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Germany from the Earliest Period, Volume 4

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Title: Germany from the Earliest Period, Volume 4

Author: Wolfgang Menzel

Translator: Mrs. George Horrocks


        
Release date: July 1, 2005 [eBook #8401]
                Most recently updated: December 26, 2020

Language: English

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*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK GERMANY FROM THE EARLIEST PERIOD, VOLUME 4 ***




Produced by Charles Franks, David King
and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team




GERMANY

FROM THE

EARLIEST PERIOD

BY

WOLFGANG MENZEL

TRANSLATED FROM THE FOURTH GERMAN EDITION

By MRS. GEORGE HORROCKS

WITH A SUPPLEMENTARY CHAPTER OF RECENT EVENTS

By EDGAR SALTUS

VOLUME IV



THE HISTORY OF GERMANY

PART XXI

THE RISE OF PRUSSIA

(CONTINUED)

CCXLIV. Art and Fashion


Although art had, under French influence, become unnatural,
bombastical, in fine, exactly contrary to every rule of good taste,
the courts, vain of their collections of works of art, still emulated
each other in the patronage of the artists of the day, whose
creations, tasteless as they were, nevertheless afforded a species of
consolation to the people, by diverting their thoughts from the
miseries of daily existence.

Architecture degenerated in the greatest degree. Its sublimity was
gradually lost as the meaning of the Gothic style became less
understood, and a tasteless imitation of the Roman style, like that of
St. Peter's at Rome, was brought into vogue by the Jesuits and by the
court architects, by whom the chateau of Versailles was deemed the
highest chef-d'oeuvre of art. This style of architecture was
accompanied by a style of sculpture equally unmeaning and forced;
saints and Pagan deities in theatrical attitudes, fat genii, and
coquettish nymphs peopled the roofs of the churches and palaces,
presided over bridges, fountains, etc. Miniature turnery-ware and
microscopical sculpture also came into fashion. Such curiosities as,
for instance, a cherry-stone, on which Pranner, the Carinthian, had
carved upward of a hundred faces; a chessboard, the completion of
which had occupied a Dutchman for eighteen years; golden carriages
drawn by fleas; toys composed of porcelain or ivory in imitation of
Chinese works of art; curious pieces of mechanism, musical clocks,
etc., were industriously collected into the cabinets of the wealthy
and powerful. This taste was, however, not utterly useless. The
predilection for ancient gems promoted the study of the remains of
antiquity, as Stosch, Lippert, and Winckelmann prove, and that of
natural history was greatly facilitated by the collections of natural
curiosities.

The style of painting was, however, still essentially German, although
deprived by the Reformation and by French influence of its ancient
sacred and spiritual character. Nature was now generally studied in
the search after the beautiful. Among the pupils of Rubens, the great
founder of the Dutch school, Jordaens was distinguished for brilliancy
and force of execution, Van Dyck, A.D. 1541, for grace and beauty,
although principally a portrait painter and incapable of idealizing
his subjects, in which Rembrandt, A.D. 1674, who chose more extensive
historical subjects, and whose coloring is remarkable for depth and
effect, was equally deficient. Rembrandt's pupil, Gerhard Douw,
introduced domestic scenes; his attention to the minutiæ of his art
was such that he is said to have worked for three days at a
broomstick, in order to represent it with perfect truth. Denner
carried accuracy still further; in his portraits of old men every hair
in the beard is carefully imitated. Francis and William[1] Mieris
discovered far greater talent in their treatment of social and
domestic groups; Terbourg and Netscher, on the other hand, delighted
in the close imitation of velvet and satin draperies; and Schalken, in
the effect of shadows and lamplight. Honthorst[2] attempted a higher
style, but Van der Werf's small delicious nudities and Van Loos's
luxurious pastoral scenes were better adapted to the taste of the
times. While these painters belonged to the higher orders of society,
of which their works give evidence, numerous others studied the lower
classes with still greater success. Besides Van der Meulen and
Rugendas, the painters of battle-pieces, Wouvermann chiefly excelled
in the delineation of horses and groups of horsemen, and Teniers,
Ostade, and Jan Steen became famous for the surpassing truth of their
peasants and domestic scenes. To this low but happily-treated school
also belonged the cattle-pieces of Berchem and Paul de Potter, whose
"Bull and Cows" were, in a certain respect, as much the ideal of the
Dutch as the Madonna had formerly been that of the Italians or the
Venus di Medici that of the ancients.

Landscape-painting alone gave evidence of a higher style. Nature,
whenever undesecrated by the vulgarity of man, is ever sublimely
simple. The Dutch, as may be seen in the productions of Breughel,
called, from his dress, "Velvet Breughel," and in those of Elzheimer,
termed, from his attention to minutiae, the Denner of landscape-
painting, were at first too careful and minute; but Paul Brill, A.D.
1626, was inspired with finer conceptions and formed the link between
preceding artists and the magnificent Claude Lorraine (so called from
the place of his birth, his real name being Claude Gelee), who resided
for a long time at Munich, and who first attempted to idealize nature
as the Italian artists had formerly idealized man. Everdingen and
Ruysdael, on the contrary, studied nature in her simple northern garb,
and the sombre pines of the former, the cheerful woods of the latter,
will ever be attractive, like pictures of a much-loved home, to the
German. Bakhuysen's sea-pieces and storms are faithful representations
of the Baltic. In the commencement of last century, landscape-painting
also degenerated and became mere ornamental flower-painting, of which
the Dutch were so passionately fond that they honored and paid the
most skilful artists in this style like princes. The dull prosaic
existence of the merchant called for relief. Huysum was the mosrt
celebrated of the flower-painters, with Rachel Ruysch, William von
Arless, and others of lesser note. Fruit and kitchen pieces were also
greatly admired. Hondekotter was celebrated as a painter of birds.

Painting was, in this manner, confined to a slavish imitation of
nature, for whose lowest objects a predilection was evinced until the
middle of the eighteenth century, when a style, half Italian, half
antique, was introduced into Germany by the operas, by travellers, and
more particularly by the galleries founded by the princes, and was
still further promoted by the learned researches of connoisseurs, more
especially by those of Winckelmann. Mengs, the Raphael of Germany,
Oeser, Tischbein, the landscape-painters Seekatz, Hackert, Reinhardt,
Koch, etc., formed the transition to the modern style. Frey,
Chodowiecki, etc., gained great celebrity as engravers.

Architecture flourished during the Middle Ages, painting at the time
of the Reformation, and music in modern times. The same spirit that
spoke to the eye in the eternal stone now breathed in transient melody
to the ear. The science of music, transported by Dutch artists into
Italy, had been there assiduously cultivated; the Italians had
speedily surpassed their masters, and had occupied themselves with the
creation of a peculiar church-music and of the profane opera, while
the Netherlands and the whole of Germany were convulsed by bloody
religious wars. After the peace of Westphalia, the national music of
Germany, with the exception of the choral music in the Protestant
churches, was almost silent, and Italian operas were introduced at all
the courts, where Italian chapel-masters, singers, and performers were
patronized in imitation of Louis XIV., who pursued a similar system in
France. German talent was reduced to imitate the Italian masters, and,
in 1628, Sagittarius produced at Dresden the first German opera in
imitation of the Italian, and Keyser published no fewer than one
hundred and sixteen.

The German musicians were, nevertheless, earlier than the German
poets, animated with a desire to extirpate the foreign and degenerate
mode fostered by the vanity of the German princes, and to give free
scope to their original and native talent. This regeneration was
effected by the despised and simple organists of the Protestant
churches. In 1717, Schroeder, a native of Hohenstein in Saxony,
invented the pianoforte and improved the organ. Sebastian Bach, in his
colossal fugues, like to a pillared dome dissolved in melody,[3]
raised music by his compositions to a height unattained by any of his
successors. He was one of the most extraordinary geniuses that ever
appeared on earth. Handel, whose glorious melodies entranced the
senses, produced the grand oratorio of the "Messiah," which is still
performed in both Protestant and Catholic cathedrals; and Graun, with
whom Frederick the Great played the flute, brought private singing
into vogue by his musical compositions. Gluck was the first composer
who introduced the depth and pathos of more solemn music into the
opera. He gained a complete triumph at Paris over Piccini, the
celebrated Italian musician, in his contest respecting the comparative
excellencies of the German and Italian schools. Haydn introduced the
variety and melody of the opera into the oratorio, of which his
"Creation" is a standing proof. In the latter half of the foregoing
century, sacred music has gradually yielded to the opera. Mozart
brought the operatic style to perfection in the wonderful compositions
that eternalize his fame.

The German theatre was, owing to the Gallomania of the period, merely
a bad imitation of the French stage. Gottsched,[4] who greatly
contributed toward the reformation of German literature, still
retained the stilted Alexandrine and the pseudo-Gallic imitation of
the ancient dramatists to which Lessing put an end. Lessing wrote his
"Dramaturgy" at Hamburg, recommended Shakespeare and other English
authors as models, but more particularly nature. The celebrated
Eckhof, the father of the German stage, who at first travelled about
with a company of actors and finally settled at Gotha, was the first
who followed this innovation. He was succeeded by Schroeder in
Hamburg, who was equally industrious as a poet, an actor, and a
Freemason. In Berlin, where Fleck had already paved the way, Iffland,
who, like Schroeder, was both a poet and an actor, founded a school,
which in every respect took nature as a guide, and which raised the
German stage to its well-merited celebrity.

At the close of the eighteenth century, men of education were seized
with an enthusiasm for art, which showed itself principally in a love
for the stage and in visits for the promotion of art to Italy. The
poet and the painter, alike dissatisfied with reality, sought to still
their secret longings for the beautiful amid the unreal creations of
fancy and the records of classical antiquity.

Fashion, that masker of nature, that creator of deformity, had, in
truth, arrived at an unparalleled pitch of ugliness. The German
costume, although sometimes extravagantly curious during the Middle
Ages, had nevertheless always retained a certain degree of picturesque
beauty, nor was it until the reign of Louis XIV. of France that dress
assumed an unnatural, inconvenient, and monstrous form. Enormous
allonge perukes and ruffles, the fontange (high headdress), hoops, and
high heels, rendered the human race a caricature of itself. In the
eighteenth century, powdered wigs of extraordinary shape, hairbags and
queues, frocks and frills, came into fashion for the men; powdered
headdresses an ell in height, diminutive waists, and patches for the
women. The deformity, unhealthiness, and absurdity of this mode of
attire were vainly pointed out by Salzmann, in a piece entitled,
"Charles von Carlsberg, or Human Misery."

[Footnote 1: Also his brother John, who painted with equal talent in
the same style.--_Trans_.]

[Footnote 2: Called also Gerardo dalle Notti from his subjects,
principally night-scenes and pieces illuminated by torch or
candle-light. His most celebrated picture is that of Jesus Christ
before the Tribunal of Pilate.--_Ibid_.]

[Footnote 3: Gothic architecture has been likened to petrified music.]

[Footnote 4: He was assisted in his dramatic writings by his wife, a
woman of splendid talents.--_Trans_.]



CCXLV. Influence of the Belles-Lettres


The German, excluded from all participation in public affairs and
confined to the narrow limits of his family circle and profession,
followed his natural bent for speculative philosophy and poetical
reverie; but while his thoughts became more elevated and the loss of
his activity was, in a certain degree, compensated by the gentle
dominion of the muses, the mitigation thus afforded merely aggravated
the evil by rendering him content with his state of inaction. Ere
long, as in the most degenerate age of ancient Rome, the citizen,
amused by sophists and singers, actors and jugglers, lost the
remembrance of his former power and rights and became insensible to
his state of moral degradation, to which the foreign notions, the vain
and frivolous character of most of the poets of the day, had not a
little contributed.

After the thirty years' war, the Silesian poets became remarkable for
Gallomania or the slavish imitation of those of France. Unbounded
adulation of the sovereign, bombastical _carmina_ on occasion of the
birth, wedding, accession, victories, fêtes, treaties of peace, and
burial of potentates, love-couplets equally strained, twisted
compliments to female beauty, with pedantic, often indecent, citations
from ancient mythology, chiefly characterized this school of poetry.
Martin Opitz, A.D. 1639, the founder of the first Silesian school,[1]
notwithstanding the insipidity of the taste of the day, preserved the
harmony of the German ballad. His most distinguished followers were
Logau, celebrated for his Epigrams;[2] Paul Gerhard, who, in his fine
hymns, revived the force and simplicity of Luther; Flemming, a genial
and thoroughly German poet, the companion of Olearius[3] during his
visit to Persia; the gentle Simon Dach, whose sorrowing notes bewail
the miseries of the age. He founded a society of melancholy poets at
Königsberg, in Prussia, the members of which composed elegies for each
other; Tscherning and Andrew Gryphius, the Corneille of Germany, a
native of Glogau, whose dramas are worthy of a better age than the
insipid century in which they were produced. The life of this
dramatist was full of incident. His father was poisoned; his mother
died of a broken heart. He wandered over Germany during the thirty
years' war, pursued by fire, sword, and pestilence, to the latter of
which the whole of his relations fell victims. He travelled over the
whole of Europe, spoke eleven languages, and became a professor at
Leyden, where he taught history, geography, mathematics, physics, and
anatomy. These poets were, however, merely exceptions to the general
rule. In the poetical societies, the "Order of the Palm" or
"Fructiferous Society," founded A.D. 1617, at Weimar, by Caspar von
Teutleben, the "Upright Pine Society," established by Rempler of
Löwenthal at Strasburg, that of the "Roses," founded A.D. 1643, by
Philip von Zesen, at Hamburg, the "Order of the Pegnitz-shepherds,"
founded A.D. 1644, by Harsdörfer, at Nuremberg, the spirit of the
Italian and French operas and academies prevailed, and pastoral
poetry, in which the god of Love was represented wearing an immense
allonge peruke, and the coquettish immorality of the courts was
glowingly described in Arcadian scenes of delight, was cultivated. The
fantastical romances of Spain were also imitated, and the invention of
novel terms was deemed the highest triumph of the poet. Every third
word was either Latin, French, Spanish, Italian, or English. Francisci
of Lübeck, who described all the discoveries of the New World in a
colloquial romance contained in a thick folio volume, was the most
extravagant of these scribblers. The romances of Antony Ulric, duke of
Brunswick, who embraced Catholicism on the occasion of the marriage of
his daughter with the emperor Charles VI., are equally bad.
Lauremberg's satires, written A.D. 1564, are excellent. He said with
great truth that the French had deprived the German muse of her nose
and had patched on another quite unsuited to her German ears.
Moscherosch (Philander von Sittewald) wrote an admirable and cutting
satire upon the manners of the age, and Greifenson von Hirschfeld is
worthy of mention as the author of the first historical romance that
gives an accurate and graphic account of the state of Germany during
the thirty years' war.

This first school was succeeded by a second of surpassing
extravagance. Hoffman von Hoffmannswaldau, A.D. 1679, the founder of
the second Silesian school, was a caricature of Opitz, Lohenstein of
Gryphius, Besser of Flemming, Talander and Ziegler of Zesen, and even
Francisci was outdone by that most intolerable of romancers, Happel.
This school was remarkable for the most extravagant license and
bombastical nonsense, a sad proof of the moral perversion of the age.
The German character, nevertheless, betrayed itself by a sort of naïve
pedantry, a proof, were any wanting, that the ostentatious absurdities
of the poets of Germany were but bad and paltry imitations. The French
Alexandrine was also brought into vogue by this school, whose
immorality was carried to the highest pitch by Günther, the lyric
poet, who, in the commencement of the eighteenth century, opposed
marriage, attempted the emancipation of the female sex, and, with
criminal geniality, recommended his follies and crimes, as highly
interesting, to the world. To him the poet, Schnabel, the author of an
admirable romance, the "Island of Felsenburg," the asylum, in another
hemisphere, of virtue, exiled from Europe, offers a noble contrast.

Three Catholic poets of extreme originality appear at the close of the
seventeenth century, Angelus Silesius (Scheffler of Breslau), who gave
to the world his devotional thoughts in German Alexandrines; Father
Abraham a Sancta Clara (Megerle of Swabia), a celebrated Viennese
preacher, who, with comical severity, wrote satires abounding with wit
and humorous observations; and Balde, who wrote some fine Latin poems
on God and nature. Prätorius, A.D. 1680, the first collector of the
popular legendary ballads concerning Rübezahl and other spirits,
ghosts and witches, also deserves mention. The Silesian, Stranizki,
who, A.D. 1708, founded the Leopoldstadt theatre at Vienna, which
afterward became so celebrated, and gave to it the popular comic style
for which it is famous at the present day, was also a poet of extreme
originality. Gottsched appeared as the hero of Gallomania, which was
at that time threatened with gradual extinction by the Spanish and
Hamburg romance and by Viennese wit. Assisted by Neuber, the actress,
he extirpated all that was not strictly French, solemnly burned
Harlequin in effigy at Leipzig, A.D. 1737, and laid down a law for
German poetry, which prescribed obedience to the rules of the stilted
French court-poetry, under pain of the critic's lash. He and his
learned wife guided the literature of Germany for several years.

In the midst of these literary aberrations, during the first part of
the foregoing century, Thomson, the English poet, Brokes of Hamburg,
and the Swiss, Albert von Haller, gave their descriptions of nature to
the world. Brokes, in his "Earthly Pleasures in God," was faithful,
often Homeric, in his descriptions, while Haller depictured his native
Alps with unparalleled sublimity. The latter was succeeded by a Swiss
school, which imitated the witty and liberal-minded criticisms of
Addison and other English writers, and opposed French taste and
Gottsched. At its head stood Bodmer and Breitinger, who recommended
nature as a guide, and instead of the study of French literature, that
of the ancient classics and of English authors. It was also owing to
their exertions that Müller published an edition of Rudiger Maness's
collection of Swabian Minnelieder, the connecting link between modern
and ancient German poetry. Still, notwithstanding their merit as
critics, they were no poets, and merely opened to others the road to
improvement. Hagedorn, although frivolous in his ideas, was graceful
and easy in his versification; but the most eminent poet of the age
was Gellert of Leipzig, A.D. 1769, whose tales, fables, and essays
brought him into such note as to attract the attention of Frederick
the Great, who, notwithstanding the contempt in which he held the
poets of Germany, honored him with a personal visit.

Poets and critics now rose in every quarter and pitilessly assailed
Gottsched, the champion of Gallomania. They were themselves divided
into two opposite parties, into Anglomanists and Græcomanists,
according to their predilection for modern English literature or for
that of ancient Greece and Rome. England, grounded, as upon a rock, on
her self-gained constitution, produced men of the rarest genius in all
the higher walks of science and literature, and her philosophers,
naturalists, historians, and poets exercised the happiest influence
over their Teutonic brethren, who sought to regain from them the vigor
of which they had been deprived by France. The power and national
learning of Germany break forth in Klopstock, whose genius vainly
sought a natural garb and was compelled to assume a borrowed form. He
consecrated his muse to the service of religion, but, in so doing,
imitated the Homeric hexameters of Milton; he sought to arouse the
national pride of his countrymen by recalling the deeds of Hermann
(Armin) and termed himself a bard, but, in the Horatian metre of his
songs, imitated Ossian, the old Scottish bard, and was consequently
labored and affected in his style. Others took the lesser English
poets for their model, as, for instance, Kleist, who fell at
Kunersdorf, copied Thomson in his "Spring"; Zachariä, Pope, in his
satirical pieces; Hermes, in "The Travels of Sophia," the humorous
romances of Richardson; Müller von Itzehoe, in his "Siegfried von
Lindenberg," the comic descriptions of Smollett. The influence of the
celebrated English poets, Shakespeare, Swift, and Sterne, on the tone
of German humor and satire, was still greater. Swift's first imitator,
Liscow, displayed considerable talent, and Rabener, a great part of
whose manuscripts was burned during the siege of Dresden in the seven
years' war, wrote witty, and at the same time instructive, satires on
the manners of his age. Both were surpassed by Lichtenberg, the little
hump-backed philosopher of Göttingen, whose compositions are replete
with grace. The witty and amiable Thümmmel was also formed on an
English model, and Archenholz solely occupied himself with
transporting the customs and literature of England into Germany. If
Shakespeare has not been without influence upon Goethe and Schiller,
Sterne, in his "Sentimental Journey," touched an echoing chord in the
German's heart by blending pathos with his jests. Hippel was the first
who, like him, united wit with pathos, mockery with tears.

In Klopstock, Anglo and Graecomania were combined. The latter had,
however, also its particular school, in which each of the Greek and
Roman poets found his imitator. Voss, for instance, took Homer for his
model, Ramler, Horace, Gleim, Anacreon, Gessner, Theocritus, Cramer,
Pindar, Lichtwer, Æsop, etc. The Germans, in the ridiculous attempt to
set themselves up as Greeks, were, in truth, barbarians. But all was
forced, unnatural, and perverted in this aping age. Wieland alone was
deeply sensible of this want of nature, and hence arose his
predilection for the best poets of Greece and France. The German muse,
led by his genius, lost her ancient stiffness and acquired a pliant
grace, to which the sternest critic of his too lax morality is not
insensible. Some lyric poets, connected with the Graecomanists by the
_Göttingen Hainbund_, preserved a noble simplicity, more particularly
Salis and Hòlty, and also Count Stolberg, wherever he has not been led
astray by Voss's stilted manner. Matthison is, on the other hand, most
tediously affected.

