rhine. The Prussian subsidies granted by England
resulted in some useless engagements between Möllendorf's corps in the
Palatinate and a French army double its size, followed by the retreat of
the Prussians into Mainz. It only remained for Great Britain to attempt to
keep the French out of Holland. The defence of the Dutch, after everything
south of the river Waal had been lost, Pitt determined to entrust to abler
hands than those of the Duke of York; but the presence of one high-born
blunderer more or less made little difference in a series of operations
conceived in indifference and perversity. Clerfayt would not, or could not,
obey the Emperor's orders and succour his ally. City after city in Holland
welcomed the French. The very elements seemed to declare for the Republic.
Pichegru's army marched in safety over the frozen rivers; and, when the
conquest of the land was completed, his cavalry crowned the campaign by the
capture of the Dutch fleet in the midst of the ice-bound waters of the
Texel. The British regiments, cut off from home, made their way eastward
through the snow towards the Hanoverian frontier, in a state of prostrate
misery which is compared by an eye-witness of both events to that of the
French on their retreat in 1813 after the battle of Leipzig. [40]

[Treaties of Basle with Prussia, April 5, and Spain, July 22, 1795.]

The first act of the struggle between France and the Monarchies of Europe
was concluded. The result of three years of war was that Belgium, Nice, and
Savoy had been added to the territory of the Republic, and that French
armies were in possession of Holland, and the whole of Germany west of the
Rhine. In Spain and in Piedmont the mountain-passes and some extent of
country had been won. Even on the seas, in spite of the destruction of the
fleet at Toulon, and of a heavy defeat by Lord Howe off Ushant on the 1st
of June, 1794, the strength of France was still formidable; and the losses
which she inflicted on the commercial marine of her enemies exceeded those
which she herself sustained. England, which had captured most of the French
West Indian Islands, was the only Power that had wrested anything from the
Republic. The dream of suppressing the Revolution by force of arms had
vanished away; and the States which had entered upon the contest in levity,
in fanaticism, or at the bidding of more powerful allies, found it
necessary to make peace upon such terms as they could obtain. Holland, in
which a strong Republican party had always maintained connection with
France, abolished the rule of its Stadtholder, and placed its resources at
the disposal of its conquerors. Sardinia entered upon abortive
negotiations. Spain, in return for peace, ceded to the Republic the Spanish
half of St. Domingo (July 22, 1795). Prussia concluded a Treaty at Basle
(April 5), which marked and perpetuated the division of Germany by
providing that, although the Empire as a body was still at war with France,
the benefit of Prussia's neutrality should extend to all German States
north of a certain line. A secret article stipulated that, upon the
conclusion of a general peace, if the Empire should cede to France the
principalities west of the Rhine, Prussia should cede its own territory
lying in that district, and receive compensation elsewhere. [41]

[Austria and England continue the war, 1795.]

Humiliating such a peace certainly was; yet it would probably have been the
happiest issue for Europe had every Power been forced to accept its
conditions. The territory gained by France was not much more than the very
principle of the Balance of Power would have entitled it to demand, at a
moment when Russia, victorious over the Polish rebellion, was proceeding to
make the final partition of Poland among the three Eastern Monarchies; and,
with all its faults, the France of 1795 would have offered to Europe the
example of a great free State, such as the growth of the military spirit
made impossible after the first of Napoleon's campaigns. But the dark
future was withdrawn from the view of those British statesmen who most
keenly felt the evils of the present; and England, resolutely set against
the course of French aggression, still found in Austria an ally willing to
continue the struggle. The financial help of Great Britain, the Russian
offer of a large share in the spoils of Poland, stimulated the flagging
energy of the Emperor's government. Orders were sent to Clerfayt to advance
from the Rhine at whatever risk, in order to withdraw the troops of the
Republic from the west of France, where England was about to land a body of
Royalists. Clerfayt, however, disobeyed his instructions, and remained
inactive till the autumn. He then defeated a French army pushing beyond the
Rhine, and drove back the besiegers of Mainz; but the British expedition
had already failed, and the time was passed when Clerfayt's successes might
have produced a decisive result. [42]

[Landing at Quiberon, June 27, 1795.]