The German, never more at home than when abroad, boasted of being the
cosmopolite he had become, made a virtue of necessity, and termed his
want of patriotism, justice to others, humanity, philanthropy.
Fortunately for him, there were, besides the French, other nations on
which he could model himself, the ancient Greeks and the English, from
each of whom he gathered something until he had converted himself into
a sort of universal abstract. The great poets, who shortly before and
after the seven years' war, put an end to mere partial imitations,
were not actuated by a reaction of nationality, but by a sentiment of
universality. Their object was, not to oppose the German to the
foreign, but simply the human to the single national element, and,
although Germany gave them birth, they regarded the whole world
equally as their country.

Lessing, by his triumph over the scholastic pedants, completed what
Thomasius had begun, by his irresistible criticism drove French taste
from the literary arena, aided Winckelmann to promote the study of the
ancients and to foster the love of art, and raised the German theatre
to an unprecedented height. His native language, in which he always
wrote, breathes, even in his most trifling works, a free and lofty
spirit, which, fascinating in every age, was more peculiarly so at
that emasculated period. He is, however, totally devoid of patriotism.
In his "Minna von Barnhelm," he inculcates the finest feelings of
honor; his "Nathan" is replete with the wisdom "that cometh from
above" and with calm dignity; and in "Emilia Galotti" he has been the
first to draw the veil, hitherto respected, from scenes in real life.
His life was, like his mind, independent. He scorned to cringe for
favor, even disdained letters of recommendation when visiting Italy
(Winckelmann had deviated from the truth for the sake of pleasing a
patron), contented himself with the scanty lot of a librarian at
Wolfenbüttel, and even preferred losing that appointment rather than
subject himself to the censorship. He was the boldest, freest, finest
spirit of the age.

Herder, although no less noble, was exactly his opposite. Of a soft
and yielding temperament, unimaginative, and gifted with little
penetration, but with a keen sense of the beautiful in others, he
opened to his fellow countrymen with unremitting diligence the
literary treasures of foreign nations, ancient classical poetry, that,
hitherto unknown, of the East, and rescued from obscurity the old
popular poetry of Germany. In his "Ideas of a Philosophical History of
Mankind," he attempted to display in rich and manifold variety the
moral character of every nation and of every age, and, while thus
creating and improving the taste for poetry and history, ever, with
childlike piety, sought for and revered God in all his works.

Goethe, with a far richer imagination, possessed the elegance but not
the independence of Lessing, all the softness, pathos, and
universality of Herder, without his faith. In the treatment and choice
of his subjects he is indubitably the greatest poet of Germany, but he
was never inspired with enthusiasm except for himself. His personal
vanity was excessive. His works, like the lights in his apartment at
Weimar, which were skilfully disposed so as to present him in the most
favorable manner to his visitors, but artfully reflect upon self. The
manner in which he palliated the weaknesses of the heart, the vain
inclinations, shared by his contemporaries in common with himself,
rendered him the most amiable and popular author of the day. French
frivolity and license had long been practiced, but they had also been
rebuked. Goethe was the first who gravely justified adultery, rendered
the sentimental voluptuary an object of enthusiastic admiration, and
deified the heroes of the stage, in whose imaginary fortunes the
German forgot sad reality and the wretched fate of his country. His
_fade_ assumption of dignity, the art with which he threw the veil of
mystery over his frivolous tendencies and made his commonplace ideas
pass for something incredibly sublime, naturally met with astonishing
success in his wonder-seeking times.

Rousseau's influence, the ideas of universal reform, the example of
England, proud and free, but still more, the enthusiasm excited by the
American war of independence, inflamed many heads in Germany and
raised a poetical opposition, which began with the bold-spirited
Schubart, whose liberal opinions threw him into a prison, but whose
spirit still breathed in his songs and roused that of his great
countryman, Schiller. The first cry of the oppressed people was, by
Schiller, repeated with a prophet's voice. In him their woes found an
eloquent advocate. Lessing had vainly appealed to the understanding,
but Schiller spoke to the heart, and if the seed, sown by him, fell
partially on corrupt and barren ground, it found a fostering soil in
the warm, unadulterated hearts of the youth of both sexes. He recalled
his fellow-men, in those frivolous times, to a sense of self-respect,
he restored to innocence the power and dignity of which she had been
deprived by ridicule, and became the champion of liberty, justice, and
his country, things from which the love of pleasure and the
aristocratic self-complacency, exemplified in Goethe, had gradually
and completely Weaned succeeding poets. Klinger, at the same time,
coarsely portrayed the vices of the church and state, and Meyern
extravagated in his romance "Dya-Na-Sore" on Utopian happiness. The
poems of Muller, the painter, are full of latent warmth. Burger,
Pfeffel, the blind poet, and Claudius, gave utterance, in Schubart's
coarse manner, to a few trite truisms. Musæus was greatly admired for
his amusing popular stories. As for the rest, it seemed as though the
spiritless writers of that day had found it more convenient to be
violent and savage in their endless chivalric pieces and romances
than, like Schiller, steadily and courageously to attack the vices and
evils of their age. Their fire but ended in smoke. Babo and Ziegler
alone, among the dramatists, have a liberal tendency. The spirit that
had been called forth also degenerated into mere bacchanalian license,
and, in order to return to nature, the limits set by decency and
custom were, as by Heinse, for instance, who thus disgraced his
genius, wantonly overthrown.

In contradistinction to these wild spirits, which, whether borne aloft
by their genius or impelled by ambition, quitted the narrow limits of
daily existence, a still greater number of poets employed their
talents in singing the praise of common life, and brought domesticity
and household sentimentality into vogue. The very prose of life, so
unbearable to the former, was by them converted into poetry. Although
the ancient idyls and the family scenes of English authors were at
first imitated, this style of poetry retained an essentially German
originality; the hero of the modern idyl, unlike his ancient model,
was a fop tricked out with wig and cane, and the domestic hero of the
tale, unlike his English counterpart, was a mere political nullity. It
is perhaps well when domestic comforts replace the want of public
life, but these poets hugged the chain they had decked with flowers,
and forgot the reality. They forgot that it is a misfortune and a
disgrace for a German to be without a country, without a great
national interest, to be the most unworthy descendant of the greatest
ancestors, the prey and the jest of the foreigner; to this they were
indifferent, insensible; they laid down the maxim that a German has
nothing more to do than "to provide for" himself and his family, no
other enemy to repel than domestic trouble, no other duty than "to
keep his German wife in order," to send his sons to the university,
and to marry his daughters. These commonplace private interests were
withal merely adorned with a little sentimentality. No noble motive is
discoverable in Voss's celebrated "Louisa" and Goethe's "Hermann and
Dorothea." This style of poetry was so easy that hundreds of
weak-headed men and women made it their occupation, and family scenes
and plays speedily surpassed the romances of chivalry in number. The
poet, nevertheless, exercised no less an influence, notwithstanding
his voluntary renunciation of his privilege to elevate the sinking
minds of his countrymen by the great memories of the past or by ideal
images, and his degradation of poetry to a mere palliation of the
weaknesses of humanity.


[Footnote 1: He was a friend of Grotius and is styled the father of
German poetry.--_Trans_.]

[Footnote 2: Of which an edition, much esteemed, was published by
Lessing and Ramler.]

[Footnote 3: Adam Elschlager or Olearius, an eminent traveller and
mathematician, a native of Anhalt. He became secretary to an embassy
sent to Russia and Persia by the duke of Holstein.--_Trans_.]



       *       *       *       *       *

PART XXII

THE GREAT WARS WITH FRANCE

CCXLVI. The French Revolution


In no other European state had despotism arrived at such a pitch as in
France; the people groaned beneath the heavy burdens imposed by the
court, the nobility, and the clergy, and against these two estates
there was no appeal, their tyranny being protected by the court, to
which they had servilely submitted. The court had rendered itself not
only unpopular, but contemptible, by its excessive license, which had
also spread downward among the higher classes; the government was,
moreover, impoverished by extravagance and weakened by an incapable
administration, the helm of state, instead of being guided by a
master-hand, having fallen under Louis XV. into that of a woman.

In France, where the ideas of modern philosophy emanated from the
court, they spread more rapidly than in any other country among the
tiers-etat, and the spirit of research, of improvement, of ridicule of
all that was old, naturally led the people to inquire into the
administration, to discover and to ridicule its errors. The natural
wit of the people, sharpened by daily oppression and emboldened by
Voltaire's unsparing ridicule of objects hitherto held sacred, found
ample food in the policy pursued by the government, and ridicule
became the weapon with which the tiers-etat revenged the tyranny of
the higher classes. As learning spread, the deeds of other nations,
who had happily and gloriously cast off the yoke of their oppressors,
became known to the people. The names of the patriots of Greece and
Rome passed from mouth to mouth, and their actions became the theme of
the rising generation; but more powerful than all in effect, was the
example of the North Americans, who, A.D. 1783, separated themselves
from their mother-country, England, and founded a republic. France,
intent upon weakening her ancient foe, lent her countenance to the new
republic, and numbers of her sons fought beneath her standard and bore
the novel ideas of liberty back to their native land, where they
speedily produced a fermentation among their mercurial countrymen.

Louis XV., a voluptuous and extravagant monarch, was succeeded by
Louis XVI., a man of refined habits, pious and benevolent in
disposition, but unpossessed of the moral power requisite for the
extermination of the evils deeply rooted in the government. His queen,
Marie Antoinette, sister to Joseph II., little resembled her brother
or her husband in her tastes, was devoted to gaiety, and, by her
example, countenanced the most lavish extravagance. The evil increased
to a fearful degree. The taxes no longer sufficed; the exchequer was
robbed by privileged thieves; an enormous debt continued to increase;
and the king, almost reduced to the necessity of declaring the state
bankrupt, demanded aid from the nobility and clergy, who, hitherto
free from taxation, had amassed the whole wealth of the empire.

The aristocracy, ever blind to their true interest, refused to comply,
and, by so doing, compelled the king to have recourse to the
tiers-etat. Accordingly, A.D. 1789, he convoked a general assembly, in
which the deputies sent by the citizens and peasant classes were not
only numerically equal to those of the aristocracy, but were greatly
superior to them in talent and energy, and, on the refusal of the
nobility and clergy to comply with the just demands of the tiers-etat,
or even to hold a common sitting with their despised inferiors, these
deputies declared the national assembly to consist of themselves
alone, and proceeded, on their own responsibility, to scrutinize the
evils of the administration and to discuss remedial measures. The
whole nation applauded the manly and courageous conduct of its
representatives. The Parisians, ever in extremes, revolted, and
murdered the unpopular public officers; the soldiers, instead of
quelling the rebellion, fraternized with the people. The national
assembly, emboldened by these first successes, undertook a thorough
transformation of the state, and, in order to attain the object for
which they had been assembled, that of procuring supplies, declared
the aristocracy subject to taxation, and sold the enormous property
belonging to the church. They went still further. The people was
declared the only true sovereign, and the king the first servant of
the state. All distinctions and privileges were abolished, and all
Frenchmen were declared equal.

The nobility and clergy, infuriated by this dreadful humiliation,
embittered the people still more against them by their futile
opposition, and, at length convinced of the hopelessness of their
cause, emigrated in crowds and attempted to form another France on the
borders of their country in the German Rhenish provinces. Worms and
Coblentz were their chief places of resort. In the latter city, they
continued their Parisian mode of life at the expense of the avaricious
elector of Treves, Clement Wenzel, a Saxon prince, by whose powerful
minister, Dominique, they were supported, and acted with unparalleled
impudence. They were headed by the two brothers of the French king,
who entered into negotiation with all the foreign powers, and they
vowed to defend the cause of the sovereigns against the people. Louis,
who for some time wavered between the national assembly and the
emigrants, was at length persuaded by the queen to throw himself into
the arms of the latter, and secretly fled, but was retaken and
subjected to still more rigorous treatment. The emigrants, instead of
saving, hurried him to destruction.

The other European powers at first gave signs of indecision. Blinded
by a policy no longer suited to the times, they merely beheld in the
French Revolution the ruin of a state hitherto inimical to them, and
rejoiced at the event. The prospect of an easy conquest of the
distracted country, however, ere long led to the resolution on their
part of actively interfering with its affairs. Austria was insulted in
the person of the French queen, and, as head of the empire, was bound
to protect the rights of the petty Rhenish princes and nobility, who
possessed property and ecclesiastical or feudal rights[1] on French
territory, and had been injured by the new constitution. Prussia,
habituated to despotism, came forward as its champion in the hope of
gaining new laurels for her unemployed army. A conference took place
at Pilnitz in Saxony, A.D. 1791, between Emperor Leopold and King
Frederick William, at which the Count D'Artois, the youngest brother
of Louis XVI., was present, and a league was formed against the
Revolution. The old ministers strongly opposed it. In Prussia,
Herzberg drew upon himself the displeasure of his sovereign by
zealously advising a union with France against Austria. In Austria,
Kaunitz recommended peace, and said that were he allowed to act he
would defeat the impetuous French by his "patience;" that, instead of
attacking France, he would calmly watch the event and allow her, like
a volcano, to bring destruction upon herself. Ferdinand of Brunswick,
field-marshal of Prussia, was equally opposed to war. His fame as the
greatest general of his time had been too easily gained, more by his
manoeuvres than by his victories, not to induce a fear on his side of
being as easily deprived of it in a fresh war; but the proposal of the
revolutionary party in France--within whose minds the memory of
Rossbach was still fresh--mistrustful of French skill, to nominate him
generalissimo of the troops of the republic, conspired with the
incessant entreaties of the emigrants to reanimate his courage; and he
finally declared that, followed by the famous troops of the great
Frederick, he would put a speedy termination to the French Revolution.

Leopold II. was, as brother to Marie Antoinette, greatly embittered
against the French. The disinclination of the Austrians to the reforms
of Joseph II. appears to have chiefly confirmed him in the conviction
of finding a sure support in the old system. He consequently strictly
prohibited the slightest innovation and placed a power hitherto
unknown in the hands of the police, more particularly in those of its
secret functionaries, who listened to every word and consigned the
suspected to the oblivion of a dungeon. This mute terrorism found many
a victim. This system was, on the death of Leopold II., A.D. 1792,[2]
publicly abolished by his son and successor, Francis II., but was ere
long again carried on in secret.

Catherine II., with the view of seizing the rest of Poland, employed
every art in order to instigate Austria and Prussia to a war with
France, and by these means fully to occupy them in the West. The
Prussian king, although aware of her projects, deemed the French an
easy conquest, and that in case of necessity his armies could without
difficulty be thrown into Poland. He meanwhile secured the popular
feeling in Poland in his favor by concluding, A.D. 1790, an alliance
with Stanislaus and giving his consent to the improved constitution
established in Poland, A.D. 1791. Herzberg had even counselled an
alliance with France and Poland, the latter was to be bribed with a
promise of the annexation of Galicia, against Austria and Russia; this
plan was, however, merely whispered about for the purpose of blinding
the Poles and of alarming Russia.

The bursting storm was anticipated on the part of the French by a
declaration of war, A.D. 1792, and while Austria still remained behind
for the purpose of watching Russia, Poland, and Turkey, and the
unwieldy empire was engaged in raising troops, Ferdinand of Brunswick
had already led the Prussians across the Rhine. He was joined by the
emigrants under Conde, whose army almost entirely consisted of
officers. The well-known manifesto, published by the duke of Brunswick
on his entrance into France, and in which he declared his intention to
level Paris with the ground should the French refuse to submit to the
authority of their sovereign, was composed by Renfner, the counsellor
of the embassy at Berlin. The emperor and Frederick William, persuaded
that fear would reduce the French to obedience, had approved of this
manifesto, which was, on the contrary, disapproved of by the duke of
Brunswick, on account of its barbarity and its ill-accordance with the
rules of war.[3] He did not, however, withdraw his signature on its
publication. The effect of this manifesto was that the French, instead
of being struck with terror, were maddened with rage, deposed their
king, proclaimed a republic, and flew to arms in order to defend their
cities against the barbarians threatening them with destruction. The
Orleans party and the Jacobins, who were in close alliance with the
German Illuminati, were at that time first able to gain the mastery
and to supplant the noble-spirited constitutionalists. A Prussian
baron, Anachasis Cloots,[4] was even elected in the national
convention of the French republic, where he appeared as the advocate
of the whole human race. These atheistical babblers, however, talked
to little purpose, but the national pride of the troops, hastily
levied and sent against the invaders, effected wonders.

The delusion of the Prussians was so complete that Bischofswerder said
to the officers, "Do not purchase too many horses, the affair will
soon be over"; and the duke of Brunswick remarked, "Gentlemen, not too
much baggage, this is merely a military trip."

The Prussians, it is true, wondered that the inhabitants did not, as
the emigrants had alleged they would, crowd to meet and greet them as
their saviors and liberators, but at first they met with no
opposition. The noble-spirited Lafayette, who commanded the main body
of the French army, had at first attempted to march upon Paris for the
purpose of saving the king, but the troops were already too much
republicanized and he was compelled to seek refuge in the Netherlands,
where he was, together with his companions, seized by command of the
emperor of Austria, and thrown into prison at Olmütz, where he
remained during five years under the most rigorous treatment merely on
account of the liberality of his opinions, because he wanted a
constitutional king, and notwithstanding his having endangered his
life and his honor in order to save his sovereign. Such was the hatred
with which high-minded men of strict principle were at that period
viewed, while at the same time a negotiation was carried on with
Dumouriez,[5] a characterless Jacobin intriguant, who had succeeded
Lafayette in the command of the French armies.

Ferdinand of Brunswick now became the dupe of Dumouriez, as he had
formerly been that of the emigrants. In the hope of a counter-
revolution in Paris, he procrastinated his advance and lost his most
valuable time in the siege of fortresses. Verdun fell: three beautiful
citizens' daughters, who had presented bouquets to the king of
Prussia, were afterward sent to the guillotine by the republicans as
traitoresses to their country. Ferdinand, notwithstanding this
success, still delayed his advance in the hope of gaining over the
wily French commander and of thus securing beforehand his triumph in a
contest in which his ancient fame might otherwise be at stake. The
impatient king, who had accompanied the army, spurred him on, but was,
owing to his ignorance of military matters, again pacified by the
reasons alleged by the cautious duke. Dumouriez, consequently, gained
time to collect considerable reinforcements and to unite his forces
with those under Kellermann of Alsace. The two armies came within
sight of each other at Valmy; the king gave orders for battle, and the
Prussians were in the act of advancing against the heights occupied by
Kellermann, when the duke suddenly gave orders to halt and drew off
the troops under a loud _vivat_ from the French, who beheld this
movement with astonishment. The king was at first greatly enraged, but
was afterward persuaded by the duke of the prudence of this
extraordinary step. Negotiations were now carried on with increased
spirit. Dumouriez, who, like Kaunitz, said that the French, if left to
themselves, would inevitably fall a prey to intestine convulsions,
also contrived to accustom the king to the idea of a future alliance
with France. The result of these intrigues was an armistice and the
retreat of the Prussian army, which dysentery, bad weather, and bad
roads rendered extremely destructive.

Austria was now, owing to the intrigues of the duke of Brunswick and
the credulity of Frederick William, left unprotected. As early as
June, old Marshal Lukner invaded Flanders, but, being arrested on
suspicion, was replaced by Dumouriez, who continued the war in the
Netherlands and defeated the stadtholder, Albert, duke of Saxon-
Tescheu (son-in-law to Maria Theresa, in consideration of which he had
been endowed with the principality of Teschen and the stadtholdership
at Brussels), at Jemappes, and the whole of the Netherlands fell into
the hands of the Jacobins, who, on the 14th of November, entered
Brussels, where they proclaimed liberty and equality. A few days later
(19th of November) the national convention at Paris proclaimed liberty
and equality to all nations, promised their aid to all those who
asserted their liberty, and threatened to compel those who chose to
remain in slavery to accept of liberty. As a preliminary, however, the
Netherlands, after being declared free, were ransacked of every
description of movable property, of which Pache, a native of Freiburg
in Switzerland, at that time the French minister of war, received a
large share. The fluctuations of the war, however, speedily recalled
the Jacobins. Another French army under Custines, which had marched to
the Upper Rhine, gained time to take a firm footing in Mayence.


[Footnote 1: To the archbishopric of Cologne belonged the bishopric of
Strasburg, to the archbishopric of Treves, the bishoprics of Metz,
Toul, Verdun, Nancy, St. Diez. Würtemberg, Baden, Darmstadt, Nassau,
Pfalz-Zweibrücken, Leiningen, Salm-Salm, Hohenlohe-Bartenstein,
Löwenstein, Wertheim, the Teutonic order, the knights of St. John, the
immediate nobility of the empire, the bishop of Basel, etc., had,
moreover, feudal rights within the French territory. The arch-
chancellor, elector of Mayence, made the patriotic proposal to the
imperial diet that the empire should, now that France had, by the
violation of the conditions of peace, infringed the old and shameful
treaties by which Germany had been deprived of her provinces, seize
the opportunity also on her part to refuse to recognize those
treaties, and to regain what she had lost. This sensible proposal,
however, found no one capable of carrying it into effect.]

[Footnote 2: His sons were the emperor Francis II., Ferdinand,
grandduke of Tuscany, the archduke Charles, celebrated for his
military talents, Joseph, palatine of Hungary, Antony, grand-master of
the Teutonic order, who died at Vienna, A.D. 1835, John, a general (he
lived for many years in Styria), the present imperial vicar-general of
Germany, and Rayner, viceroy of Milan.--_Trans_.]

[Footnote 3: Gentz, who afterward wrote so many manifestoes for
Austria, practically remarks that this celebrated manifesto was in
perfect conformity with the intent and that the only fault committed
was the non-fulfillment of the threats therein contained.]

[Footnote 4: From Cleve. He compared himself with Anacharsis the
Scythian, a barbarian, who visited Greece for the sake of learning. He
sacrificed the whole of his property to the Revolution. Followed by a
troop of men dressed in the costumes of different nations, of whom
they were the pretended representatives, he appeared before the
convention, from which he demanded the liberation of the whole world
from the yoke of kings and priests. He became president of the great
Jacobin club, and it was principally owing to his instigations that
the French, at first merely intent upon defence, were roused to the
attack and inspired with the desire for conquest.]

[Footnote 5: Dumouriez proposed as negotiator John Müller, who was at
that time teaching at Mayence, and who was in secret correspondence
with him. Vide Memoirs of a Celebrated Statesman, edited by Rüder.
Rüder remarks that John Müller is silent in his autobiography
concerning his correspondence with the Jacobins, for which he might,
under a change of circumstances, have had good reason.]



CCXLVII. German Jacobins


In Lorraine and Alsace, the Revolution had been hailed with delight by
the long-oppressed people. On the 10th of July, 1789, the peasants
destroyed the park of the bishop, Rohan, at Zabern, and killed immense
quantities of game. The chateaux and monasteries throughout the
country were afterward reduced to heaps of ruins, and, in Suntgau, the
peasants took especial vengeance on the Jews, who had, in that place,
long lived on the fat of the land. Mulhausen received a democratic
constitution and a Jacobin club. In Strasburg, the town-house was
assailed by the populace,[1] notwithstanding which, order was
maintained by the mayor, Dietrich. The unpopular bishop, Rohan, was
replaced by Brendel, against whom the people of Colmar revolted, and
even assaulted him in the church for having taken the oath imposed by
the French republic, and which was rejected by all good Catholics.
Dietrich, aided by the great majority of the citizens of Strasburg,
long succeeded in keeping the _sans culottes_ at bay, but was at
length overcome, deprived of his office, and guillotined at Paris,
while Eulogius Schneider, who had formerly been a professor at Bonn,
then court preacher to the Catholic duke, Charles of Wurtemberg,[2]
became the tyrant of Strasburg, and, in the character of public
accuser before the revolutionary tribunal, conducted the executions.
The national convention at Paris nominated as his colleague Monet, a
man twenty-four years of age, totally ignorant of the German language,
and who merely made himself remarkable for his open rapacity.[3] This
was, however, a mere prelude to far greater horrors. Two members of
the convention, St. Just and Lebas, unexpectedly appeared at
Strasburg, declared that nothing had as yet been done, ordered the
executions to take place on a larger scale, and, A.D. 1793, imposed a
fine of nine million livres on the already plundered city. The German
costume and mode of writing were also prohibited; every sign, written
in German, affixed to the houses, was taken down, and, finally, the
whole of the city council and all the officers of the national guard
were arrested and either exiled or guillotined, notwithstanding their
zealous advocacy of revolutionary principles, on the charge of an
understanding with Austria, without proof, on a mere groundless
suspicion, without being permitted to defend themselves, for the sole
purpose of removing them out of the way in order to replace them with
trueborn Frenchmen, a Parisian mob, who established themselves in the
desolate houses. Schneider and Brendel continued to retain their
places by means of the basest adulation. On the 21st of November, a
great festival was solemnized in the Minster, which had been converted
into a temple of Reason. The bust of Marat, the most loathsome of all
the monsters engendered by the Revolution, was borne in solemn
procession to the cathedral, before whose portals an immense fire was
fed with pictures and images of the saints, crucifixes, priests'
garments, and sacred vessels, among which Brendel hurled his mitre.
Within the cathedral walls, Schneider delivered a discourse in
controversion of the Christian religion, which he concluded by
solemnly renouncing; a number of Catholic ecclesiastics followed his
example. All the statues and ecclesiastical symbols were piled in a
rude heap at the foot of the great tower, which it was also attempted
to pull down for the promotion of universal equality, an attempt which
the extraordinary strength of the building and the short reign of
revolutionary madness fortunately frustrated. All the more wealthy
citizens had, meanwhile, been consigned either to the guillotine or to
prison, and their houses filled with French bandits, who revelled in
their wealth and dishonored their wives and daughters. Eulogius
Schneider was compelled to seek at midnight for a wife, suspicion
having already attached to him on account of his former profession. It
was, however, too late. On the following morning, he was seized and
sent to Paris, where he was guillotined. All ecclesiastics, all
schoolmasters, even the historian, Friese, were, without exception,
declared suspected and dragged to the prisons of Besançon, where they
suffered the harshest treatment at the hands of the commandant, Prince
Charles of Hesse. In Strasburg, Neumann, who had succeeded Schneider
as public accuser, raged with redoubled fury. The guillotine was ever
at work, was illuminated during the night time, and was the scene of
the orgies of the drunken bandits. On the advance of the French armies
to the frontiers, the whole country was pillaged.[4]

In other places, where the plundering habits of the French had not
cooled the popular enthusiasm, it still rose high, more particularly
at Mayence. This city, which had been rendered a seat of the Muses by
the elector, Frederick Charles, was in a state of complete
demoralization. On the loss of Strasburg, Mayence, although the only
remaining bulwark of Germany, was entirely overlooked. The war had
already burst forth; no imperial army had as yet been levied, and the
fortifications of Mayence were in the most shameful state of neglect.
Magazines had been established by the imperial troops on the left bank
of the Rhine, seemingly for the mere purpose of letting them fall into
the hands of Custine: but eight hundred Austrians garrisoned Mayence;
the Hessians, although numerically weak, were alone sincere in their
efforts for the defence of Germany. Custine's advanced guard no sooner
came in sight than the elector and all the higher functionaries fled
to Aschaffenburg. Von Gymnich, the commandant of Mayence, called a
council of war and surrendered the city, which was unanimously
declared untenable by all present with the exception of Eikenmaier,
who, notwithstanding, went forthwith over to the French, and of
Andujar, the commander of the eight hundred Austrians, with whom he
instantly evacuated the place. The Illuminati, who were here in great
number, triumphantly opened the gates to the French, A.D. 1792. The
most extraordinary scenes were enacted. A society, the members of
which preached the doctrines of liberty and equality, and at whose
head stood the professors Blau, Wedekind, Metternich, Hoffmann,
Forster, the eminent navigator, the doctors Böhmer and Stamm, Dorsch
of Strasburg, etc., chiefly men who had formerly been Illuminati, was
formed in imitation of the revolutionary Jacobin club at Paris.[5]
These people committed unheard-of follies. At first, notwithstanding
their doctrine of equality, they were distinguished by a particular
ribbon; the women, insensible to shame, wore girdles with long ends,
on which the word "liberty" was worked in front, and the word
"equality" behind. Women, girt with sabres, danced franticly around
tall trees of liberty, in imitation of those of France, and fired off
pistols. The men wore monstrous mustaches in imitation of those of
Custine, whom, notwithstanding their republican notions, they loaded
with servile flattery. As a means of gaining over the lower orders
among the citizens, who with plain good sense opposed their apish
tricks, the clubbists demolished a large stone, by which the
Archbishop Adolphus had formerly sworn, "You, citizens of Mayence,
shall not regain your privileges until this stone shall melt." This,
however, proved as little effective as did the production of a large
book, in which every citizen, desirous of transforming the electorate
of Mayence into a republic, was requested to inscribe his name.
Notwithstanding the threat of being treated, in case of refusal, as
slaves, the citizens and peasantry, plainly foreseeing that, instead
of receiving the promised boon of liberty, they would but expose
themselves to Custine's brutal tyranny, withheld their signatures, and
the clubbists finally established a republic under the protection of
France without the consent of the people, removed all the old
authorities, and, at the close of 1792, elected Dorsch, a remarkably
diminutive, ill-favored man, who had formerly been a priest,
president.

The manner in which Custine levied contributions in Frankfort on the
Maine,[6] was still less calculated to render the French popular in
Germany. Cowardly as this general was, he, nevertheless, told the
citizens of Frankfort a truth that time has, up to the present period,
confirmed. "You have beheld the coronation of the emperor of Germany?
Well! you will not see another."

Two Germans, natives of Colmar in Alsace, Rewbel and Hausmann, and a
Frenchman, Merlin, all three members of the national convention, came
to Mayence for the purpose of conducting the defence of that city.
They burned symbolically all the crowns, mitres, and escutcheons of
the German empire, but were unable to induce the citizens of Mayence
to declare in favor of the republic. Rewbel, infuriated at their
opposition, exclaimed that he would level the city to the ground, that
he should deem himself dishonored were he to waste another word on
such slaves. A number of refractory persons were expelled from the
city,[7] and, on the 17th of March, 1793, although three hundred and
seventy of the citizens alone voted in its favor, a Teuto-Rhenish
national convention, under the presidency of Hoffmann, was opened at
Mayence and instantly declared in favor of the union of the new
republic with France. Forster, in other respects a man of great
elevation of mind, forgetful, in his enthusiasm, of all national
pride, personally carried to Paris the scandalous documents in which
the French were humbly entreated to accept of a province of the German
empire. The Prussians, who had remained in Luxemburg (without aiding
the Austrians), meanwhile advanced to the Rhine, took Coblentz, which
Custine had neglected to garrison (a neglect for which he afterward
lost his head), repulsed a French force under Bournonville, when on
the point of forming a junction with Custine, at Treves, expelled
Custine from Frankfort,[8] and closely besieged Mayence, which, after
making a valiant defence, was compelled to capitulate in July.

Numbers of the clubbists fled, or were saved by the French, when
evacuating the city, in the disguise of soldiers. Others were arrested
and treated with extreme cruelty. Every clubbist, or any person
suspected of being one, received five and twenty lashes in the
presence of Kalkreuth, the Prussian general. Metternich was, together
with numerous others, carried off, chained fast between the horses of
the hussars, and, whenever he sank from weariness, spurred on at the
sabre point. Blau had his ears boxed by the Prussian minister,
Stein.[9] A similar reaction took place at Worms,[10] Spires, etc.

The German Jacobins suffered the punishment amply deserved by all
those who look for salvation from the foreigner. Those who had barely
escaped the vengeance of the Prussian on the Rhine were beheaded by
their pretended good friends in France. Robespierre, an advocate, who,
at that period, governed the convention, sent every foreigner who had
enrolled himself as a member of the Jacobin club to the guillotine, as
a suspicious person, a bloody but instructive lesson to all
unpatriotic German Gallomanists.[11]

The victims who fell on this occasion were, a prince of Salm-Kyrburg,
who had voluntarily republicanized his petty territory, Anacharsis
Cloots,[12] and the venerable Trenk, who had so long pined in
Frederick's prisons. Adam Lux, a friend of George Forster, was also
beheaded for expressing his admiration of Charlotte Corday, the
murderess of Marat. Marat was a Prussian subject, being a native of
Neufchâtel. Göbel von Bruntrut, uncle to Rengger,[13] a celebrated
character in the subsequent Swiss revolution, vicar-general of Basel,
a furious revolutionist, who had on that account been appointed bishop
of Paris, presented himself on the 6th of November, 1793, at the bar
of the convention as an associate of Cloots, Hebert, Chaumette, etc.,
cast his mitre and other insignia of office to the ground, and placing
the bonnet rouge on his head, solemnly renounced the Christian faith
and proclaimed that of "liberty and equality." The rest of the
ecclesiastics were compelled to imitate his example; the Christian
religion was formally abolished and the worship of Reason was
established in its stead. Half-naked women were placed upon the altars
of the desecrated churches and worshipped as "goddesses of Reason."
Göbel's friend, Pache, a native of Freiburg, a creature abject as
himself, was particularly zealous, as was also Proli, a natural son of
the Austrian minister, Kaunitz. Prince Charles of Hesse, known among
the Jacobins as Charles Hesse, fortunately escaped. Schlaberndorf,[14]
a Silesian count, who appears to have been a mere spectator, and
Oelsner, a distinguished author, were equally fortunate. These two
latter remained in Paris. Reinhard, a native of Wurtemberg, secretary
to the celebrated Girondin, Vergniaud, whom he is said to have aided
in the composition of his eloquent speeches, remained in the service
of France, was afterward ennobled and raised to the ministry. Felix
von Wimpfen, whom the faction of the Gironde (the moderates who
opposed the savage Jacobins) elected their general, and who,
attempting to lead a small force from Normandy against Paris, was
defeated and compelled to seek safety by flight. The venerable Lukner,
the associate of Lafayette, who had termed the great Revolution merely
"a little occurrence in Paris," was beheaded. The unfortunate George
Forster perceived his error and died of sorrow.[15] Among the other
Rhenish Germans of distinction, who had at that time formed a
connection with France, Joseph Görres brought himself, notwithstanding
his extreme youth, into great note at Coblentz by his superior
talents. He went to Paris as deputy of Treves and speedily became
known by his works (Rubezahl and the Red Leaf). He also speedily
discovered the immense mistake made by the Germans in resting their
hopes upon France. It was indeed a strange delusion to suppose the
vain and greedy Frenchman capable of being inspired with disinterested
love for all mankind, and it was indeed a severe irony, that, after
such repeated and cruel experience, after having for centuries seen
the French ever in the guise of robbers and pillagers, and after
breathing such loud complaints against the princes who had sold
Germany to France, that the warmest friends of the people should on
this occasion be guilty of similar treachery, and, like selecting the
goat for a gardener, entrust the weal of their country to the French.

The people in Germany too little understood the real motives and
object of the French Revolution, and were too soon provoked by the
predatory incursions of the French troops, to be infected with
revolutionary principles. These merely fermented among the literati;
the Utopian idea of universal fraternization was spread by
Freemasonry; numbers at first cherished a hope that the Revolution
would preserve a pure moral character, and were not a little
astonished on beholding the monstrous crimes to which it gave birth.
Others merely rejoiced at the fall of the old and insupportable
system, and numerous anonymous pamphlets in this spirit appeared in
the Rhenish provinces. Fichte, the philosopher, also published an
anonymous work in favor of the Revolution. Others again, as, for
instance, Reichard, Girtanner, Schirach, and Hoffmann, set themselves
up as informers, and denounced every liberal-minded man to the princes
as a dangerous Jacobin. A search was made for Crypto-Jacobins, and
every honest man was exposed to the calumny of the servile newspaper
editors. French republicanism was denounced as criminal,
notwithstanding the favor in which the French language and French
ideas were held at all the courts of Germany. Liberal opinions were
denounced as criminal, notwithstanding the example first set by the
courts in ridiculing religion, in mocking all that was venerable and
sacred. Nor was this reaction by any means occasioned by a burst of
German patriotism against the tyranny of France, for the treaty of
Basel speedily reconciled the self-same newspaper editors with France.
It was mere servility; and the hatred which, it may easily be
conceived, was naturally excited against the French as a nation, was
vented in this mode upon the patient Germans,[16] who were,
unfortunately, ever doomed, whenever their neighbors were visited with
some political chronic convulsion, to taste the bitter remedy. But few
of the writers of the day took a historical view of the Revolution and
weighed its irremediable results in regard to Germany, besides Gentz,
Rehberg, and the Baron von Gagern, who published an "Address to his
Countrymen," in which he started the painful question, "Why are we
Germans disunited?" The whole of these contending opinions of the
learned were, however, equally erroneous. It was as little possible to
preserve the Revolution from blood and immorality, and to extend the
boon of liberty to the whole world, as it was to suppress it by force,
and, as far as Germany was concerned, her affairs were too complicated
and her interests too scattered for any attempt of the kind to
succeed. A Doctor Faust, at Buckeburg, sent a learned treatise upon
the origin of trousers to the national convention at Paris, by which
Sansculottism had been introduced; an incident alone sufficient to
show the state of feeling in Germany at that time.

The revolutionary principles of France merely infected the people in
those parts of Germany where their sufferings had ever been the
greatest, as, for instance, in Saxony, where the peasantry, oppressed
by the game laws and the rights of the nobility, rose, after a dry
summer by which their misery had been greatly increased, to the number
of eighteen thousand, and sent one of their class to lay their
complaints before the elector, A.D. 1790. The unfortunate messenger
was instantly consigned to a madhouse, where he remained until 1809,
and the peasantry were dispersed by the military. A similar revolt of
the peasantry against the tyrannical nuns of Wormelen, in Westphalia,
merely deserves mention as being characteristic of the times. A revolt
of the peasantry, of equal unimportance, also took place in Buckeburg,
on account of the expulsion of three revolutionary priests, Froriep,
Meyer, and Rauschenbusch. In Breslau, a great émeute, which was put
down by means of artillery, was occasioned by the expulsion of a
tailor's apprentice, A.D. 1793.

In Austria, one Hebenstreit formed a conspiracy, which brought him to
the gallows, A.D. 1793. That formed by Martinowits, for the
establishment of the sovereignty of the people in Hungary and for the
expulsion of the magnates, was of a more dangerous character.
Martinowits was beheaded, A.D. 1793, with four of his associates.[17]
These attempts so greatly excited the apprehensions of the government
that the reaction, already begun on the death of Joseph II., was
brought at once to a climax; Thugut, the minister, established an
extremely active secret police and a system of surveillance, which
spread terror throughout Austria and was utterly uncalled for, no one,
with the exception of a few crack-brained individuals, being in the
slightest degree infected with the revolutionary mania.[18]

It may be recorded as a matter of curiosity that, during the
bloodstained year of 1793, the petty prince of Schwarzburg-Rudolstadt
held, as though in the most undisturbed time of peace, a magnificent
tournament, and the fetes customary on such an occasion.


[Footnote 1: Oberlin, the celebrated philologist, an ornament to
German learning, a professor at Strasburg, rescued, at the risk of his
life, a great portion of the ancient city archives, which had been
thrown out of the windows, by re-collecting the documents with the aid
of the students. On account of this sample of old German pedantry he
pined, until 1793, in durance vile at Metz, and narrowly escaped being
guillotined.]

[Footnote 2: At Bonn he had the impudence to say to the elector, "I
cannot pay you a higher compliment than by asserting you to be no
Catholic."--_Van Alpen_, _History of Rhenish Franconia_.]

[Footnote 3: He mulcted the brewers to the amount of 255,000 livres,
"on account of their well-known avarice," the bakers and millers to
that of 314,000, a publican to that of 40,000, a baker to that of
30,000, "because he was an enemy of mankind," etc.--_Vide Friese's
History of Strasburg_.]

[Footnote 4: It was asserted that the Jacobins had formed a plan to
depopulate the whole of Alsace, and to partition the country among the
bravest soldiers belonging to the republican armies.]

[Footnote 5: John Müller played a remarkable part. This thoroughly
deceptive person had, by his commendation of the ancient Swiss in his
affectedly written History of Switzerland, gained the favor of the
friends of liberty, and, at the same time, that of the nobility by his
encomium on the degenerate Swiss aristocracy. While with sentimental
phrases and fine words he pretended to be one of the noblest of
mankind, he was addicted to the lowest and most monstrous vices. His
immorality brought him into trouble in Switzerland, and the man, who
had been, apparently, solely inspired with the love of republican
liberty, now paid court, for the sake of gain, to foreign princes; the
adulation that had succeeded so well with all the lordlings of
Switzerland was poured into the ears of all the potentates of Europe.
He even rose to great favor at Rome by his flattery of the pope in a
work entitled "The Travels of the Popes." He published the most
virulent sophisms against the beneficial reforms of the emperor
Joseph, and cried up the League, for which he was well paid. He
contrived, at the same time, to creep into favor with the Illuminati.
He was employed by the elector of Mayence to carry on negotiations
with Dumouriez, got into office under the French republic, and
afterward revisited Mayence for the express purpose of calling upon
the citizens, at that time highly dissatisfied with the conduct of the
French, to unite themselves with France. Vide Forster's
Correspondence. Dumouriez shortly afterward went over to the
Austrians, and Müller suddenly appeared at Vienna, adorned with a
title and in the character of an Aulic councillor.]

[Footnote 6: While in his proclamations he swore by all that was
sacred (what was so to a Frenchman?) to respect the property of the
citizens and that France coveted no extension of territory.]

[Footnote 7: Forster was so blinded at that time by his enthusiasm
that he wrote, "all of those among us who refuse the citizenship of
France are to be expelled the city, even if complete depopulation
should be the result." He relates: "I summoned, at Grunstadt, the
Counts von Leiningen to acknowledge themselves citizens of France.
They protested against it, caballed, instigated the citizens peasantry
to revolt; one of my soldiers was attacked and wounded. I demanded a
reinforcement, took possession of both the castles, and placed the
counts under guard. To-day I sent them with an escort to Landau. This
has been a disagreeable duty, but we must reduce every opponent of the
good cause to obedience."]

[Footnote 8: Where the weak garrison left by the French was disarmed
by the workmen.]

[Footnote 9: Either the Prussian minister who afterward gained such
celebrity or one of his relations.]

[Footnote 10: Here Skekuly forced the German clubbists, with the lash,
to cut down the tree of liberty.]