[France in 1795.]

A new Government was now entering upon power in France. The Reign of Terror
had ended in July, 1794, with the life of Robespierre. The men by whom
Robespierre was overthrown were Terrorists more cruel and less earnest than
himself, who attacked him only in order to save their own lives, and
without the least intention of restoring a constitutional Government to
France. An overwhelming national reaction forced them, however, to
represent themselves as the party of clemency. The reaction was indeed a
simple outburst of human feeling rather than a change in political opinion.
Among the victims of the Terror the great majority had been men of the
lower or middle class, who, except in La Vendée and Brittany, were as
little friendly to the old _régime_ as their executioners. Every class in
France, with the exception of the starving city mobs, longed for security,
and the quiet routine of life. After the disorders of the Republic a
monarchical government naturally seemed to many the best guarantee of
peace; but the monarchy so contemplated was the liberal monarchy of 1791,
not the ancient Court, with its accessories of a landed Church and
privileged noblesse. Religion was still a power in France; but the peasant,
with all his superstition and all his desire for order, was perfectly free
from any delusions about the good old times. He liked to see his children
baptised; but he had no desire to see the priest's tithe-collector back in
his barn: he shuddered at the summary marketing of Conventional
Commissioners; but he had no wish to resume his labours on the fields of
his late seigneur. To be a Monarchist in 1795, among the shopkeepers of
Paris or the farmers of Normandy, meant no more than to wish for a
political system capable of subsisting for twelve months together, and
resting on some other basis than forced loans and compulsory sales of
property. But among the men of the Convention, who had abolished monarchy
and passed sentence of death upon the King, the restoration of the Crown
seemed the bitterest condemnation of all that the Convention had done for
France, and a sentence of outlawry against themselves. If the will of the
nation was for the moment in favour of a restored monarchy, the Convention
determined that its will must be overpowered by force or thwarted by
constitutional forms. Threatened alternately by the Jacobin mob of Paris
and by the Royalist middle class, the Government played off one enemy
against the other, until an ill-timed effort of the emigrant noblesse gave
to the Convention the prestige of a decisive victory over Royalists and
foreigners combined. On the 27th of June, 1795, an English fleet landed the
flower of the old nobility of France at the Bay of Quiberon in southern
Brittany. It was only to give one last fatal proof of their incapacity that
these unhappy men appeared once more on French soil. Within three weeks
after their landing, in a region where for years together the peasantry,
led by their landlords, baffled the best generals of the Republic, this
invading army of the nobles, supported by the fleet, the arms, and the
money of England, was brought to utter ruin by the discord of its own
leaders. Before the nobles had settled who was to command and who was to
obey, General Hoche surprised their fort, beat them back to the edge of the
peninsula where they had landed, and captured all who were not killed
fighting or rescued by English boats (July 20). The Commissioner Tallien,
in order to purge himself from the just suspicion of Royalist intrigues,
caused six hundred prisoners to be shot in cold blood. [43]

[Project of Constitution, 1795.]

At the moment when the emigrant army reached France, the Convention was
engaged in discussing the political system which was to succeed its own
rule. A week earlier, the Committee appointed to draw up a new constitution
for France had presented its report. The main object of the new
constitution in its original form was to secure France against a recurrence
of those evils which it had suffered since 1792. The calamities of the last
three years were ascribed to the sovereignty of a single Assembly. A vote
of the Convention had established the Revolutionary Tribunal, proscribed
the Girondins, and placed France at the mercy of eighty individuals
selected by the Convention from itself. The legislators of 1795 desired a
guarantee that no party, however determined, should thus destroy its
enemies by a single law, and unite supreme legislative and executive power
in its own hands. With the object of dividing authority, the executive was,
in the new draft-constitution, made independent of the legislature, and the
legislature itself was broken up into two chambers. A Directory of five
members, chosen by the Assemblies, but not responsible except under actual
impeachment, was to conduct the administration, without the right of
proposing laws; a Chamber of five hundred was to submit laws to the
approval of a Council of two hundred and fifty Ancients, or men of middle
life; but neither of these bodies was to exercise any influence upon the
actual government. One director and a third part of each of the legislative
bodies were to retire every year. [44]

[Constitution of 1795. Insurrection of Vendémiaire, Oct. 4.]