[Footnote 11: Forster wrote from Paris, "Suspicion hangs over every
foreigner, and the essential distinctions which ought to be made in
this respect are of no avail." Thus did nature, by whom nations are
eternally separated, avenge herself on the fools who had dreamed of
universal equality.]

[Footnote 12: Cloots had incessantly preached war, threatened all the
kings of the earth with destruction, and, in his vanity, had even set
a price upon the head of the Prussian monarch. His object was the
union of the whole of mankind, the abolition of nationality. The
French were to receive a new name, that of "Universel." He preached in
the convention: "I have struggled during the whole of my existence
against the powers of heaven and earth. There is but one God, Nature,
and but one sovereign, mankind, the people, united by reason in one
universal republic. Religion is the last obstacle, but the time has
arrived for its destruction. J'occupe la tribune de l'univers. Je le
repète, le genre humain est Dieu, le _Peuple Dieu_. Quiconque a la
débilité de croire en Dieu ne sauroit avoir la sagacité de connaitre
le genre humain, le souverain unique," etc.--_Moniteur of_ 1793, No.
120. He also subscribed himself the "personal enemy of Je«us of
Nazareth."]

[Footnote 13: Whose nephew, the celebrated traveller, Rengger, was,
with Bonpland, so long imprisoned in Paraguay.]

[Footnote 14: He had been already imprisoned and was ordered to the
guillotine, but not being able to find his boots quickly enough, his
execution was put off until the morrow. During the night, Robespierre
fell, and his life was saved. He continued to reside at Paris, where
he never quitted his apartment, cherished his beard, and associated
solely with ecclesiastics.]

[Footnote 15: After an interview with his wife, Theresa (daughter to
the great philologist, Heyne of Grottingen), on the French frontier,
he returned to Paris and killed himself by drinking aquafortis. Vide
Crome's Autobiography. Theresa entered into association with Huber,
the journalist, whom she shortly afterward married. She gained great
celebrity by her numerous romances.]

[Footnote 16: The popular work "Huergelmer" relates, among other
things, the conduct of the Margrave of Baden toward Lauchsenring, his
private physician, whom he, on account of the liberality of his
opinions, delivered over to the Austrian general, who sentenced him to
the bastinado.]

[Footnote 17: Schnelter says: "The first great conspiracy was formed
in the vicinity of the throne, A.D. 1793. The chief conspirator was
Hebenstreit, the commandant, who held, by his office, the keys to the
arsenal, and had every place of importance in his power. His fellow
conspirators were Prandstätter, the magistrate and poet, who, by his
superior talents, led the whole of the magistracy, and possessed great
influence in the metropolis, Professor Riedl, who possessed the
confidence of the court, which he frequented for the purpose of
instructing some of the principal personages, and Häckel, the
merchant, who had the management of its pecuniary affairs. The rest of
the conspirators belonged to every class of society and were spread
throughout every province of the empire. The plan consisted in the
establishment of a democratic constitution, the first step to which
appears to have been an attempt against the life of the imperial
family. The signal for insurrection was to be given by firing the
immense wood-yards. The hearts of the people were to be gained by the
destruction of the government accounts. The discovery was made through
a conspiracy formed in Denmark. The chief conspirator was seized and
sent to the gallows. The rest were exiled to Munkatch, where several
of them had succumbed to the severity of their treatment and of the
climate when their release was effected by Bonaparte by the peace of
Campo Formio, which gave rise to the supposition that the Hebenstreit
conspiracy was connected with the French republicans and Jacobins. The
second conspiracy was laid in Hungary, by the bishop and abbot,
Josephus Ignatius Martinowits, a man whom the emperors Joseph,
Leopold, and Francis had, on account of his talent and energy, loaded
with favors. The plan was an _actionalis conspiratio_, for the purpose
of contriving an attempt against the sacred person of his Majesty the
king, the destruction of the power of the privileged classes in
Hungary, the subversion of the administration, and the establishment
of a democracy. The means for the execution of this project were
furnished by two secret societies." Huergelmer relates: "A certain Dr.
Plank somewhat thoughtlessly ridiculed the institution of the jubilee;
in order to convince him of its utility, he was sent as a recruit to
the Italian army, an act that was highly praised by the newspapers."
On the 22d of July, 1795, a Baron von Riedel was placed in the pillory
at Vienna for some political crime, and was afterward consigned to the
oblivion of a dungeon; the same fate, some days later, befell
Brand-Btetter, Fellesneck, Billeck, Ruschitiski (Ephemeridae of 1796).
A Baron Taufner was hanged at Vienna as a traitor to his country (E.
of 1796).]

[Footnote 18: "The increase of crime occasioned by the artifices of
the police, who thereby gained their livelihood, rendered an especial
statute, prohibitory of such measures, necessary in the new
legislature. Even the passing stranger perceived the disastrous effect
of their intrigues upon the open, honest character and the social
habits of the Viennese. The police began gradually to be considered as
a necessary part of the machine of government, a counterbalance to or
a remedy for the faults committed by other branches of the
administration. Large sums, the want of which was heavily felt in the
national education and in the army, were expended on this arsenal of
poisoned weapons."--_Hormayr's Pocket-Book_, 1832. Thugut is described
as a diminutive, hunchbacked old man, with a face resembling the mask
of a fawn and with an almost satanic expression.]



CCXLVIII. Loss of the Left Bank of the Rhine


The object of the Prussian king was either to extend his conquests
westward or, at all events, to prevent the advance of Austria. The war
with France claimed his utmost attention, and, in order to guard his
rear, he again attempted to convert Poland into a bulwark against
Russia.

His ambassador, Lucchesini, drove Stackelberg, the Russian envoy, out
of Warsaw, and promised mountains of gold to the Poles, who dissolved
the perpetual council associated by Russia with the sovereign, freed
themselves from the Russian guarantee; aided by Prussia, compelled the
Russian troops to evacuate the country; devised a constitution, which
they laid before the cabinets of London and Berlin; concluded an
offensive and defensive alliance with Prussia on the 29th of March,
1790, and, on the 3d of May, 1791, carried into effect the new
constitution ratified by England and Prussia, and approved of by the
emperor Leopold. During the conference, held at Pilnitz, the
indivisibility of Poland was expressly mentioned. The constitution was
monarchical. Poland was, for the future, to be a hereditary instead of
an elective monarchy, and, on the death of Poniatowsky, the crown was
to fall to Saxony. The modification of the peasants' dues and the
power conceded to the serf of making a private agreement with his lord
also gave the monarchy a support against the aristocracy.

Catherine of Russia, however, no sooner beheld Prussia and Austria
engaged in a war with France, than she commenced her operations
against Poland, declared the new Polish constitution French and
Jacobinical, notwithstanding its abolition of the _liberum veto_ and
its extension of the prerogatives of the crown, and, taking advantage
of the king's absence from Prussia, speedily regained possession of
the country. What was Frederick William's policy in this dilemma? He
was strongly advised to make peace with France, to throw himself at
the head of the whole of his forces into Poland, and to set a limit to
the insolence of the autocrat; but--he feared, should he abandon the
Rhine, the extension of the power of Austria in that quarter, and--
calculating that Catherine, in order to retain his friendship, would
cede to him a portion of her booty,[1] unhesitatingly broke the faith
he had just plighted with the Poles, suddenly took up Catherine's
tone, declared the constitution he had so lately ratified Jacobinical,
and despatched a force under Mollendorf into Poland in order to secure
possession of his stipulated prey. By the second partition of Poland,
which took place as rapidly, as violently, and, on account of the
assurances of the Prussian monarch, far more unexpectedly than the
first, Russia received the whole of Lithuania, Podolia, and the
Ukraine, and Prussia, Thorn and Dantzig, besides Southern Prussia
(Posen and Calisch). Austria, at that time fully occupied with France,
had no participation in this robbery, which was, as it were, committed
behind her back.

Affairs had worn a remarkably worse aspect since the campaign of 1792.
The French had armed themselves with all the terrors of offended
nationalism and of unbounded, intoxicating liberty. All the enemies of
the Revolution within the French territory were mercilessly
exterminated, and hundreds of thousands were sacrificed by the
guillotine, a machine invented for the purpose of accelerating the
mode of execution. The king was beheaded in this manner in the January
of 1793, and the queen shared a similar fate in the ensuing
October.[2] While Robespierre directed the executions, Carnot
undertook to make preparations for war, and, in the very midst of this
immense fermentation, calmly converted France into an enormous camp,
and more than a million Frenchmen, as if summoned by magic from the
clod, were placed under arms.

The sovereigns of Europe also prepared for war, and, A.D. 1793, formed
the first great coalition, at whose head stood England, intent upon
the destruction of the French navy. The English, aided by a large
portion of the French population devoted to the ancient monarchy,
attacked France by sea, and made a simultaneous descent on the
northern and southern coasts. The Spanish and Portuguese troops
crossed the Pyrenees; the Italian princes invaded the Alpine boundary;
Austria, Prussia, Holland, and the German empire threatened the
Rhenish frontier, while Sweden and Russia stood frowning in the
background. The whole of Christian Europe took up arms against France,
and enormous armies hovered, like vultures, around their prey.

The duke of Coburg commanded the main body of the Austrians in the
Netherlands, where he was at first merely opposed by the old French
army, whose general, Dumouriez, after unsuccessfully grasping at the
supreme power, entered into a secret agreement with the coalition,
allowed himself to be defeated at Aldenhovenl[3] and Neerwinden, and
finally deserted to the Austrians. At this moment, when the French
army was dispirited by defeat and without a leader, Coburg, who had
been reinforced by the English and Dutch under the duke of York,
might, by a hasty advance, have taken Paris by surprise, but both the
English and Austrian generals solely owed the command, for which they
were totally unfit, to their high birth, and Colonel Mack, the most
prominent character among the officers of the staff, was a mere
theoretician, who could cleverly enough conduct a campaign--upon
paper. Clairfait, the Austrian general, beat the disbanded French army
under Dampiere at Famars, but temporized instead of following up his
victory. Coburg, in the hope of the triumph of the moderate party, the
Girondins, published an extremely mild and peaceable proclamation,
which, on the fall of the Gironde, was instantly succeeded by one of a
more threatening character, which his want of energy and decision in
action merely rendered ridiculous. No vigorous attack was made, nor
was even a vigorous defence calculated upon, not one of the frontier
forts in the Netherlands, demolished by Joseph II., having been
rebuilt. The coalition foolishly trusted that the French would be
annihilated by their inward convulsions, while they were in reality
seizing the opportunity granted by the tardiness of their foes to levy
raw recruits and exercise them in arms. The principal error, however,
lay in the system of conquest pursued by both Austria and England.
Conde, Valenciennes, and all towns within the French territory taken
by Coburg, were compelled to take a formal oath of allegiance to
Austria, and England made, as the condition of her aid, that of the
Austrians for the conquest of Dunkirk. The siege of this place, which
was merely of importance to England in a mercantile point of view,
retained the armies of Coburg and York, and the French were
consequently enabled, in the meantime, to concentrate their scattered
forces and to act on the offensive. Ere long, Houchard and Jourdan
pushed forward with their wild masses, which, at first undisciplined
and unsteady, were merely able to screen themselves from the rapid and
sustained fire of the British by acting as tirailleurs (a mode of
warfare successfully practiced by the North Americans against the
serried ranks of the English), became gradually bolder, and finally,
by their numerical strength and republican fury, gained a complete
triumph. Houchard, in this manner, defeated the English at Hondscoten
(September 8th), and Jourdan drove the Austrians off the field at
Wattignies on the 16th of October, the day on which the French queen
was beheaded. Coburg, although the Austrians had maintained their
ground on every other point, resolved to retreat, notwithstanding the
urgent remonstrances of the youthful archduke, Charles, who had
greatly distinguished himself. During the retreat, an unimportant
victory was gained at Menin by Beaulieu, the imperial general.[4] His
colleague, Wurmser, nevertheless maintained with extreme difficulty
the line extending from Basel to Luxemburg, which formed the Prussian
outposts. A French troop under Delange advanced as far as
Aix-la-Chapelle, where they crowned the statue of Charlemagne with a
bonnet rouge.

Mayence was, during the first six months of this year, besieged by the
main body of the Prussian army under the command of Ferdinand, duke of
Brunswick. The Austrians, when on their way past Mayence to
Valenciennes with a quantity of heavy artillery destined for the
reduction of the latter place (which they afterward compelled to do
homage to the emperor), refusing the request of the king of Prussia
for its use _en passant_ for the reduction of Mayence, greatly
displeased that monarch, who clearly perceived the common intention of
England and Austria to conquer the north of France to the exclusion of
Prussia, and consequently revenged himself by privately partitioning
Poland with Russia, and refusing his assistance to General Wurmser in
the Vosges country. The dissensions between the allies again rendered
their successes null. The Prussians, after the conquest of Mayence,
A.D. 1793, advanced and beat the fresh masses led against them by
Moreau at Pirmasens, but Frederick William, disgusted with Austria and
secretly far from disinclined to peace with France, quitted the army
(which he maintained in the field, merely from motives of honor, but
allowed to remain in a state of inactivity), in order to visit his
newly acquired territory in Poland.

The gallant old Wurmser was a native of Alsace, where he had some
property, and fought meritoriously for the German cause, while so many
of his countrymen at that time ranged themselves on the side of the
French.[5] His position on the celebrated Weissenburg line was, owing
to the non-assistance of the Prussians, replete with danger, and he
consequently endeavored to supply his want of strength by striking his
opponents with terror. His Croats, the notorious _Rothmantler_, are
charged with the commission of fearful deeds of cruelty. Owing to his
system of paying a piece of gold for every Frenchman's head, they
would rush, when no legitimate enemy could be encountered, into the
first large village at hand, knock at the windows and strike off the
heads of the inhabitants as they peeped out. The petty principalities
on the German side of the Rhine also complained of the treatment they
received from the Austrians. But how could it be otherwise? The empire
slothfully cast the whole burden of the war upon Austria. Many of the
princes were terror-stricken by the French, while others meditated an
alliance with that power, like that formerly concluded between them
and Louis XIV. against the empire. Bavaria alone was, but with great
difficulty, induced to furnish a contingent. The weak imperial free
towns met with most unceremonious treatment at the hands of Austria.
They were deprived of their artillery and treated with the utmost
contempt. It often happened that the aristocratic magistracy, as, for
instance, at Ulm, sided with the soldiery against the citizens. The
slothful bishops and abbots of the empire were, on the other hand,
treated with the utmost respect by the Catholic soldiery. The
infringement of the law of nations by the arrest of Semonville, the
French ambassador to Constantinople, and of Maret, the French
ambassador to Naples, and the seizure of their papers on neutral
ground, in the Valtelline, by Austria, created a far greater
sensation.

The duke of Brunswick, who had received no orders to retreat, was
compelled, _bongre-malgre_, to hazard another engagement with the
French, who rushed to the attack. He was once more victorious, at
Kaiserslautern, over Hoche, whose untrained masses were unable to
withstand the superior discipline of the Prussian troops. Wurmser took
advantage of the moment when success seemed to restore the good humor
of the allies to coalesce with the Prussians, dragging the unwilling
Bavarians in his train. This junction, however, merely had the effect
of disclosing the jealousy rankling on every side. The greatest
military blunders were committed and each blamed the other. Landau
ought to and might have been rescued from the French, but this step
was procrastinated until the convention had charged Generals Hoche and
Pichegru, "Landau or death." These two generals brought a fresh and
numerous army into the field, and, in the very first engagements, at
Worth and Froschweiler, the Bavarians ran away and the Austrians and
Prussians were signally defeated. The retreat of Wurmser, in high
displeasure, across the Rhine afforded a welcome pretext to the duke
of Brunswick to follow his example and even to resign the command of
the army to Mollendorf. In this shameful manner was the left bank of
the Rhine lost to Germany.

In the spring of the ensuing year, 1794, the emperor Francis II.
visited the Netherlands in person, with the intent of pushing straight
upon Paris. This project, practicable enough during the preceding
campaign, was, however, now utterly out of the question, the more so
on account of the retreat of the Prussians. The French observed on
this occasion with well-merited scorn: "The allies are ever an idea, a
year and an army behindhand." The Austrians, nevertheless, attacked
the whole French line in March and were at first victorious on every
side, at Catillon, where Kray and Wernek distinguished themselves, and
at Landrecis, where the Archduke Charles made a brilliant charge at
the head of the cavalry. Landrecis was taken. But this was all.
Clairfait, whose example might have animated the inactive duke of
York, being left unsupported by the British, was attacked singly at
Courtray by Pichegru and forced to yield to superior numbers. Coburg
fought an extremely bloody but indecisive battle at Doornik (Tournay),
where Pichegru ever opposed fresh masses to the Austrian artillery.
Twenty thousand dead strewed the field. The youthful emperor,
discouraged by the coldness displayed by the Dutch, whom he had
expected to rise _en masse_ in his cause, returned to Vienna. His
departure and the inactivity of the British commander completely
dispirited the Austrian troops, and on the 26th of June, 1794,[6] the
duke of Coburg was defeated at Fleurus by Jourdan, the general of the
republic. This success was immediately followed by that of Pichegru,
not far from Breda, over the inefficient English general,[7] who
consequently evacuated the Netherlands, which were instantly overrun
by the pillaging French. And thus had the German powers,
notwithstanding their well-disciplined armies and their great plans,
not only forfeited their military honor, but also drawn the enemy,
and, in his train, anarchy with its concomitant horrors, into the
empire. The Austrians had rendered themselves universally unpopular by
their arbitrary measures, and each province remained stupidly
indifferent to the threatened pillage of its neighbor by the
victorious French. Jourdan but slowly tracked the retreating forces of
Coburg, whom he again beat at Sprimont, where he drove him from the
Maese, and at Aldenhoven, where he drove him from the Roer. Frederick,
Landgrave of Hesse-Cassel, capitulated at Maestricht, with ten
thousand men, to Kleber; and the Austrians, with the exception of a
small corps under the Count von Erbach, stationed at Düsseldorf,
completely abandoned the Lower Rhine.

The disasters suffered by the Austrians seem at that time to have
flattered the ambition of the Prussians, for Mollendorf suddenly
recrossed the Rhine and gained an advantage at Kaiserslautern, but
was, in July, 1794, again repulsed at Trippstadt, notwithstanding
which he once more crossed the Rhine in September, and a battle was
won by the Prince von Hohenlohe-Ingelfingen at Fischbach, but, on the
junction of Jourdan with Hoche, who had until then singly opposed him,
Mollendorf again, and for the last time, retreated across the Rhine.
The whole of the left bank of the Rhine, Luxemburg and Mayence alone
excepted, were now in the hands of the French. Resius, the Hessian
general, abandoned the Rheinfels with the whole garrison, without
striking a blow in its defence. He was, in reward, condemned to
perpetual imprisonment.[8] Jourdan converted the fortress into a
ruined heap. The whole of the fortifications on the Rhine were yielded
for the sake of saving Mannheim from bombardment.

In the Austrian Netherlands, the old government had already been
abolished, and the whole country been transformed into a Belgian
republic by Dumouriez. The reform of all the ancient evils, so vainly
attempted but a few years before by the noble-spirited emperor, Joseph
II., was successfully executed by this insolent Frenchman, who also
abolished with them all that was good in the ancient system. The city
deputies, it is true, made an energetic but futile resistance.[9]
After the flight of Dumouriez, fresh depredations were, with every
fresh success, committed by the French. Liege was reduced to the most
deplorable state of desolation, the cathedral and thirty splendid
churches were levelled with the ground by the ancient enemies of the
bishop. Treves was also mercilessly sacked and converted into a French
fortress.


[Footnote 1: Prussia chiefly coveted the possession of Dantzig, which
the Poles refused to give or the English to grant to him, and which he
could only seize by the aid of Russia.]

[Footnote 2: After having been long retained in prison, ill fed and
ill clothed, after supporting, with unbending dignity, the unmanly
insults of the republican mob before whose tribunal she was dragged.
The young dauphin expired under the ill-treatment he received from his
guardian, a shoemaker. His sister, the present Duchess d'Angouleme,
was spared.]

[Footnote 3: Where the peasantry, infuriated at the depredations of
the French, cast the wounded and the dead indiscriminately into a
trench.--_Benzenberg's Letters._ ]

[Footnote 4: The Hanoverian general, Hammerstein, and his adjutant
Scharnhorst, who afterward became so noted, made a gallant defence.
When the city became no longer tenable, they boldly sallied forth at
the head of the garrison and escaped.]

[Footnote 5: Rewbel, one of the five directors of the great French
republic, and several of the most celebrated French generals,
Germany's unwearied foes, were natives of Alsace, as, for instance,
the gallant Westermann, one of the first leaders of the republican
armies; the intrepid Kellermann, the soldiers' father; the immortal
Kleber, generalissimo of the French forces in Egypt, who fell by the
dagger of a fanatical Mussulman; and the undaunted Rapp, the hero of
Dantzig. The lion-hearted Ney, justly designated by the French as the
bravest of the brave, was a native of Lorraine. These were, one and
all, men of tried metal, but whose German names induce the demand,
"Why did they fight for France?" Wurmser belonged to the same old
Strasburg family which had given birth to Wurmser, the celebrated
court-painter of the emperor, Charles IV. ]

[Footnote 6: The Austrian generals Beaulieu, Quosdanowich, and the
Archduke Charles, who, at that period, laid the foundation to his
future fame, had pushed victoriously forward and taken Fleurus, when
the ill-tuned orders, as they are deemed, of the generalissimo Coburg
compelled them to retreat. Quosdanowich dashed his sabre furiously on
the ground and exclaimed, "The army is betrayed, the victory is ours,
and yet we must resign it. Adieu, thou glorious land, thou garden of
Europe, the house of Austria bids thee eternally adieu!" The French
had, before and during the action, made use of a balloon for the
purpose of watching the movements of the enemy.]

[Footnote 7: The worst spirit prevailed among the British troops; the
officers were wealthy young men, who had purchased their posts and
were, in the highest degree, licentious. Vide Dietfurth's Hessian
Campaigns.]

[Footnote 8: Peter Hammer, in his "Description of the Imperial Army,"
published, A.D. 1796, at Cologne, graphically depictures the sad state
of the empire. The imperial troops consisted of the dregs of the
populace, so variously arranged as to justify the remark of Colonel
Sandberg of Baden that the only thing wanting was their regular
equipment as jack-puddings. A monastery furnished two men; a petty
barony, the ensign; a city, the captain. The arms of each man differed
in calibre. No patriotic spirit animated these defenders of the
empire. An anonymous author remarks: "For love of one's country to be
felt, there must, first of all, be a country; but Germany is split
into petty useless monarchies, chiefly characterized by their
oppression of their subjects, by pride, slavery, and unutterable
weakness. Formerly, when Germany was attacked, each of her sons made
ready for battle, her princes were patriotic and brave. Now, may
Heaven have pity on the land; the princes, the counts, and nobles
march hence and leave their country to its fate. The Margrave of
Baden--I do not speak of the prince bishop of Spires and of other
spiritual lords whose profession forbids their laying hand to
sword--the Landgrave of Darmstadt and other nobles fled on the mere
report of an intended visit from the French, by which they plainly
intimated that they merely held sovereign rule for the purpose of
being fattened by their subjects in time of peace. Danger no sooner
appears than the miserable subject is left to his own resources.
_Germany is divided into too many petty states._ How can an elector of
the Pfalz, or indeed any of the still lesser nobility, protect the
country? Unity, moreover, is utterly wanting. The Bavarian regards the
Hessian as a stranger, not as his countryman. Each petty territory has
a different tariff, administration, and laws. The subject of one petty
state cannot travel half a mile into a neighboring one without leaving
behind him great part of his property. The bishop of Spires strictly
forbids his subjects to intermarry with those of any other state. And
patriotism is expected to result from these measures! The subject of a
despot, whose revenues exceed those of his neighbors by a few thousand
florins, looks down with contempt on the slave of a poorer prince.
Hence the boundless hatred between the German courts and their petty
brethren, hence the malicious joy caused by the mishaps of a
neighboring dynasty." Hence the wretchedness of the troops. "With the
exception of the troops belonging to the circle there were none to
defend the frontiers of the empire. Grandes battues, balls, operas,
and mistresses, swallowed up the revenue, not a farthing remained for
the erection of fortresses, the want of which was so deeply felt for
the defence of the frontiers."]

[Footnote 9: "How can France, with her solemn assurances of liberty,
arbitrarily interfere with the government of a country already
possessing a representative elected by the people? How can she
proclaim us as a free nation, and, at the same moment, deprive us of
our liberty? Will she establish a new mythology of nations, and divide
the different peoples on the face of the earth, according to their
strength, into nations and demi-nations?"--_Protest of the Provisional
Council of the City of Brussels. The President, Theodore Dotrenge._
"Every free nation gives to itself laws, does not receive them from
another."--_Protest of the City of Antwerp, President of the Council,
Van Dun._ "You confiscate alike public and private property. That have
even our former tyrants never ventured to do when declaring us rebels,
and you say that you bring to us liberty."--_Protest of the Hennegau._
The most copious account of the revolutionizing of the Netherlands is
contained in Rau's History of the Germans in France, and of the French
in Germany. Frankfort on the Maine, 1794 and 1795.]



CCXLIX. The Defection of Prussia--The Archduke Charles


Frederick William's advisers, who imagined the violation of every
principle of justice and truth an indubitable proof of instinctive and
consummate prudence, unwittingly played a high and hazardous game.
Their diplomatic absurdity, which weighed the fate of nations against
a dinner, found a confusion of all the solid principles on which
states rest as stimulating as the piquant ragouts of the great Ude.
Lucchesini, under his almost intolerable airs of sapience, as artfully
veiled his incapacity in the cabinet as Ferdinand of Brunswick did his
in the field, and to this may be ascribed the measures which but
momentarily and seemingly aggrandized Prussia and prepared her deeper
fall. Each petty advantage gained by Prussia but served to raise
against her some powerful foe, and finally, when placed by her policy
at enmity with every sovereign of Europe, she was induced to trust to
the shallow friendship of the French republic.

The Poles, taken unawares by the second partition of their country,
speedily recovered from their surprise and collected all their
strength for an energetic opposition. Kosciuszko, who had, together
with Lafayette, fought in North America in the cause of liberty, armed
his countrymen with scythes, put every Russian who fell into his hands
to death, and attempted the restoration of ancient Poland. How easily
might not Prussia, backed by the enthusiasm of the patriotic Poles,
have repelled the Russian colossus, already threatening Europe! But
the Berlin diplomatists had yet to learn the homely truth, that
"honesty is the best policy." They aided in the aggrandizement of
Russia, drew down a nation's curse upon their heads for the sake of an
addition to the territory of Prussia, the maintenance of which cost
more than its revenue, and violated the Divine commands during a
period of storm and convulsion, when the aid of Heaven was indeed
required. The ministers of Frederick William II. were externally
religious, but those of Frederick William I., by whom the Polish
question had been so justly decided, were so in reality.

The king led his troops in person into Poland. In June, 1794, he
defeated Kosciuszko's scythemen at Szczekociny, but met with such
strenuous opposition in his attack upon Warsaw as to be compelled to
retire in September.[1] On the retreat of the Prussian troops, the
Russians, who had purposely awaited their departure in order to secure
the triumph for themselves, invaded the country in great force under
their bold general, Suwarow, who defeated Kosciuszko, took him
prisoner, and besieged Warsaw, which he carried by storm. On this
occasion, termed by Reichardt "a peaceful and merciful entry of the
clement victor," eighteen thousand of the inhabitants of every age and
sex were cruelly put to the sword. The result of this success was the
third partition or utter annihilation of Poland. Russia took
possession of the whole of Lithuania and Volhynia, as far as the
Riemen and the Bug; Prussia, of the whole country west of the Riemen,
including Warsaw; Austria, of the whole country south of the Bug, A.D.
1795. An army of German officials, who earned for themselves not the
best of reputations, settled in the Prussian division: they were
ignorant of the language of the country, and enriched themselves by
tyranny and oppression. Von Treibenfeld, the counsellor to the
forest-board, one of Bischofswerder's friends, bestowed a number of
confiscated lands upon his adherents.

The ancient Polish feof of Courland was, in consequence of the
annihilation of Poland, incorporated with the Russian empire, Peter,
the last duke, the son of Biron, being compelled to abdicate, A.D.
1795.

Pichegru invaded Holland late in the autumn of 1794. The duke of York
had already returned to England. A line of defence was, nevertheless,
taken up by the British under Wallmoden, by the Dutch under their
hereditary stadtholder, William V. of Orange, and by an Austrian corps
under Alvinzi; the Dutch were, however, panic-struck, and negotiated a
separate treaty with Pichegru,[2] who, at that moment, solely aimed at
separating the Dutch from their allies; but when, in December, all the
rivers and canals were suddenly frozen, and nature no longer threw
insurmountable obstacles in his path, regardless of the negotiations
then pending in Paris, he unexpectedly took up arms, marched across
the icebound waters, and carried Holland by storm. With him marched
the anti-Orangemen, the exiled Dutch patriots, under General Daendels
and Admiral de Winter, with the pretended view of restoring ancient
republican liberty to Holland and of expelling the tyrannical Orange
dynasty.

The British (and some Hessian troops) were defeated at Thiel on the
Waal; Alvinzi met with a similar fate at Pondern, and was compelled to
retreat into Westphalia. Some English ships, which lay frozen up in
the harbor, were captured by the French hussars. A most manly
resistance was made; but no aid was sent from any quarter. Prussia,
who so shortly before had ranged herself on the side of the
stadtholder against the people, was now an indifferent spectator.
William V. was compelled to flee to England. Holland was transformed
into a Batavian republic. Hahn, Hoof, etc., were the first furious
Jacobins by whom everything was there formed upon the French model.
The Dutch were compelled to cede Maestricht, Venloo, and Vliessingen;
to pay a hundred millions to France, and, moreover, to allow their
country to be plundered, to be stripped of all the splendid works of
art, pictures, etc. (as was also the case in the Netherlands and on
the Rhine), and even of the valuable museum of natural curiosities
collected by them with such assiduity in every quarter of the globe.
These depredations were succeeded by a more systematic mode of
plunder. Holland was mercilessly drained of her enormous wealth. All
the gold and silver bullion was first of all collected; this was
followed by the imposition of an income-tax of six per cent, which was
afterward repeated, and was succeeded by an income-tax on a sliding
scale from three to thirty per cent. The British, at the same time,
destroyed the Dutch fleet in the Texel commanded by de Winter, in
order to prevent its capture by the French, and seized all the Dutch
colonies, Java alone excepted. The flag of Holland had vanished from
the seas.

In August, 1794, the reign of terror in France reached its close. The
moderate party which came into power gave hopes of a general peace,
and Frederick William II without loss of time negotiated a separate
treaty, suddenly abandoned the monarchical cause which he had formerly
so zealously upheld, and offered his friendship to the revolutionary
nation, against which he had so lately hurled a violent manifesto. The
French, with equal inconsistency on their part, abandoned the popular
cause, and, after having murdered their own sovereign and threatened
every European throne with destruction, accepted the alliance of a
foreign king. Both parties, notwithstanding the contrariety of their
principles and their mutual animosity, were conciliated by their
political interest. The French, solely bent upon conquest, cared not
for the liberty of other nations; Prussia, intent upon self-
aggrandizement, was indifferent to the fate of her brother sovereigns.
Peace was concluded between France and Prussia at Basel, April 5,
1795. By a secret article of this treaty, Prussia confirmed the French
republic in the possession of the whole of the left bank of the Rhine,
while France in return richly indemnified Prussia at the expense of
the petty German states. This peace, notwithstanding its manifest
disadvantages, was also acceded to by Austria, which, on this
occasion, received the unfortunate daughter of Louis XVI. in exchange
for Semonville and Maret, the captive ambassadors of the republic, and
the members of the Convention seized by Dumouriez. Hanover[3] and
Hesse-Cassel participated in the treaty and were included within the
line of demarcation, which France, on her side, bound herself not to
transgress.

The countries lying beyond this line of demarcation, the Netherlands,
Holland, and Pfalz-Juliers, were now abandoned to France, and Austria,
kept in check on the Upper Rhine, was powerless in their defence. In
this manner fell Luxemburg and Düsseldorf. All the Lower Rhenish
provinces were systematically plundered by the French under pretext of
establishing liberty and equality.[4] The Batavian republic was
permitted to subsist, but dependent upon France; Belgium was annexed
to France, A.D. 1795.

On the retreat of the Prussians, Mannheim was surrendered without a
blow by the electoral minister, Oberndorf, to the French. Wurmser
arrived too late to the relief of the city. Quosdanowich, his
lieutenant-general, nevertheless, succeeded in saving Heidelberg by
sheltering himself behind a great abatis at Handschuchsheion, whence
he repulsed the enemy, who were afterward almost entirely cut to
pieces by General Klenau, whom he sent in pursuit with the light
cavalry. General Boros led another Austrian corps across Nassau to
Ehrenbreitstein, at that time besieged by the French under their
youthful general, Marceau, who instantly retired. Wurmser no sooner
arrived in person than, attacking the French before Mannheim, he
completely put them to the rout and took General Oudinot prisoner.
Clairfait, at the same time, advanced unperceived upon Mayence, and
unexpectedly attacking the besieging French force, carried off one
hundred and thirty-eight pieces of heavy artillery. Pichegru, who had
been called from Holland to take the command on the Upper Rhine, was
driven back to the Vosges. Jourdan advanced to his aid from the Lower
Rhine, but his vanguard under Marceau was defeated at Kreuznach and
again at Meissenheim. Mannheim also capitulated to the Austrians. The
winter was now far advanced; both sides were weary of the campaign,
and an armistice was concluded. Austria, notwithstanding her late
success, was, owing to the desertion of Prussia, in a critical
position. The imperial troops also refused to act. The princes of
Southern Germany longed for peace. Even Spain followed the example of
Prussia and concluded a treaty with the French republic.

The consequent dissolution of the coalition between the German powers
had at least the effect of preventing the formation of a coalition of
nations against them by the French. Had the alliance between the
sovereigns continued, the French would, from political motives, have
used their utmost endeavors to revolutionize Germany; this project was
rendered needless by the treaty of Basel, which broke up the coalition
and confirmed France in the undisturbed possession of her liberties;
and thus it happened that Prussia unwittingly aided the monarchical
cause by involuntarily preventing the promulgation of the
revolutionary principles of France.

Austria remained unshaken, and refused either to betray the
monarchical cause by the recognition of a revolutionary democratical
government, or to cede the frontiers of the empire to the youthful and
insolent generals of the republic. Conscious of the righteousness of
the cause she upheld, she intrepidly stood her ground and ventured her
single strength in the mighty contest, which the campaign of 1796 was
to decide. The Austrian forces in Germany were commanded by the
emperor's brother, the Archduke Charles; those in Italy, by Beaulieu.
The French, on the other hand, sent Jourdan to the Lower Rhine, Moreau
to the Upper Rhine, Bonaparte to Italy, and commenced the attack on
every point with their wonted impetuosity.

The Austrians had again extended their lines as far as the Lower
Rhine. A corps under Prince Ferdinand of Würtemberg was stationed in
the Bergland, in the narrow corner still left between the Rhine and
the Prussian line of demarcation. Marceau forced him to retire as far
as Altenkirchen, but the Archduke Charles hastening to his assistance
encountered Jourdan's entire force on the Lahn near Kloster Altenberg,
and, after a short contest, compelled it to give way. A great part of
the Austrian army of the Rhine under Wurmser having been, meanwhile,
drawn off and sent into Italy, the archduke was compelled to turn
hastily from Jourdan against Moreau, who had just despatched General
Ferino across the Lake of Constance, while he advanced upon Strasburg.
A small Swabian corps under Colonel Raglowich made an extraordinary
defence in Kehl (the first instance of extreme bravery given by the
imperial troops at that time), but was forced to yield to numbers. The
Austrian general, Sztarray, was, notwithstanding the gallantry
displayed on the occasion, also repulsed at Sasbach; the Wurtemberg
battalion was also driven from the steep pass of the Kniebes,[5]
across which Moreau penetrated through the Black Forest into the heart
of Swabia, and had already reached Freudenstadt, when the Austrian
general, Latour, marched up the Murg. He was, however, also repulsed.
The Archduke Charles now arrived in person in the country around
Pforzheim (on the skirts of the Black Forest), and sent forward his
columns to attack the French in the mountains, but in vain; the French
were victorious at Rothensol and at Wildbad. The archduke retired
behind the Neckar to Cannstadt; his rearguard was pursued through the
city of Stuttgard by the vanguard of the French. After a short
cannonade, the archduke also abandoned his position at Cannstadt. The
whole of the Swabian circle submitted to the French. Wurtemberg was
now compelled to make a formal cession of Mumpelgard, which had been
for some time garrisoned by the French,[6] and, moreover, to pay a
contribution of four million livres; Baden was also mulcted two
millions, the other states of the Swabian circle twelve millions, the
clergy seven millions, altogether twenty-five million livres, without
reckoning the enormous requisition of provisions, horses, clothes,
etc. The archduke, in the meantime, deprived the troops belonging to
the Swabian circle of their arms at Biberach, on account of the peace
concluded by their princes with the French, and retired behind the
Danube by Donauwoerth. Ferino had, meanwhile, also advanced from
Huningen into the Breisgau and to the Lake of Constance, had beaten
the small corps under General Frõhlick at Herbolsheim and the remnant
of the French emigrants under Oonde at Mindelheim,[7] and joined
Moreau in pursuit of the archduke. His troops committed great havoc
wherever they appeared.[8]

Jourdan had also again pushed forward. The archduke had merely been
able to oppose to him on the Lower Rhine thirty thousand men under the
Count von Wartensleben, who, owing to Jourdan's numerical superiority,
had been repulsed across both the Lahn and Maine. Jourdan took
Frankfort by bombardment and imposed upon that city a contribution of
six millions. The Franconian circle also submitted and paid sixteen
millions, without reckoning the requisition of natural productions and
the merciless pillage.[9]

The Archduke Charles, too weak singly to encounter the armies of
Moreau and Jourdan, had, meanwhile, boldly resolved to keep his
opponents as long as possible separate, and, on the first favorable
opportunity, to attack one with the whole of his forces, while he kept
the other at bay with a small division of his army. In pursuance of
this plan, he sent Wartensleben against Jourdan, and, meanwhile, drew
Moreau after him into Bavaria, where, leaving General Latour with a
small corps to keep him in check at Rain on the Lech, he recrossed the
Danube at Ingolstadt with the flower of his army and hastily advanced
against Jourdan, who was thus taken unawares. At Teiningen, he
surprised the French avant-garde under Bernadotte, which he compelled
to retire. At Amberg, he encountered Jourdan, whom he completely
routed, A.D. 1796. The French retreated through the city, on the other
side of which they formed an immense square against the imperial
cavalry under Wernek; it was broken on the third charge, and a
terrible slaughter took place, three thousand of the French being
killed and one thousand taken prisoner. The peasantry had already
flown to arms, and assisted in cutting down the fugitives. Jourdan
again made a stand at Wurzburg, where Wernek stormed his batteries at
the head of his grenadiers and a complete rout ensued, September 3.
The French lost six thousand dead and two thousand prisoners. The
peasantry rose _en masse_, and hunted down the fugitives.[10] On the
Upper Rhone, Dr. Röder placed himself at the head of the peasantry,
but, encountering a superior French corps at Mellrichstadt, was
defeated and killed. The French suffered most in the Spessart, called
by them, on that account, La petite Vendee. The peasantry were here
headed by an aged forester named Philip Witt, and, protected by their
forests, exterminated numbers of the flying foe. The imperial troops
were also unremitting in their pursuit, again defeated Bernadotte at
Aschaffenburg and chased Jourdan through Nassau across the Rhine.
Marceau, who had vainly besieged Mayence, again made stand at
Allerheim, where he was defeated and killed.[11]

Moreau, completely deceived by the archduke, had, meanwhile, remained
in Bavaria. After defeating General Latour at Lechhausen, instead of
setting off in pursuit of the archduke and to Jourdan's aid, he was,
as the archduke had foreseen, attracted by the prospect of gaining a
rich booty, in an opposite direction, toward Munich. Bavaria submitted
to the French, paid ten millions, and ceded twenty of the most
valuable pictures belonging to the Dusseldorf and Munich galleries.
The news of Jourdan's defeat now compelled Moreau to beat a rapid
retreat in order to avoid being cut off by the victorious archduke.
Latour set off vigorously in pursuit, came up with him at Ulm and
again at Ravensberg, but was both times repulsed, owing to his
numerical inferiority. A similar fate awaited the still smaller
imperial corps led against the French by Nauendorf at Rothweil and by
Petrosch at Villingen, and Moreau led the main body of his army in
safety through the deep narrow gorges of the Hollenthal in the Black
Forest to Freiburg in the Breisgau, where he came upon the archduke,
who, amid the acclamations of the armed peasantry (by whom the
retreating French[12] were, as in the Spessart, continually harassed
in their passage through the Black Forest), had hurried, but too late,
to his encounter. Moreau had already sent two divisions of his army,
under Ferino and Desaix, across the Rhine at Huningen and Breisach,
and covered their retreat with the third by taking up a strong
position at Schliesgen, not far from Freiburg, whence, after braving a
first attack, he escaped during the night to Huningen. This retreat,
in which he had saved his army with comparatively little loss, excited
general admiration, but in Italy there was a young man who scornfully
exclaimed, "It was, after all, merely a retreat!"


[Footnote 1: The following trait proves the complete stagnation of
chivalric feeling in the army. Szekuli, colonel of the Prussian
hussars, condemned several patriotic ladies, belonging to the highest
Polish families at Znawrazlaw, to be placed beneath the gallows, in
momentary expectation of death, until it, at length, pleased him to
grant a reprieve, couched in the most offensive and indecent terms.]

[Footnote 2: A most disgraceful treaty. William's enemies, the
fugitive patriots, had promised the French, in return for their aid,
sixty million florins of the spoil of their country. William, upon
this, promised to pay to France a subsidy of eighty millions, in order
to guarantee the security of his frontier, but was instantly outbid by
the base and self-denominated patriots, who offered to France a
hundred million florins in order to induce her to invade their
country.]

[Footnote 3: Von Berlepsch, the councillor of administration, proposed
to the Calemberg diet to declare their neutrality in defiance of
England, and, in case of necessity, to place "the Calemberg Nation"
under the protection of France.--Havemomn.]