The project thus outlined met with general approval, and gained even that
of the Royalists, who believed that a popular election would place them in
a majority in the two new Assemblies. Such an event was, however, in the
eyes of the Convention, the one fatal possibility that must be averted at
every cost. In the midst of the debates upon the draft-constitution there
arrived the news of Hoche's victory at Quiberon. The Convention gained
courage to add a clause providing that two-thirds of the new deputies
should be appointed from among its own members, thus rendering a Royalist
majority in the Chambers impossible. With this condition attached to it,
the Constitution was laid before the country. The provinces accepted it;
the Royalist middle class of Paris rose in insurrection, and marched
against the Convention in the Tuileries. Their revolt was foreseen; the
defence of the Convention was entrusted to General Bonaparte, who met the
attack of the Parisians in a style unknown in the warfare of the capital.
Bonaparte's command of trained artillery secured him victory; but the
struggle of the 4th of October (13 Vendémiaire) was the severest that took
place in Paris during the Revolution, and the loss of life in fighting
greater than on the day that overthrew the Monarchy.

[The Directory, Oct., 1795.]

The new Government of France now entered into power. Members of the
Convention formed two-thirds of the new legislative bodies; the one-third
which the country was permitted to elect consisted chiefly of men of
moderate or Royalist opinions. The five persons who were chosen Directors
were all Conventionalists who had voted for the death of the King; Carnot,
however, who had won the victories without sharing in the cruelties of the
Reign of Terror, was the only member of the late Committee of Public Safety
who was placed in power. In spite of the striking homage paid to the great
act of regicide in the election of the five Directors, the establishment of
the Directory was accepted by Europe as the close of revolutionary
disorder. The return of constitutional rule in France was marked by a
declaration on the part of the King of England of his willingness to treat
for peace. A gentler spirit seemed to have arisen in the Republic. Although
the laws against the emigrants and non-juring priests were still
unrepealed, the exiles began to return unmolested to their homes. Life
resumed something of its old aspect in the capital. The rich and the gay
consoled themselves with costlier luxury for all the austerities of the
Reign of Terror. The labouring classes, now harmless and disarmed, were
sharply taught that they must be content with such improvement in their lot
as the progress of society might bring.

[What was new to Europe in the Revolution.]

[Absolute governments of 18th century engaged in reforms.]

At the close of this first period of the Revolutionary War we may pause to
make an estimate of the new influences which the French Revolution had
brought into Europe, and of the effects which had thus far resulted from
them. The opinion current among the French people themselves, that the
Revolution gave birth to the modern life not of France only but of the
Western Continent generally, is true of one great set of facts; it is
untrue of another. There were conceptions in France in 1789 which made
France a real contrast to most of the Continental monarchies; there were
others which it shared in common with them. The ideas of social, legal, and
ecclesiastical reform which were realised in 1789 were not peculiar to
France; what was peculiar to France was the idea that these reforms were to
be effected by the nation itself. In other countries reforms had been
initiated by Governments, and forced upon an unwilling people. Innovation
sprang from the Crown; its agents were the servants of the State. A
distinct class of improvements, many of them identical with the changes
made by the Revolution in France, attracted the attention in a greater or
less degree of almost all the Western Courts of the eighteenth century. The
creation of a simple and regular administrative system; the reform of the
clergy; the emancipation of the Church from the jurisdiction of the Pope,
and of all orders in the State from the jurisdiction of the Church; the
amelioration of the lot of the peasant; the introduction of codes of law
abolishing both the cruelties and the confusion of ancient practice,--all
these were purposes more or less familiar to the absolute sovereigns of the
eighteenth century, whom the French so summarily described as benighted
tyrants. It was in Austria, Prussia, and Tuscany that the civilising energy
of the Crown had been seen in its strongest form, but even the Governments
of Naples and Spain had caught the spirit of change. The religious
tolerance which Joseph gave to Austria, the rejection of Papal authority
and the abolition of the punishment of death which Leopold effected in
Tuscany, were bolder efforts of the same political rationalism which in
Spain minimised the powers of the Inquisition and in Naples attempted to
found a system of public education. In all this, however, there was no
trace of the action of the people, or of any sense that a nation ought to
raise itself above a state of tutelage. Men of ideas called upon
Governments to impose better institutions upon the people, not upon the
people to wrest them from the Governments.