[Footnote 4: "Wherever these locusts appear, everything, men, cattle,
food, property, etc., is carried off. These thieves seize everything
convertible into money. Nothing is safe from them. At Cologne, they
filled a church with coffee and sugar. At Aix-la-Chapelle, they
carried off the finest pictures of Rubens and Van Dyck, the pillars
from the altar, and the marble-slab from the tomb of Charlemagne, all
of which they sold to some Dutch Jews."--_Posselt's Annals of 1796_.
At Cologne, the nuns were instantly emancipated from their vows, and
one of the youngest and most beautiful afterward gained great
notoriety as a barmaid at an inn. This scandalous story is related by
Klebe in his Travels on the Rhine. In Bonn, Gleich, a man who had
formerly been a priest, placed himself at the head of the French
rabble and planted trees of liberty. He also gave to the world a
decade, as he termed his publication.--_Müller_, _History of Bonn_.
"The French proclaimed war against the palaces and peace to the huts,
but no hut was too mean to escape the rapacity of these birds of prey.
The first-fruits of liberty was the pillage of every corner."--
_Schwaben's History of Siegburg_. The brothers Boisserée'e afterward
collected a good many of the church pictures, at that period carried
away from Cologne and more particularly from the Lower Rhine. They now
adorn Munich and form the best collection of old German paintings now
existing.]

[Footnote 5: "Had Würtemberg possessed but six thousand well-organized
troops, the position on the Roszbuhl might have been maintained, and
the country have been saved. The millions since paid by Würtemberg,
and which she may still have to pay, would have been spared."--
_Appendix to the History of the Campaign of 1796._]

[Footnote 6: The duke, Charles, had, in 1791, visited Paris, donned
the national cockade, and bribed Mirabeau with a large sum of money to
induce the French government to purchase Mümpelgard from him. The
French, however, were quite as well aware as the duke that they would
ere long possess it gratis.]

[Footnote 7: Moreau generously allowed all his prisoners, who, as
ex-nobles, were destined to the guillotine, to escape.]

[Footnote 8: Armbruster's "Register of French Crime" contains as
follows: "Here and there, in the neighboring towns, there were
certainly symptoms of an extremely favorable disposition toward the
French, which would ill deserve a place in the annals of German
patriotism and of German good sense. This disposition was fortunately
far from general. The appearance of the French in their real
character, and the barbarous excesses and heavy contributions by which
they rendered the people sensible of their presence, speedily effected
their conversion." The French, it is true, neither murdered the
inhabitants nor burned the villages as they had during the previous
century in the Pfalz, but they pillaged the country to a greater
extent, shamefully abused the women, and desecrated the churches.
Their license and the art with which they extorted the last penny from
the wretched people surpassed all belief. "Not satisfied with robbing
the churches, they especially gloried in giving utterance to the most
fearful blasphemies, in destroying and profaning the altars, in
overthrowing the statues of saints, in treading the host beneath their
feet or casting it to dogs.--At the village of Berg in Weingarten,
they set up in the holy of holies the image of the devil, which they
had taken from the representation of the temptation of the Saviour in
the wilderness. In the village of Boos, they roasted a crucifix before
a fire."--_Vide Hurter's Memorabilia, concerning the French allies in
Swabia, who attempted to found an Alemannic Republic. Schaffhausen,
1840_. Moreau reduced them to silence by declaring, "I have no need of
a revolution to the rear of my army."]

[Footnote 9: Notwithstanding Jourdan's proclamation, promising
protection to all private property, Würzburg, Schweinfurt, Bamberg,
etc., were completely pillaged. The young girls fled in hundreds to
the woods. The churches were shamelessly desecrated. When mercy in
God's name was demanded, the plunderers replied, "God! we are God!"
They would dance at night-time around a bowl of burning brandy, whose
blue flames they called their être suprème.--_The French in Franconia,
by Count Soden._]

[Footnote 10: "They deemed the assassination of a foreigner a
meritorious work."--_Ephemeridae of 1797._ "The peasantry, roused to
fury by the disorderly and cruel French, whose excesses exceeded all
belief, did not even extend mercy to the wounded; and the French, with
equal barbarity, set whole villages on fire."--_Appendix to the
Campaign of 1796_].

[Footnote 11: When scarcely in his twenty-seventh year. He was one of
the most distinguished heroes of the Revolution, and as remarkable for
his generosity to his weaker foes as for his moral and chivalric
principles. The Archduke Charles sent his private physicians to attend
upon him, and, on the occasion of his burial, fired a salvo
simultaneously with that of the French stationed on the opposite bank
of the Rhine.--_Mussinan_.]

[Footnote 12: The peasants of the Artenau and the Kinzigthal were
commanded by a wealthy farmer, named John Baader. Besides several
French generals, Hausmann, the commissary of the government, who
accompanied Moreau's army, was taken prisoner.--_Mussinan, History of
the French War of 1796_ etc. A decree, published on the 18th of
September by Frederick Eugene, Duke of Würtemberg, in which he
prohibited his subjects from taking part in the pursuit of the French,
is worthy of remark.]


CCL. Bonaparte


This youth was Napoleon Bonaparte, the son of a lawyer in the island
of Corsica, a man of military genius, who, when a mere lieutenant, had
raised the siege of Toulon, had afterward served the Directory by
dispersing the old Jacobins with his artillery in the streets of
Paris, and had been intrusted with the command of the army in Italy.
Talents, that under a monarchy would have been doomed to obscurity,
were, under the French republic, called into notice, and men of
decided genius could, amid the general competition, alone attain to
power or retain the reins of government.

Bonaparte was the first to take the field. In the April of 1796, he
pushed across the Alps and attacked the Austrians. Beaulieu, a good
general, but too old for service (he was then seventy-two, Napoleon
but twenty-seven), had incautiously extended his lines too far, in
order to preserve a communication with the English fleet in the
Mediterranean. Bonaparte defeated his scattered forces at Montenotte
and Millesimo, between the 10th and 15th of April, and, turning
sharply upon the equally scattered Sardinian force, beat it in several
engagements, the principal of which took place at Mondovi, between the
19th and 22d of April. An armistice was concluded with Sardinia, and
Beaulieu, who vainly attempted to defend the Po, was defeated on the
7th and 8th of May, at Fombio. The bridge over the Adda at Lodi, three
hundred paces in length, extremely narrow and to all appearance
impregnable, defended by his lieutenant Sebottendorf, was carried by
storm, and, on the 15th of May, Bonaparte entered Milan. Beaulieu took
up a position behind the Mincio, notwithstanding which, Bonaparte
carried the again ill-defended bridge at Borghetto by storm. While in
this part of the country, he narrowly escaped being taken prisoner by
a party of skirmishers, and was compelled to fly half-naked, with but
one foot booted, from his night quarters at St. Georgio.

Beaulieu now withdrew into the Tyrol. Sardinia made peace, and terms
were offered by the pope and by Naples. Leghorn was garrisoned with
French troops; all the English goods lying in this harbor, to the
value of twelve million pounds, were confiscated. The strongly
fortified city of Mantua, defended by the Austrians under their
gallant leader, Canto d'Irles, was besieged by Bonaparte. A fresh body
of Austrian troops under Wurmser crossed the mountains to their
relief; but Wurmser, instead of advancing with his whole force,
incautiously pressed forward with thirty-two thousand men through the
valley of the Adige, while Quosdanowich led eighteen thousand along
the western shore of the Lake of Garda. Bonaparte instantly perceived
his advantage, and, attacking the latter, defeated him on the 3d of
August, at Lonato. Wurmser had entered Mantua unopposed on the 1st,
but, setting out in search of the enemy, was unexpectedly attacked, on
the 5th of August, by the whole of Bonaparte's forces at Castiglione,
and compelled, like Quosdanowich, to seek shelter in the Tyrol. This
senseless mode of attack had been planned by Weirotter, a colonel
belonging to the general staff. Wurmser now received reinforcements,
and Laner, the general of the engineers, was intrusted with the
projection of a better plan. He again weakened the army by dividing
his forces. In the beginning of September, Davidowich penetrated with
twenty thousand men through the valley of the Adige and was defeated
at Roveredo, and Wurmser, who had, meanwhile, advanced with an army of
twenty-six thousand men through the valley of the Brenta, met with a
similar fate at Bassano. He, nevertheless, escaped the pursuit of the
victorious French by making a circuit, and threw himself by a forced
march into Mantua, where he was, however, unable to make a lengthy
resistance, the city being over-populated and provisions scarce. A
fresh army of twenty-eight thousand men, under Alvinzi, sent to his
relief[1] through the valley of the Brenta, was attacked in a strong
position at Arcole, on the river Alpon. Two dams protected the bank
and a narrow bridge, which was, on the 15th of November, vainly
stormed by the French, although General Augereau and Bonaparte, with
the colors in his hand, led the attack. On the following day, Alvinzi
foolishly crossed the bridge and took up an exposed position, in which
he was beaten, and, on the third day, he retreated. Davidowich,
meanwhile, again advanced from the Tyrol and gained an advantage at
Rivoli, but was also forced to retreat before Bonaparte. Wurmser, when
too late, made a sally, which was, consequently, useless. The campaign
was, nevertheless, for the fifth time, renewed. Alvinzi collected
reinforcements and again pushed forward into the valley of the Adige,
but speedily lost courage and suffered a fearful defeat, in which
twenty thousand of his men were taken prisoners, on the 14th and 15th
of January, A.D. 1797, at Rivoli. Provera, on whom he had relied for
assistance from Padua, was cut off and taken prisoner with his entire
corps. Wurmser capitulated at Mantua with twenty-one thousand men.

The spring of 1797 had scarcely commenced when Bonaparte was already
pushing across the Alps toward Vienna. Hoche, at the same time, again
attacked the Lower and Moreau the Upper Rhine. Bonaparte, the nearest
and most dangerous foe, was opposed by the archduke, whose army,
composed of the remains of Alvinzi's disbanded and discouraged troops,
called forth the observation from Bonaparte, "Hitherto I have defeated
armies without generals, now I am about to attack a general without an
army!" A battle took place at Tarvis, amid the highest mountains,
whence it was afterward known as "the battle above the clouds." The
archduke, with a handful of Hungarian hussars, valiantly defended the
pass against sixteen thousand French under Massena, nor turned to fly
until eight only of his men remained. Generals Bayalich and Ocskay,
instead of supporting him, had yielded. The archduke again collected
five thousand men around him at Glogau and opposed the advance of the
immensely superior French force until two hundred and fifty of his men
alone remained. The conqueror of Italy rapidly advanced through Styria
upon Vienna. Another French corps under Joubert had penetrated into
the Tyrol, but had been so vigorously assailed at Spinges by the brave
peasantry[2] as to be forced to retire upon Bonaparte's main body,
with which he came up at Villach, after losing between six and eight
thousand men during his retreat through the Pusterthal. The rashness
with which Bonaparte, leaving the Alps to his rear and regardless of
his distance from France, penetrated into the enemy's country, had
placed him in a position affording every facility for the Austrians,
by a bold and vigorous stroke, to cut him off and take him prisoner.
They had garrisoned Trieste and Fiume on the Adriatic and formed an
alliance with the republic of Venice, at that time well supplied with
men, arms, and gold. A great insurrection of the peasantry, infuriated
by the pillage of the French troops, had broken out at Bergamo. The
gallant Tyrolese, headed by Count Lehrbach, and the Hungarians, had
risen en masse. The victorious troops of the Archduke Charles were en
route from the Rhine, and Mack had armed the Viennese and the
inhabitants of the thickly-populated neighborhood of the metropolis.
Bonaparte was lost should the archduke's plan of operations meet with
the approbation of the Viennese cabinet, and, perfectly aware of the
fact, he made proposals of peace under pretence of sparing unnecessary
bloodshed. The imperial court, stupefied by the late discomfiture in
Italy, instead of regarding the proposals of the wily Frenchman as a
confession of embarrassment, and of assailing him with redoubled
vigor, acceded to them, and, on the 18th of April, Count Cobenzl,
Thugut's successor, concluded the preliminaries of peace at Leoben, by
which the French, besides being liberated from their dangerous
position, were recognized as victors. The negotiations of peace were
continued at the chateau of Campo Formio, where the Austrians somewhat
regained courage, and Count Cobenzl[3] even ventured to refuse some of
the articles proposed. Bonaparte, irritated by opposition, dashed a
valuable cup, the gift of the Russian empress, violently to the
ground, exclaiming, "You wish for war? Well! you shall have it, and
your monarchy shall be shattered like that cup." The armistice was not
interrupted. Hostilities were even suspended on the Rhine. The
archduke had, before quitting that river, gained the _tétes de pont_
of Strasburg (Kehl) and of Huningen, besides completely clearing the
right bank of the Rhine of the enemy. The whole of these advantages
were again lost on his recall to take the field against Napoleon. The
Saxon troops, which had, up to this period, steadily sided with
Austria, were recalled by the elector. Swabia, Franconia, and Bavaria
were intent upon making peace with France. Baron von Fahnenberg, the
imperial envoy at Ratisbon, bitterly reproached the Protestant estates
for their evident inclination to follow the example of Prussia by
siding with the French and betraying their fatherland to their common
foe, but, on applying more particularly for aid to the spiritual
princes, who were exposed to the greatest danger, he found them
equally lukewarm. Each and all refused to furnish troops or to pay a
war tax. The imperial troops were, consequently, compelled to enforce
their maintenance, and naturally became the objects of popular hatred.
In this wretched manner was the empire defended! The petty imperial
corps on the Rhine were, meanwhile, compelled to retreat before an
enemy vastly their superior in number. Wernek, attempting with merely
twenty-two thousand men to obstruct the advance of an army of
sixty-five thousand French under Hoche, was defeated at Neuwied and
deprived of his command.[4] Sztarray, who charged seven times at the
head of his men, was also beaten by Moreau at Kehl and Diersheim. At
this conjuncture, the armistice of Leoben was published.

A peace, based on the terms proposed at Leoben, was formally concluded
at Campo Formio, October 17, 1797. The triumph of the French republic
was confirmed, and ancient Europe received a new form. The object for
which the sovereigns of France had for centuries vainly striven was
won by the monarchless nation; France gained the preponderance in
Europe. Italy and the whole of the left bank of the Rhine were
abandoned to her arbitrary rule, and this fearful loss, far from
acting as a warning to Germany and promoting her unity, merely
increased her internal dissensions and offered to the French republic
an opportunity for intervention, of which it took advantage for
purposes of gain and pillage.

The principal object of the policy of Bonaparte and of the French
Directory, at that period, was, by rousing the ancient feelings of
enmity between Austria and Prussia, to eternalize the disunion between
those two monarchies. Bonaparte, after effectuating the peace by means
of terror, loaded Austria with flattery. He flattered her religious
feelings by the moderation of his conduct in Italy toward the pope,
notwithstanding the disapprobation manifested by the genuine French
republicans, and her interests by the offer of Venice in compensation
for the loss of the Netherlands, and, making a slight side-movement
against that once powerful and still wealthy republic, reduced it at
the first blow, nay, by mere threats, to submission; so deeply was the
ancient aristocracy here also fallen. The cession of Venice to the
emperor was displeasing to the French republicans. They were, however,
pacified by the delivery of Lafayette, who had been still detained a
prisoner in Austria after the treaty of Basel. Napoleon said in
vindication of his policy, "I have merely lent Venice to the emperor,
he will not keep her long." He, moreover, gratified Austria by the
extension of her western frontier, so long the object of her ambition,
by the possession of the archbishopric of Salzburg and of a part of
Bavaria with the town of Wasserburg.[5] The sole object of these
concessions was provisionally to dispose Austria in favor of
France,[6] and to render Prussia's ancient jealousy of Austria
implacable.[7] Hence the secret articles of peace by which France and
Austria bound themselves not to grant any compensation to Prussia.
Prussia was on her part, however, resolved not to be the loser, and,
in the summer of 1797, took forcible possession of the imperial free
town of Nuremberg, notwithstanding her declaration made just three
years previously through Count Soden to the Franconian circle, "that
the king had never harbored the design of seeking a compensation at
the expense of the empire, whose constitution had ever been sacred in
his eyes!" and to the empire, "He deemed it beneath his dignity to
refute the reports concerning Prussia's schemes of aggrandizement,
oppression, and secularization." Prussia also extended her possessions
in Franconia[8] and Westphalia, and Hesse-Cassel imitated her example
by the seizure of a part of Schaumburg-Lippe. The diet energetically
remonstrated, but in vain. Pamphlets spoke of the Prussian reunion-
chambers opened by Hardenberg in Franconia. An attempt was, however,
made to console the circle of Franconia by depicturing the far worse
sufferings of that of Swabia under the imperial contributions. The
petty Estates of the empire stumbled, under these circumstances, upon
the unfortunate idea "that the intercession of the Russian court
should be requested for the maintenance of the integrity of the German
empire and for that of her constitution"; the intercession of the
Russian court, which had so lately annihilated Poland!

Shortly after this, A.D. 1797, Frederick William II., who had, on his
accession to the throne, found seventy-two millions of dollars in the
treasury, expired, leaving twenty-eight millions of debts. His son,
Frederick William III., placed the Countess Lichtenau under arrest,
banished Wollner, and abolished the unpopular monopoly in tobacco, but
retained his father's ministers and continued the alliance, so
pregnant with mischief, with France.--This monarch, well-meaning and
destined to the severest trials, educated by a peevish valetudinarian
and ignorant of affairs, was first taught by bitter experience the
utter incapacity of the men at that time at the head of the
government, and after, as will be seen, completely reforming the
court, the government, and the army, surrounded himself with men, who
gloriously delivered Prussia and Germany from all the miseries and
avenged all the disgrace, which it is the historian's sad office to
record.

Austria, as Prussia had already done by the treaty of Basel, also
sacrificed, by the peace of Campo Formio, the whole of the left bank
of the Rhine and abandoned it to France, the loss thereby suffered by
the Estates of the empire being indemnified by the secularization of
the ecclesiastical property in the interior of Germany and by the
prospect of the seizure of the imperial free towns. Mayence was ceded
without a blow to France. Holland was forgotten. The English, under
pretext of opposing France, destroyed, A.D. 1797, the last Dutch
fleet, in the Texel, though not without a heroic and determined
resistance on the part of the admirals de Winter and Reintjes, both of
whom were severely wounded, and the latter died in captivity in
England. Holland was formed into a Batavian, Genoa into a Ligurian,
Milan with the Valtelline (from which the Grisons was severed) into a
Cisalpine, republic. Intrigues were, moreover, set on foot for the
formation of a Roman and Neapolitan republic in Italy and of a Rhenish
and Swabian one in Germany, all of which were to be subordinate to the
mother republic in France. The proclamation of a still-born Cisrhenish
republic (it not having as yet been constituted when it was swallowed
up in the great French republic), in the masterless Lower Rhenish
provinces in the territory of Treves, Aix-la-Chapelle, and Cologne,
under the influence of the French Jacobins and soldiery, was, however,
all that could at first be done openly.

The hauteur with which Bonaparte, backed by his devoted soldiery, had
treated the republicans, and the contempt manifested by him toward the
citizens, had not failed to rouse the jealous suspicions of the
Directory, the envy of the less successful generals, and the hatred of
the old friends of liberty, by whom he was already designated as a
tyrant. The republican party was still possessed of considerable
power, and the majority of the French troops under Moreau, Jourdan,
Bernadotte, etc., were still ready to shed their blood in the cause of
liberty. Bonaparte, compelled to veil his ambitious projects, judged
it more politic, after sowing the seed of discord at Campo Formio, to
withdraw a while, in order to await the ripening of the plot and to
return to reap the result. He, accordingly, went meantime, A.D. 1798,
with a small but well-picked army to Egypt, for the ostensible purpose
of opening a route overland to India, the sea-passage having been
closed against France by the British, but, in reality, for the purpose
of awaiting there a turn in continental affairs, and, moreover, by his
victories over the Turks in the ancient land of fable to add to the
wonder it was ever his object to inspire. On his way thither he seized
the island of Malta and compelled Baron Hompesch, the grand-master of
the order of the Knights of Malta, to resign his dignity, the fortress
being betrayed into his hands by the French knights.

At Rastadt, near Baden, where the compensation mentioned in the treaty
of Campo Formio was to be taken into consideration, the terrified
Estates of the empire assembled for the purpose of suing the French
ambassadors for the lenity they had not met with at the hands of
Austria and Prussia.--The events that took place at Rastadt are of a
description little calculated to flatter the patriotic feelings of the
German historian. The soul of the congress was Charles Maurice
Talleyrand-Perigord, at one time a bishop, at the present period
minister of the French republic. His colloquy with the German
ambassadors resembled that of the fox with the geese, and he attuned
their discords with truly diabolical art. While holding Austria and
Prussia apart, instigating them one against the other, flattering both
with the friendship of the republic and with the prospect of a rich
booty by the secularization of the ecclesiastical lands, he encouraged
some of the petty states with the hope of aggrandizement by an
alliance with France,[9] and, with cruel contempt, allowed others a
while to gasp for life before consigning them to destruction. The
petty princes, moreover, who had been deprived of their territory on
the other side of the Rhine, demanded lands on this side in
compensation; all the petty princes on this side consequently trembled
lest they should be called upon to make compensation, and each
endeavored, by bribing the members of the congress, Talleyrand in
particular, to render himself an exception. The French minister was
bribed not by gold alone; a considerable number of ladies gained great
notoriety by their liaison with the insolent republican, from whom
they received nothing, the object for which they sued being sold by
him sometimes even two or three times. Momus, a satirical production
of this period, relates numerous instances of crime and folly that are
perfectly incredible. The avarice manifested by the French throughout
the whole of the negotiations was only surpassed by the brutality of
their language and behavior. Roberjot, Bonnier, and Jean de Bry, the
dregs of the French nation, treated the whole of the German empire on
this occasion _en canaille_, and, while picking the pockets of the
Germans, were studiously coarse and brutal; still the trifling
opposition they encountered, and the total want of spirit in the
representatives of the great German empire, whom it must, in fact,
have struck them as ridiculous to see thus humbled at their feet,
forms an ample excuse for their demeanor.