[In France, the nation itself acted.]

In France alone a view of public affairs had grown up which impelled the
nation to create its reforms for itself. If the substance of many of the
French revolutionary changes coincided with the objects of Austrian or of
Tuscan reform, there was nothing similar in their method. In other
countries reform sprang from the command of an enlightened ruler; in France
it started with the Declaration of the Rights of Man, and aimed at the
creation of local authority to be exercised by the citizens themselves. The
source of this difference lay partly in the influence of England and
America upon French opinion, but much more in the existence within France
of a numerous and energetic middle class, enriched by commerce, and keenly
interested in all the speculation and literary activity of the age. This
was a class that both understood the wrongs which the other classes
inflicted or suffered, and felt itself capable of redressing them. For the
flogged and over-driven peasant in Naples or Hungary no ally existed but
the Crown. In most of those poor and backward States which made up
monarchical Europe, the fraction of the inhabitants which neither enjoyed
privilege nor stood in bondage to it was too small to think of forcing
itself into power. The nobles sought to preserve their feudal rights: the
Crown sought to reduce them; the nation, elsewhere than in France, did not
intervene and lay hands upon power for itself, because the nation was
nothing but the four mutually exclusive classes of the landlords who
commanded, the peasants who served, the priests who idled, and the soldiers
who fought. France differed from all the other monarchies of the Continent
in possessing a public which blended all classes and was dominated by none;
a public comprehending thousands of men who were familiar with the great
interests of society, and who, whether noble or not noble, possessed the
wealth and the intelligence that made them rightly desire a share in power.

[Movements against governments outside France.]

Liberty, the right of the nation to govern itself, seemed at the outset to
be the great principle of the Revolution. The French people themselves
believed the question at issue to be mainly between authority and popular
right; the rest of Europe saw the Revolution under the same aspect. Hence,
in those countries where the example of France produced political
movements, the effect was in the first instance to excite agitation against
the Government, whatever might be the form of the latter. In England the
agitation was one of the middle class against the aristocratic
parliamentary system; in Hungary, it was an agitation of the nobles against
the Crown; on the Rhine it was an agitation of the commercial classes
against ecclesiastical rule. But in every case in which the reforming
movement was not supported by the presence of French armies, the terrors
which succeeded the first sanguine hopes of the Revolution struck the
leaders of these movements with revulsion and despair, and converted even
the better Governments into engines of reaction. In France itself it was
seen that the desire for liberty among an enlightened class could not
suddenly transform the habits of a nation accustomed to accept everything
from authority. Privilege was destroyed, equality was advanced; but instead
of self-government the Revolution brought France the most absolute rule it
had ever known. It was not that the Revolution had swept by, leaving things
where they were before: it had in fact accomplished most of those great
changes which lay the foundation of a sound social life: but the faculty of
self-government, the first condition of any lasting political liberty,
remained to be slowly won.

[Reaction.]

Outside France reaction set in without the benefit of previous change. At
London, Vienna, Naples, and Madrid, Governments gave up all other objects
in order to devote themselves to the suppression of Jacobinism. Pitt, whose
noble aims had been the extinction of the slave-trade, the reform of
Parliament, and the advance of national intercourse by free trade,
surrendered himself to men whose thoughts centred upon informers, Gagging
Acts, and constructive treasons, and who opposed all legislation upon the
slave-trade because slaves had been freed by the Jacobins of the
Convention. State trials and imprisonments became the order of the day; but
the reaction in England at least stopped short of the scaffold. At Vienna
and Naples fear was more cruel. The men who either were, or affected to be,
in such fear of revolution that they discovered a Jacobinical allegory in
Mozart's last opera, [45] did not spare life when the threads of anything
like a real conspiracy were placed in their hands. At Vienna terror was
employed to crush the constitutional opposition of Hungary to the Austrian
Court. In Naples a long reign of cruelty and oppression began with the
creation of a secret tribunal to investigate charges of conspiracy made by
informers. In Mainz, the Archbishop occupied the last years of his
government, after his restoration in 1793, with a series of brutal
punishments and tyrannical precautions.