Gustavus Adolphus IV., who mounted the throne of Sweden in 1796,
distinguished himself at that time among the Estates of the empire,
when Duke of Pomerania and Prince of Rugen, by his solemn protest
against the depredations committed by France, and by his summons to
every member of the German empire to take the field against their
common foe. Hesse-Cassel was also remarkable for the warlike demeanor
and decidedly anti-Gallic feeling of her population; and Wurtemberg,
for being the first of the German states that gave the example of
making concessions more in accordance with the spirit of the times. By
the abolition of ancient abuses alone could the princes meet the
threats used on every occasion by the French at Rastadt to
revolutionize the people unless their demands were fully complied
with. In Wurtemberg, the duke, Charles, had been succeeded, A.D. 1793,
by his brother, Louis Eugène, who banished license from his court,
but, a foe to enlightenment, closed the Charles college, placed monks
around his person, was extremely bigoted, and a zealous but impotent
friend to France. He expired, A.D. 1795, and was succeeded by the
third brother, Frederick Eugène, who had been during his youth a canon
at Salzburg, but afterward became a general in the Prussian service,
married a princess of Brandenburg, and educated his children in the
Protestant faith in order to assimilate the religion of the reigning
family with that of the people. His mild government terminated in
1797. Frederick, his talented son and successor, mainly frustrated the
projected establishment of a Swabian republic, which was strongly
supported by the French, by his treatment of the provincial Estates,
the modification of the rights of chase, etc., on which occasion he
took the following oath: "I repeat the solemn vow, ever to hold the
constitution of this country sacred and to make the weal of my
subjects the aim of my life." He nevertheless appears, by the
magnificent fetes, masquerades, and pastoral festivals given by him,
as if in a time of the deepest peace, at Hohenheim, to have trusted
more to his connection with England, by his marriage with the princess
royal, Matilda,[10] with Russia, and with Austria (the emperor Paul,
Catherine's successor, having married the princess Maria of
Wurtemberg, and the emperor Francis II., her sister Elisabeth), than
to the constitution, which he afterward annihilated.

The weakness displayed by the empire and the increasing disunion
between Austria and Prussia encouraged the French to further
insolence. Not satisfied with garrisoning every fortification on the
left bank of the Rhine, they boldly attacked, starved to submission,
and razed to the ground, during peace time, the once impregnable
fortress of Ehrenbreitstein, on the right bank of the Rhine, opposite
Coblentz.[11] Not content with laying the Netherlands and Holland
completely waste, they compelled the Hanse towns to grant them a loan
of eighteen million livres. Lubeck refused, but Hamburg and Bremen,
more nearly threatened and hopeless of aid from Prussia, were
constrained to satisfy the demands of the French brigands. In the
Netherlands, the German faction once more rose in open insurrection;
in 1798, the young men, infuriated by the conscription and by their
enrolment into French regiments, flew to arms, and torrents of blood
were shed in the struggle, in which they were unaided by their German
brethren, before they were again reduced to submission. The English
also landed at Ostend, but for the sole purpose of destroying the
sluices of the canal at Bruges.

The French divided the beautiful Rhenish provinces, yielded to them
almost without a blow by Germany, into four departments: First, Roer,
capital Aix-la-Chapelle; besides Cologne and Cleves. Secondly,
Donnersberg, capital Mayence; besides Spires and Zweibrucken. Thirdly,
Saar, capital Treves. Fourthly, Rhine and Moselle, capital Coblentz;
besides Bonn. Each department was subdivided into cantons, each canton
into communes. The department was governed by a perfect, the canton by
a sub-prefect, the commune by a mayor. All distinction of rank,
nobility, and all feudal rights were abolished. Each individual was a
citizen, free and equal. All ecclesiastical establishments were
abandoned to plunder, the churches alone excepted, they being still
granted as places of worship to believers, notwithstanding the
contempt and ridicule into which the clergy had fallen. The
monasteries were closed. The peasantry, more particularly in Treves,
nevertheless, still manifested great attachment to Popery. Guilds and
corporations were also abolished. The introduction of the ancient
German oral law formerly in use throughout the empire, the institution
of trial by jury, which, to the disgrace of Germany, the Rhenish
princes, after the lapse of a thousand years, learned from their
Gallic foe, was a great and signal benefit.

Liberty, equality, and justice were, at that period, in all other
respects, mere fictions. The most arbitrary rule in reality existed,
and the new provinces were systematically drained by taxes of every
description, as, for instance, register, stamp, patent, window, door,
and land taxes: there was also a tax upon furniture and upon luxuries
of every sort; a poll-tax, a percentage on the whole assessment, etc.;
besides extortion, confiscation, and forced sales. And woe to the new
citizen of the great French republic if he failed in paying more
servile homage to its officers, from the prefect down to the lowest
underling, than had ever been exacted by the princes![12] Such was the
liberty bestowed by republican France! Thus were her promises
fulfilled! The German Illuminati were fearfully undeceived,
particularly on perceiving how completely their hopes of universally
revolutionizing Germany were frustrated by the treaty of Basel. The
French, who had proclaimed liberty to all the nations of the earth,
now offered it for sale. The French character was in every respect the
same as during the reign of Louis XIV. The only principle to which
they remained ever faithful was that of robbery.--Switzerland was now,
in her turn, attacked, and vengeance thus overtook every province that
had severed itself from the empire, and every part of the once
magnificent empire of Germany was miserably punished for its want of
unity.


[Footnote 1: Clausewitz demands, with great justice, why the Austrians
so greatly divided their forces on this occasion for the sake of
saving Italy, as they had only to follow up their successes vigorously
on the Rhine in order to gain, in that quarter, far more than they
could lose on the Po.]

[Footnote 2: At Absom, in the valley of the Inn, a peasant girl had,
at that time, discovered a figure of the Virgin in one of the panes of
glass in her chamber window. This appearance being deemed miraculous
by the simple peasantry, the authorities of the place investigated the
matter, had the glass cleaned and scraped, etc., and at length
pronounced the indelible figure to be simply the outline of an old
colored painting. The peasantry, however, excited by the appearance of
the infidel French, persisted in giving credence to the miracle and
set up the piece of glass in a church, which was afterward annually
visited by thousands of pilgrims. In 1407, the celebrated pilgrimage
to Waldrast, in the Tyrol, had been founded in a similar manner by the
discovery of a portrait of the Virgin which had been grown up in a
tree, by two shepherd lads.]

[Footnote 3: Cobenzl was a favorite of Kaunitz and a thorough
courtier. At an earlier period, when ambassador at Petersburg, he
wrote French comedies, which were performed at the Hermitage in the
presence of the empress Catherine. The arrival of an unpleasant
despatch being ever followed by the production of some amusing piece
as an antidote to care, the empress jestingly observed, "that he was
no doubt keeping his best piece until the news arrived of the French
being in Vienna." He expired in the February of 1809, a year pregnant
with fate for Austria.]

[Footnote 4: He indignantly refused the stipend offered to him on this
occasion and protested against the injustice of his condemnation.]

[Footnote 5: Bavaria regarded these forced concessions as a bad reward
for her fidelity to Austria. Napoleon appears to have calculated upon
relighting by this means the flames of discord, whence he well knew
how to draw an advantage, between Bavaria and Austria.]

[Footnote 6: "Thus the emperor also now abandoned the empire by merely
bargaining with the enemy to quit his territories, and leaving the
wretched provinces of the empire a prey to war and pillage. And if the
assurances of friendship, of confidence, and of affection between
Austria and Venice are but recalled to mind, the contrast was indeed
laughable when the emperor was pleased to allow that loyal city to be
ceded to him. The best friend was in this case the cloth from which
the emperor cut himself an equivalent."--_Huergelmer_.]

[Footnote 7: A curious private memoir of Talleyrand says: "J'ai la
certitude que Berlin est le lieu, où le traité du 26 Vendémiaire (the
reconciliation of Austria with France at Campo Formio), aura jetté le
plus d'etonnement, d'embarras et de orainte." He then explains that,
now that the Netherlands no longer belong to Austria, and that Austria
and France no longer come into collision, both powers would be
transformed from natural foes into natural friends and would have an
equal interest in weakening Prussia. Should Russia stir, the Poles
could be roused to insurrection, etc.]

[Footnote 8: "Exactly at this period, when the empire's common foe was
plundering the Franconian circle, when deeds of blood and horror, when
misery and want had reached a fearful height, the troops of the
Elector of Brandenburg overran the cities and villages. The
inhabitants were constrained to take the oath of fealty, the public
officers, who refused, were dragged away captive, etc. Ellingen,
Stopfenheim, Absperg, Eschenbach, Nüremberg, Postbaur, Virnsperg,
Oettingen, Dinkelspühl, Ritzenhausen, Gelchsheim, were scenes of
brutal outrage."--_The History of the Usurpation of Brandenburg, A.D.
1797_, with the original Documents, published by the Teutonic Order.]

[Footnote 9: His secret memoirs, even at that period, designate Baden,
Würtemberg, and Darmstadt as states securely within the grasp of
France.]

[Footnote 10: He fled on Moreau's invasion to England, where he formed
this alliance. There was at one time a project of creating him elector
of Hanover and of partitioning Würtemberg between Bavaria and Baden.]

[Footnote 11: The commandant, Faber, defended the place for fourteen
months with a garrison of 2,000 men. During the siege, the
badly-disciplined French soldiery secretly sold provisions at an
exorbitant price to the starving garrison.]

[Footnote 12: Klebe gave an extremely detailed account of the French
government: "It is, for instance, well known that a pastry cook was
nominated lord high warden of the forest! over a whole department, and
a jeweller was raised to the same office in another.--The documents
proving the cheating and underselling carried on by Pioc, the lord
high warden of the forests, and by his assistant, Gauthier, in all the
forests in the department of the Rhine and Moselle, are detailed at
full length in 'Rübezahl,' a sort of monthly magazine. It is
astonishing to see with what boundless impudence these people have
robbed the country.--Still greater rascalities were carried on on the
right bank of the Rhine. Gauthier robbed from Coblentz down to the
Prussian frontiers." These allegations are confirmed by Görres in a
pamphlet, "Results of my Mission to Paris," in which he says, "The
Directory had treated the four departments like so many Paschalics,
which it abandoned to its Janissaries and colonized with its
favorites. Every petition sent by the inhabitants was thrown aside
with revolting contempt; everything was done that could most deeply
wound their feelings in regard to themselves or to their country."
"The secret history of the government of the country between the Rhine
and the Moselle," sums up as follows: "All cheated, all thieved, all
robbed. The cheating, thieving, and robbing were perfectly terrible,
and not one of the cheats, thieves, or robbers seemed to have an idea
that this country formed, by the decree of union, a part of France." A
naïve confession! The French, at all events, acted as if conscious
that the land was not theirs. The Rhenish Jews, who, as early as the
times of Louis XIV., had aided the French in plundering Germany, again
acted as their bloodhounds, and, by accepting bills in exchange for
their real or supposed loans, at double the amount, on wealthy
proprietors, speedily placed themselves in possession of the finest
estates. Vide Reichardt's Letters from Paris.]



CCLI. The Pillage of Switzerland


Peace had reigned throughout Switzerland since the battle of
Villmergen, A.D. 1712, which had given to Zurich and Berne the
ascendency in the confederation. The popular discontent caused by the
increasing despotism of the aristocracy had merely displayed itself in
petty conspiracies, as, for instance, that of Henzi, in 1749, and in
partial insurrections. In all the cantons, even in those in which the
democratic spirit was most prevalent, the chief authority had been
seized by the wealthier and more ancient families. All the offices
were in their hands, the higher posts in the Swiss regiments raised
for the service of France were monopolized by the younger sons of the
more powerful families, who introduced the social vices of France into
their own country, where they formed a strange medley in conjunction
with the pedantry of the ancient oligarchical form of government. In
the great canton of Berne, the council of two hundred, which had
unlimited sway, was solely composed of seventy-six reigning families.
In Zurich, the one thousand nine hundred townsmen had unlimited power
over the country. For one hundred and fifty years no citizen had been
enrolled among them, and no son of a peasant had been allowed to study
for, or been nominated to, any office, even to that of preacher. In
Solothurn, but one-half of the eight hundred townsmen were able to
carry on the government. Lucerne was governed by a council of one
hundred, so completely monopolized by the more powerful families that
boys of twenty succeeded their fathers as councillors. Basel was
governed by a council of two hundred and eighty, which was entirely
formed out of seventy wealthy mercantile families. Seventy-one
families had usurped the authority at Freiburg: similar oligarchical
government prevailed at St. Gall and Schaffhausen. The _Junker_, in
the latter place, rendered themselves especially ridiculous by the
innumerable offices and chambers in which they transacted their
useless and prolix affairs. In all these aristocratic cantons, the
peasantry were cruelly harassed, oppressed, and, in some parts, kept
in servitude, by the provincial governors. The wealthy provincial
governments were monopolized by the great aristocratic families.[1]
Even in the pure democracies, the provincial communes were governed by
powerful peasant families, as, for instance, in Glarus, and the
tyranny exercised by these peasants over the territory beneath their
sway far exceeded that of the aristocratic burgesses in their
provincial governments. The Italian valleys groaned beneath the yoke
of the original cantons, particularly under that of Uri,[2] the seven
provincial governments in Unterwallis under that of Oberwallis, the
countship of Werdenberg under that of the Glarner, the Valtelline
under that of the Grisons.[3] The princely abbot of St. Gall was
unlimited sovereign over his territory. Separate monasteries, for
instance, Engelberg, had feudal sway over their vassals.

Enlightenment and liberal opinions spread also gradually over
Switzerland, and twenty years after Henzi's melancholy death, a
disposition was again shown to oppose the tyranny of the oligarchies.
In 1792, Lavater and Fuszli were banished Zurich for venturing to
complain of the arbitrary conduct of one of the provincial
governors;[4] in 1779, a curate named Waser, a man of talent and a foe
to the aristocracy, was beheaded on a false charge of falsifying the
archives;[5] in 1794, the oppressed peasantry of Lucerne revolted
against the aristocracy; in the same year, the peasantry in Schwyz,
roused by the insolence of the French recruiting officers, revolted,
and, in the public provincial assembly, enforced the recall of all the
people of Schwyz in the French service, besides imposing a heavy fine
upon General Reding on his return. In 1781, a revolt of the Freiburg
peasantry, occasioned by the tyranny of the aristocracy, was quelled
with the aid of Berne; in 1784, Suter, the noble-spirited _Landammann_
of Appenzell, fell a sacrifice to envy. His mental and moral
superiority to the rest of his countrymen inspired his rival, Geiger,
with the most deadly hatred, and he persecuted him with the utmost
rancor. He was accused of being a freethinker; documents and protocols
were falsified; the stupid populace was excited against him, and,
after having been exposed on the pillory, publicly whipped, and
tortured on the rack, he was beheaded, and all intercession on his
behalf was prohibited under pain of death. Solothurn, on the other
hand, was freed from feudal servitude in 1785. The popular feeling at
that time prevalent throughout Switzerland was, however, of far
greater import than these petty events. The oligarchies had everywhere
suppressed public opinion; the long peace had slackened the martial
ardor of the people; the ridiculous affectation of ancient heroic
language brought into vogue by John Muller rendered the contrast yet
more striking, and, on the outburst of the French Revolution, the
tyrannized Swiss peasantry naturally threw themselves into the arms of
the French, the aristocracy into those of the Austrians.

The oppressed peasantry revolted as early as 1790 against the ruling
cities, the vassal against the aristocrat, in Schaffhausen, on account
of the tithes; in Lower Valais, on account of the tyranny of one of
the provincial governors. These petty outbreaks and an attempt made by
Laharpe to render the Vaud independent of Berne[6] were suppressed,
A.D. 1791. The people remained, nevertheless, in a high state of
fermentation. The new French republic at first quarrelled with the
ancient confederation for having, unmindful of their origin, descended
to servility. The Swiss guard had, on the 16th of August, 1792,
courageously defended the palace of the unfortunate French king and
been cut to pieces by the Parisian mob. At a later period, the
Austrians had seized the ambassadors of the French republic,
Semonville and Maret, in the Valtelline, in the territory of the
Grisons. The Swiss patriots, as they were called, however, gradually
fomented an insurrection against the aristocrats and called the French
to their aid. In 1793, the vassals of the bishop of Basel at Pruntrut
had already planted trees of liberty and placed the bishopric, under
the name of a Rauracian republic, under the protection of France,
chiefly at the instigation of Gobel, who was, in reward, appointed
bishop of Paris, and whose nephew, Rengger, shortly afterward became a
member of the revolutionary government in Berne. In Geneva, during the
preceding year, the French faction had gained the upper hand. The
fickleness of the war kept the rest of the patriots in a state of
suspense, but, on the seizure of the left bank of the Rhine by the
French, the movements in Switzerland assumed a more serious character.
The abbot, Beda, of St. Gall, 1795, pacified his subjects by
concessions, which his successor, Pancras, refusing to recognize, he
was, in consequence, expelled. The unrelenting aristocracy of Zurich,
upon this, took the field against the restless peasantry, surrounded
the patriots in Stäfa, threw the venerable Bodmer and a number of his
adherents into prison, and inflicted upon them heavy fines or severe
corporeal chastisement.

The campaign of 1796 had fully disclosed to Bonaparte the advantage of
occupying Switzerland with his troops, whose passage to Italy or
Germany would be thereby facilitated, while the line of communication
would be secured, and the danger to which he and Moreau had been
exposed through want of co-operation would at once be remedied. He
first of all took advantage of the dissensions in the Grisons to
deprive that republic of the beautiful Valtelline,[7] and, even at
that time, demanded permission from the people of Valais to build the
road across the Simplon, which he was, however, only able to execute
at a later period. On his return to Paris from the Italian expedition,
he passed through Basel,[8] where he was met by Talleyrand. Peter
Ochs, the chief master of the corporation, was, on this occasion, as
he himself relates in his History of Basel, won over, as the
acknowledged chief of the patriots, to revolutionize Switzerland and
to enter into a close alliance with France. The base characters, at
that time the tools of the French Directory, merely acceded to the
political plans of Bonaparte and Talleyrand in the hope of reaping a
rich harvest by the plunder of the federal cantons, and the Swiss
expedition was, consequently, determined upon. The people of Valais,
whose state of oppression served as a pretext for interference,
revolted, under Laharpe, against Berne, 1798, and demanded the
intervention of the French republic, as heir to the dukes of Savoy, on
the strength of an ancient treaty, which had, for that purpose, been
raked up from the ashes of the past. Nothing could exceed the
miserable conduct of the diet at that conjuncture. After having
already conceded to France her demand for the expulsion of the
emigrants and having exposed its weakness by this open violation of
the rights of hospitality, it discussed the number of troops to be
furnished by each of the cantons, when the enemy was already in this
country. Even the once haughty Bernese, who had set an army, thirty
thousand strong, on foot, withdrew, under General Wysz, from Valais to
their metropolis, where they awaited the attack of the enemy. There
was neither plan[9] nor order; the patriots rose in every quarter and
struck terror into the aristocrats, most of whom were now rather
inclined to yield and impeded by their indecision the measures of the
more spirited party. In Basel, Ochs deposed the oligarchy; in Zurich,
the government was induced, by intimidation, to restore Bodmer and his
fellow-prisoners to liberty. In Freiburg, Lucerne, Schaffhausen, and
St. Gall the oligarchies resigned their authority; Constance asserted
its independence.