These were but instances of the effect which the first epoch of the
Revolution produced upon the old European States. After a momentary
stimulus to freedom it threw the nations themselves into reaction and
apathy; it totally changed the spirit of the better governments, attaching
to all liberal ideas the stigma of Revolution, and identifying the work of
authority with resistance to every kind of reform. There were States in
which this change, the first effect of the Revolution, was also its only
one; States whose history, as in the case of England, is for a whole
generation the history of political progress unnaturally checked and thrown
out of its course. There were others, and these the more numerous, where
the first stimulus and the first reaction were soon forgotten in new and
penetrating changes produced by the successive victories of France. The
nature of these changes, even more than the warfare which introduced them,
gives its interest to the period on which we are about to enter.




CHAPTER III.


Triple attack on Austria--Moreau, Jourdan--Bonaparte in Italy--Condition of
the Italian States--Professions and real intentions of Bonaparte and the
Directory--Battle of Montenotte--Armistice with Sardinia--Campaign in
Lombardy--Treatment of the Pope, Naples, Tuscany--Siege of Mantua--
Castiglione, Moreau and Jourdan in Germany Their retreat--Secret Treaty
with Prussia--Negotiations with England--Cispadane Republic--Rise of the
idea of Italian Independence--Battles of Arcola and Rivoli--Peace with the
Pope at Tolentino--Venice--Preliminaries of Leoben--The French in
Venice--The French take the Ionian Islands and give Venice to
Austria--Genoa--Coup d'état of 17 Fructidor in Paris--Treaty of Campo
Formio--Victories of England at sea--Bonaparte's project against Egypt.


[Armies of Italy, the Danube, and the Main, 1796.]

With the opening of the year 1796 the leading interest of European history
passes to a new scene. Hitherto the progress of French victory had been in
the direction of the Rhine: the advance of the army of the Pyrenees had
been cut short by the conclusion of peace with Spain; the army of Italy had
achieved little beyond some obscure successes in the mountains. It was the
appointment of Napoleon Bonaparte to the command of the latter force, in
the spring of 1796, that first centred the fortunes of the Republic in the
land beyond the Alps. Freed from Prussia by the Treaty of Basle, the
Directory was now able to withdraw its attention from Holland and from the
Lower Rhine, and to throw its whole force into the struggle with Austria.
By the advice of Bonaparte a threefold movement was undertaken against
Vienna, by way of Lombardy, by the valley of the Danube, and by the valley
of the Main. General Jourdan, in command of the army that had conquered the
Netherlands, was ordered to enter Germany by Frankfort; Moreau crossed the
Rhine at Strasburg: Bonaparte himself, drawing his scanty supplies along
the coast-road from Nice, faced the allied forces of Austria and Sardinia
upon the slopes of the Maritime Apennines, forty miles to the west of
Genoa. The country in which he was about to operate was familiar to
Bonaparte from service there in 1794; his own descent and language gave him
singular advantages in any enterprise undertaken in Italy. Bonaparte was no
Italian at heart; but he knew at least enough of the Italian nature to work
upon its better impulses, and to attach its hopes, so long as he needed the
support of Italian opinion, to his own career of victory.

[Condition of Italy.]

Three centuries separated the Italy of that day from the bright and
vigorous Italy which, in the glow of its Republican freedom, had given so
much to Northern Europe in art, in letters, and in the charm of life. A
long epoch of subjection to despotic or foreign rule, of commercial
inaction, of decline in mind and character, had made the Italians of no
account among the political forces of Europe. Down to the peace of
Aix-la-Chapelle in 1748 their provinces 

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