Within Berne itself, tranquillity was with difficulty preserved by
Steiger, the venerable mayor, a man of extreme firmness of character.
A French force under Brune had already overrun Vaud, which, under
pretext of being delivered from oppression, was laid under a heavy
contribution; the ancient charnel-house at Murten was also destroyed,
because the French had formerly been beaten on this spot by the
Germans. But few of the Swiss marched to the aid of Berne; two hundred
of the people of Uri, arrayed in the armor of their ancestors, some of
the peasantry of Glarus, St. Gall, and Freiburg.[10] A second French
force under Schauenburg entered Switzerland by Basel, defeated the
small troops of Bernese sent to oppose it at Dornach and Langnau, and
took Solothurn, where it liberated one hundred and eighty self-styled
patriots imprisoned in that place. The patriots, at this conjuncture,
also rose in open insurrection in Berne, threw everything into
confusion, deposed the old council, formed a provisional government,
and checked all the preparations for defence. The brave peasantry,
basely betrayed by the cities, were roused to fury. Colonels Ryhiner,
Stettler, Crusy, and Goumores were murdered by them upon mere
suspicion (their innocence was afterward proved), and boldly following
their leader, Grafenried, against the French, they defeated and
repulsed the whole of Brune's army and captured eighteen guns at the
bridge of Neuenegg. But a smaller Bernese corps, which, under Steiger,
the mayor, opposed the army of Schauenburg in the _Grauen Holz_, was
routed after a bloody struggle, and, before Erlach, the newly-
nominated generalissimo, could hurry back to Berne with the victors of
Neuenegg, the patriots, who had long been in the pay of France, threw
wide the gates to Schauenburg. All was now lost. Erlach fled to Thun,
in order to place himself at the head of the people of the Oberland,
who descended in thick masses from the mountains; but, on his
addressing the brave Senn peasantry in French, according to the
malpractice of the Bernese, they mistook him for a French spy and
struck him dead in his carriage. The loss of Berne greatly dispirited
them and they desisted from further and futile opposition. Steiger
escaped. Hotze, a gallant Austrian general, who, mindful of his Swiss
origin, had attempted to place himself at the head of his countrymen,
was compelled to retrace his steps. In Berne, the French meanwhile
pillaged the treasures of the republic.[11] Besides the treasury and
the arsenal, estimated at twenty-nine million livres, they levied a
contribution of sixteen million. Bruno planted a tree of liberty, and
Frisching, the president of the provisional government, had the folly
to say, "Here it stands! may it bear good fruit! Amen!"

Further bloodshed was prevented by the intervention of the patriots.
The whole of Switzerland, Schwyz, Upper Valais, and Unterwalden alone
excepted, submitted, and, on the 12th of April, the federal diet at
Aarau established, in the stead of the ancient federative and
oligarchical government, a single and indivisible Helvetian republic,
in a strictly democratic form, with five directors, on the French
model. Four new cantons, Aargau, Leman (Vaud), the Bernese Oberland,
and Constance, were annexed to the ancient ones. Schwyz, Uri,
Unterwalden, and Zug were, on the other hand, to form but one canton.
Rapinat, a bold bad man, Rewbel's brother-in-law, who was at that time
absolute in Switzerland, seized everything that had escaped the
pillage of the soldiery in Berne and Zurich, sacked Solothurn,
Lucerne, Freiburg, etc., and hunted out the hidden treasures of the
confederation, which he sent to France. The protestations of the
directors, Bay and Pfyffer, were unheeded; Rapinat deposed them by
virtue of a French warrant and nominated Ochs and Dolder in their
stead. The patriotic feelings of the Swiss revolted at this tyranny;
Schwyz rose in open insurrection; the peasantry, headed by Aloys
Reding, seized and garrisoned Lucerne and called the whole country to
arms against the French invader. The peasantry of the free cantons
also marched against Aarau, but were defeated by Schauenburg at
Häcklingen; two hundred of their number fell, among others a priest
bearing the colors. Schauenburg then attacked the people of Schwyz at
Richtenschwyl, where, after a desperate combat that lasted a whole
day, he at length compelled them to give way. They, nevertheless,
speedily rallied, and two engagements of equal obstinacy took place on
the Schindeleggy and on the mountain of Etzel. The flight of Herzog,
the pastor of Einsiedeln, was the sole cause of the discomfiture of
the Swiss. Reding, however, reassembling his forces at the Red Tower,
in the vicinity of the old battlefield of Morgarten, the French,
unable to withstand their fury, were repulsed with immense loss. They
also suffered a second defeat at Arth, at the foot of the Rigi. The
Swiss, on their part, on numbering their forces after the battle,
found their strength so terribly reduced that, although victors, they
were unable to continue the contest, and voluntarily recognized the
Helvetian republic. The rich monastery of Einsiedeln was plundered and
burned; the miraculous picture of the Virgin was, however, preserved.
Upper Valais also submitted, after Sion and the whole of the valley
had been plundered and laid waste. The peasantry defended themselves
here for several weeks at the precipice of the Dala. Unterwalden
offered the most obstinate resistance. The peasantry of this canton
were headed by Lüssi. The French invaded the country simultaneously on
different sides, by water, across the lake of the four cantons, and
across the Brünig from the Haslithal; in the Kernwald they were
victorious over the masses of peasantry, but a body of three or four
thousand French, which had penetrated further down the vale, was
picked off by the peasantry concealed in the woods and behind the
rocks. A rifleman, stationed upon a projecting rock, shot more than a
hundred of the enemy one after another, his wife and children,
meanwhile, loading his guns. Both of the French corps coalesced at
Stanz, but met with such obstinate resistance from the old men, women
and girls left there, that, after butchering four hundred of them,
they set the place in flames.[12] The sturdy mountaineers, although
numerically weak, proved themselves worthy of their ancient fame.--The
four _Waldstätte_ were thrown into one canton, Waldstätten; Glarus and
Toggenburg into another, Linth; Appenzell and St. Gall into that of
Säntis. The old Italian prefectures, with the exception of the
Valtelline, were formed into two cantons, Lugano and Bellinzona
(afterward the canton of Tessin). The canton of Vaud also finally
acceded to this arrangement, but was shortly afterward, as well as the
former bishopric of Basel, Pruntrut,[13] and the city and republic of
Genoa, incorporated with France.

The levy of eighteen thousand men (the Helvetlers, Galloschwyzers or
eighteen batzmen) for the service of the Helvetian republic occasioned
fresh disturbances in the beginning of 1799. The opposition was so
great that the recruits were carried in chains to Berne. The Bernese
Oberland, the peasantry of Basel, Solothurn, Toggenburg, Appenzell,
and Glarus rose in open insurrection, but were again reduced to
submission by the military. The spirit of the mountaineers was,
however, less easily tamed. In April, 1799, the people of Schwyz took
four hundred French prisoners; those of Uri, under their leader,
Vincenz Schmid, stormed and burned Altorf, the seat of the French and
their adherents; those of Valais, under the youthful Count Courten,
drove the French from their valleys, and those of the Grisons
surprised and cut to pieces a French squadron at Dissentis. General
Soult took the field with a strong force against them in May and
reduced them one after the other, but with great loss on his side, to
submission. Twelve hundred French fell in Valais, which was completely
laid waste by fire and sword; in Uri, stones and rocks were hurled
upon them by the infuriated peasantry as they defiled through the
narrow gorges; Schmid was, however, taken and shot; Schwyz was also
reduced to obedience; in the Grisons, upward of a thousand French fell
in a bloody engagement at Coire, and the magnificent monastery of
Dissentis was, in revenge, burned to the ground. The beautiful
Bergland was reduced to an indescribable state of misery. The villages
lay in ashes; the people, who had escaped the general massacre, fell
victims to famine. In this extremity, Zschokke, at that time Helvetic
governor of the Waldstatte, proposed the complete expulsion of the
ancient inhabitants and the settlement of French colonists in the
fatherland of William Tell.[14]

The imperial free town of Muhlhausen in the Suntgau, the ancient ally
of Switzerland, fell, like her, into the hands of the French. Unable
to preserve her independence, she committed a singular political
suicide. The whole of the town property was divided among the
citizens. A girl, attired in the ancient Swiss costume, delivered the
town keys to the French commissioner; the city banner and arms were
buried with great solemnity.[15]

The French had also shown as little lenity in their treatment of
Italy. Rome was entered and garrisoned with French troops; the
handsome and now venerable puppet, Pope Pius VI., was seized, robbed,
and personally maltreated (his ring was even torn from his hand), and
dragged a prisoner to France, where he expired in the August of 1799.


[Footnote 1: "The peasant, when summoned into the presence of a
governor, lord of the council, head of a guild, or preacher, stood
there, not as a free Swiss, but as a criminal trembling before his
judge."--_Lehmann on the imaginary Freedom of the Swiss. 1799._]

[Footnote 2: "The important office of provincial secretary was, in
this manner, hereditary in the family of the Beroldingen of
Uri."--_Lehmann_.]

[Footnote 3: "In the Grisons, the constitution was extremely
complicated. The lordships of Meyenfeld and Aspermont were, for
instance, subject to the three confederated cantons and under the
control of the provincial governors nominated by them; they were at
the same time members of the whole free state, and, as such, had a
right of lordship over the subject provinces, over which, they, in
their turn, appointed a governor."--_Meyer von Knonau's Geography._]

[Footnote 4: The best information concerning the authority held by the
provincial governors, who enjoyed almost unlimited sway over their
districts, is to be met with in the excellent biography of Solomon
Landolt, the provincial governor of Zurich, by David Hesz. Landolt was
the model of an able but extremely tyrannical governor (he ruled over
Greisensee and Eglisau) and gained great note by his salomonic
judgments and by his quaint humor. He founded the Swiss rifle clubs
and introduced that national weapon into modern warfare. He was also a
painter and had the whim, notwithstanding the constant triumph of the
French, ever to represent them in his pictures as the vanquished
party.]

[Footnote 5: Hirzel wrote at that time, in his "Glimpses into the
History of the Confederation," that Captain Henzl had been deprived of
his head because he was the only man in the country who had one.
Zimmerman says in his "National Pride," "A foreign philosopher visited
Switzerland for the purpose of settling in a country where thought was
free; he remained ten days at Zurich and then went to--Portugal." In
1774, the clocks at Basel, which, since the siege of Rudolph of
Habsburg, had remained one hour behindhand, were, after immense
opposition, regulated like those in the rest of the world. Two
factions sprang up on this occasion, that of the Spieszburghers or
Lalleburghers (the ancient one), and that of the Francemen or
new-modellers (the modern one).]

[Footnote 6: Laharpe was at the same time a demagogue in the Vaud and
tutor to the emperor Alexander at Petersburg.]

[Footnote 7: Valtelline with Chiavenna and Bormio (Cleves and Worms)
were ill-treated by the people of the Grisons. Offices and justice
were regularly jobbed and sold to the highest bidder. The people of
Valtelline hastily entered into alliance with France, while the
oppressed peasantry in the Grisons rebelled against the ruling family
of Salis, which had long been in the pay of the French kings, and had,
since the revolution, sided with Austria. John Müller appeared at
Basel as Thugut's agent for the purpose of inciting the confederation
against France.--_Ochs's History of Basel._]

[Footnote 8: While here, he gave Fesch, the pastry-cook, whose
brother, a Swiss lieutenant, was the second husband of Bonaparte's
maternal grandmother, a very friendly reception. The offspring of this
second marriage was the future Cardinal Fesch, Letitia's half-brother
and Napoleon's uncle, whom Napoleon attempted to create primate of
Germany and to raise to the pontifical throne.]

[Footnote 9: Some of the cantons imagined that France merely aspired
to the possession of Valais, and, jealous of the prosperity and power
of Berne, willingly permitted her to suffer this humiliation.-_Meyer
von Knonau_].

[Footnote 10: Two Bernese, condemned to work in the trenches at
Yferten, on being liberated by the French, returned voluntarily to
Berne, in order to aid in the defense of the city. A rare trait, in
those times, of ancient Swiss fidelity.]

[Footnote 11: A good deal of it was spent by Bonaparte during his
expedition into Egypt, and, even at the present day, the Bernese bear
is to be seen on coins still in circulation on the banks of the
Nile.--_Meyer von Knonau._]

[Footnote 12: The venerable Pestalozzi assembled the orphans and
founded his celebrated model academy at Stanz. Seventy-nine women and
girls were found among the slain. A story is told of a girl who, being
attacked, in a lonely house, by two Frenchmen, knocked their heads
together with such force that they dropped down dead.]

[Footnote 13: Not far from Pruntrut is the hill of Terri, said to have
been formerly occupied by one of Cæsar's camps. The French named it
_Mont Terrible_ and created a _department du Mont Terrible_. Vide
Meyer von Knonau's Geography.]

[Footnote 14: In his "Political Remarks touching the Canton of
Waldstatten," dated the 23d of June, 1799, he says: "Let us imitate
the political maxims of the conquerors of old, who drove the
inhabitants most inimical to them into foreign countries and
established colonies, composed of families of their own kin, in the
heart of the conquered provinces." His proposal remaining unseconded,
he sought to obliterate the bad impression it had made, by publishing
a proclamation, calling upon the charitably inclined to raise a
subscription for the unfortunate inhabitants of the Waldstatte.]


[Footnote 15: Vide Graf's History of Muhlhausen.]



CCLII. The Second Coalition


Prussia looked calmly on, with a view of increasing her power by peace
while other states ruined themselves by war, and of offering her
arbitration at a moment when she could turn their mutual losses to
advantage. Austria, exposed to immediate danger by the occupation of
Switzerland by the French, remained less tranquil and hastily formed a
fresh coalition with England and Russia. Catherine II. had expired,
1796. Her son, Paul I., cherished the most ambitious views. His
election as grand-master of the Maltese order dispersed by Napoleon
had furnished him with a sort of right of interference in the affairs
of the Levant and of Italy. On the 1st of March, 1799, the Ionian
Islands, Corfu, etc., were occupied by Russian troops, and a Russian
army, under the terrible Suwarow, moved, in conjunction with the
troops of Austria, upon Italy. The project of the Russian czar was, by
securing his footing on the Mediterranean and at the same time
encircling Turkey, to attack Constantinople on both sides, on the
earliest opportunity. Austria was merely to serve as a blind tool for
the attainment of his schemes. Mack was despatched to Naples for the
purpose of bringing about a general rising in Southern Italy against
the French, and England lavished gold. The absence of Bonaparte
probably inspired several of the allied generals with greater courage,
not the French, but he, being the object of their dread. The conduct
of the French at Rastadt had revolted every German and had justly
raised their most implacable hatred, which burst forth during a
popular tumult at Vienna, when the tricolor, floating from the palace
of General Bernadotte, the French ambassador, was torn down and
burned. The infamous assassination of the French ambassadors at
Rastadt also took place during this agitated period. Bonnier,
Roberjot, and Jean de Bry quitted Rastadt on the breaking out of war,
and were attacked and cut to pieces by some Austrian hussars in a wood
close to the city gate. Jean de Bry alone escaped, although
dangerously wounded, with his life. This atrocious act was generally
believed to have been committed through private revenge, or, what is
far more probable, for the purpose of discovering by the papers of the
ambassadors the truth of the reports at that time in circulation
concerning the existence of a conspiracy and projects for the
establishment of republics throughout Germany. The real motive was,
however, not long ago,[1] unveiled. Austria had revived her ancient
projects against Bavaria, and, as early as 1798, had treated with the
French Directory for the possession of that electorate in return for
her toleration of the occupatign of Switzerland by the troops of the
republic. The venerable elector, Charles Theodore, who had been
already persuaded to cede Bavaria and to content himself with
Franconia, dying suddenly of apoplexy while at the card-table, was
succeeded by his cousin, Maximilian Joseph of Pfalz-Zweibrucken, from
whom, on account of his numerous family, no voluntary cession was to
be expected either for the present or future. Thugut and Lehr-bach,
the rulers of the Viennese cabinet, in the hope of compromising and
excluding him, as a traitor to the empire, from the Bavarian
succession, by the production of proofs of his being the secret ally
of France, hastily resolved upon the assassination of the French
ambassadors at Rastadt, on the bare supposition of their having in
their possession documents in the handwriting of the elector. None
were, however, discovered, the French envoys having either taken the
precaution of destroying them or of committing them to the
safe-keeping of the Prussian ambassador. This crime was, as Hormayr
observes, at the same time, a political blunder. This horrible act was
perpetrated on the 28th of April, 1799.

The campaign had, a month anterior to this event, been opened by the
French, who had attacked the Austrians in their still scattered
positions. Disunion prevailed as usual in the Austrian military
council. The Archduke Charles proposed the invasion of France from the
side of Swabia. The occupation of Switzerland by the troops of Austria
was, nevertheless, resolved upon, and General Auffenberg, accordingly,
entered the Grisons. The French instantly perceived and hastened to
anticipate the designs of the Austrian cabinet. Auffenberg was
defeated by Massena on the St. Luciensteig and expelled the Grisons,
while Hotze on the Vorarlberg and Bellegarde in the Tyrol looked
calmly on at the head of fifteen thousand men. The simultaneous
invasion of Swabia by Jourdan now induced the military council at
Vienna to accede to the proposal formerly made by the Archduke
Charles, who was despatched with the main body of the army to Swabia,
where, on the 25th of March, 1799, he gained a complete victory over
Jourdan at Ostrach and Stockach.[2] The Grisons were retaken in May by
Hotze, and, in June, the archduke joining him, Massena was defeated at
Zurich, and the steep passes of Mont St. Gothard were occupied by
Haddik. Massena was, however, notwithstanding the immense numerical
superiority of the archduke's forces, which could easily have driven
him far into France, allowed to remain undisturbed at Bremgarten. The
French, under Scherer, in Italy, had, meanwhile, been defeated, in
April, by Kray, at Magnano. This success was followed by the arrival
of Melas from Vienna, of Bellegarde from the Tyrol, and lastly, by
that of the Russian vanguard under Suwarow, who took the chief command
and beat the whole of the French forces in Italy; Moreau, at Cassano
and Marengo, in May; Macdonald, on his advance from Lower Italy, on
the Trebbia, in June; and finally, Joubert, in the great battle of
Novi, in which Joubert was killed, August the 15th, 1799. Dissensions
now broke out among the victors. A fourth of the forces in Italy
belonged to Austria, merely one-fifth to Russia; the Austrians,
consequently, imagined that the war was merely carried on on their
account. The Austrian forces were, against Suwarow's advice, divided,
for the purpose of reducing Mantua and Alessandria and of occupying
Tuscany. The king of Sardinia, whom Suwarow desired to restore to his
throne, was forbidden to enter his states by the Austrians, who
intended to retain possession of them for some time longer. The whole
of Italy, as far as Ancona and Genoa, was now freed from the French,
whom the Italians, embittered by their predatory habits, had aided to
expel, and Suwarow received orders to join his forces with those under
Korsakow, who was then on the Upper Rhine with thirty thousand men.
The archduke might, even without this fresh reinforcement, have
already annihilated Massena had he not remained during three months,
from June to August, in a state of complete inactivity; at the very
moment of Suwarow's expected arrival he allowed the important passes
of the St. Gothard to be again carried by a coup de main by the French
under General Lecourbe, who drove the Austrians from the Simplon, the
Furca, the Grimsel, and the Devil's bridge. The archduke, after an
unsuccessful attempt to push across the Aar at Dettingen, suddenly
quitted the scene of war and advanced down the Rhine for the purpose
of supporting the English expedition under the Duke of York against
Holland. This unexpected turn in affairs proceeded from Vienna. The
Viennese cabinet was jealous of Russia. Suwarow played the master in
Italy, favored Sardinia at the expense of the house of Habsburg, and
deprived the Austrians of the laurels and of the advantages they had
won. The archduke, accordingly, received orders to remain inactive, to
abandon the Russians, and finally to withdraw to the north; by this
movement Suwarow's triumphant progress was checked, he was compelled
to cross the Alps to the aid of Korsakow, and to involve himself in a
mountain warfare ill-suited to the habits of his soldiery.[3]
Korsakow, whom Bavaria had been bribed with Russian gold to furnish
with a corps one thousand strong, was solely supported by Kray and
Hotze with twenty thousand men. Massena, taking advantage of the
departure of the archduke and the non-arrival of Suwarow, crossed the
Limmat at Dietikon and shut Korsakow, who had imprudently stationed
himself with his whole army in Zurich, so closely in, that, after an
engagement that lasted two days, from the 15th to the 17th of
September, the Russian general was compelled to abandon his artillery
and to force his way through the enemy. Ten thousand men were all that
escaped.[4] Hotze, who had advanced from the Grisons to Schwyz to
Suwarow's rencounter, was, at the same time, defeated and killed at
Schannis. Suwarow, although aware that the road across the St. Gothard
was blocked by the lake of the four cantons, on which there were no
boats, had the folly to attempt the passage. In Airolo, he was
obstinately opposed by the French under Lecourbe, and, although
Schweikowski contrived to turn this strong position by scaling the
pathless rocks, numbers of the men were, owing to Suwarow's
impatience, sacrificed before it. On the 24th of September, 1799, he
at length climbed the St. Gothard, and a bloody engagement, in which
the French were worsted, took place on the Oberalpsee. Lecourbe blew
up the Devil's bridge, but, leaving the Urnerloch open, the Russians
pushed through that rocky gorge, and, dashing through the foaming
Reuss, scaled the opposite rocks and drove the French from their
position behind the Devil's bridge. Altorf on the lake was reached in
safety by the Russian general, who was compelled, owing to the want of
boats, to seek his way through the valleys of Shachen and Muotta,
across the almost impassable rocks, to Schwyz. The heavy rains
rendered the undertaking still more arduous; the Russians, owing to
the badness of the road, speedily became barefoot; the provisions were
also exhausted. In this wretched state they reached Muotta on the 29th
of September and learned the discouraging news of Korsakow's defeat.
Massena had already set off in the hope of cutting off Suwarow, but
had missed his way. He reached Altorf, where he joined Lecourbe on the
29th, when Suwarow was already at Muotta, whence Massena found on his
arrival he had again retired across the Bragelberg, through the
Klonthal. He was opposed on the lake of Klonthal by Molitor, who was,
however, forced to retire by Auffenberg, who had joined Suwarow at
Altorf and formed his advanced guard, Rosen, at the same time, beating
off Massena with the rear-guard, taking five cannons and one thousand
of his men prisoners. On the 1st of October, Suwarow entered Glarus,
where he rested until the 4th, when he crossed the Panixer mountains
t

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