[Allies cross the Elbe, Oct. 3.]

Till the last days of September the position of the hostile armies round Dresden remained little changed, Napoleon unweariedly repeated his attacks, now on one side, now on another, but without result. The Allies on their part seemed rooted to the soil. Bernadotte, balanced between the desire to obtain Norway from the Allies and a foolish hope of being called to the throne of France, was bent on doing the French as little harm as possible; Schwarzenberg, himself an indifferent general, was distracted by the councillors of all the three monarchs; Bluecher alone pressed for decided and rapid action. At length the Prussian commander gained permission to march northwards, and unite his army with Bernadotte's in a forward movement across the Elbe. The long-expected Russian reserves, led by Bennigsen, reached the Bohemian mountains; and at the beginning of October the operation began which was to collect the whole of the allied forces in the plain of Leipzig. Bluecher forced the passage of the Elbe at Wartenburg. It was not until Napoleon learnt that the army of Silesia had actually crossed the river that he finally quitted Dresden. Then, hastening northwards, he threw himself upon the Prussian general; but Bluecher again avoided battle, as he had done in Silesia; and on the 7th of October his army united with Bernadotte's, which had crossed the Elbe two days before.

The enemy was closing in upon Napoleon. Obstinately as he had held on to the line of the Elbe, he could hold on no longer. In the frustration of all his hopes there flashed across his mind the wild project of a march eastwards to the Oder, and the gathering of all the besieged garrisons for a campaign in which the enemy should stand between himself and France; but the dream lasted only long enough to gain a record. Napoleon ventured no more than to send a corps back to the Elbe to threaten Berlin, in the hope of tempting Bluecher and Bernadotte to abandon the advance which they had now begun in co-operation with the great army of Schwarzenberg. From the 10th to the 14th of October, Napoleon ed at Dueben, between Dresden and Leipzig, restlessly expecting to hear of Bluecher's or Bernadotte's retreat. The only definite information that he could gain was that Schwarzenberg was pressing on towards the west. At length he fell back to Leipzig, believing that Bluecher, but not Bernadotte, was advancing to meet Schwarzenberg and take part in a great engagement. As he entered Leipzig on October 14th the cannon of Schwarzenberg was heard on the south.

[Battle of Leipzig. Oct 16-19.]

Napoleon drew up for battle. The number of his troops in position around the city was 170,000: about 15,000 others lay within call. He placed Marmont and Ney on the north of Leipzig at the village of Moeckern, to meet the expected onslaught of Bluecher; and himself, with the great mass of his army, took post on the south, facing Schwarzenberg. On the morning of the 16th, Schwarzenberg began the attack. His numbers did not exceed 150,000, for the greater part of the Russian army was a march in the rear. The battle was an even one. The Austrians failed to gain ground: with one more army-corps Napoleon saw that he could overpower the enemy. He was still without intelligence of Bluecher's actual appearance in the north; and in the rash hope that Bluecher's coming might be delayed, he sent orders to Ney and Marmont to leave their positions and hurry to the south to throw themselves upon Schwarzenberg. Ney obeyed. Marmont, when the order reached him, was actually receiving Bluecher's first fire. He determined to remain and defend the village of Moeckern, though left without support. York, commanding the vanguard of Bluecher's army, assailed him with the utmost fury. A third part of the troops engaged on each side were killed or wounded before the day closed; but in the end the victory of the Prussians was complete. It was the only triumph won by the Allies on this first day of the battle, but it turned the scale against Napoleon. Marmont's corps was destroyed; Ney, divided between Napoleon and Marmont, had rendered no effective help to either. Schwarzenberg, saved from a great disaster, needed only to wait for Bernadotte and the Russian reserves, and to renew the battle with an additional force of 100,000 men.

[Storm of Leipzit, 19th. French retreat.]

[Battle of the 18th.]

In the course of the night Napoleon sent proposals for peace. It was in the vain hope of receiving some friendly answer from his father-in-law, the Austrian Emperor, that he delayed making his retreat during the next day, while it might still have been unmolested. No answer was returned to his letter. In the evening of the 17th, Bennigsen's army reached the field of battle. Next morning began that vast and decisive encounter known in the language of Germany as "the battle of the nations," the greatest battle in all authentic history, the culmination of all the military effort of the Napoleonic age. Not less than 300,000 men fought on the side of the Allies; Napoleon's own forces numbered 170,000. The battle raged all round Leipzig, except on the west, where no attempt was made to interpose between Napoleon and the line of his retreat. As in the first engagement, the decisive successes were those of Bluecher, now tardily aided by Bernadotte, on the north; Schwarzenberg's divisions, on the south side of the town, fought steadily, but without gaining much ground. But there was no longer any doubt as to the issue of the struggle. If Napoleon could not break the Allies in the first engagement, he had no chance against them now when they had been joined by 100,000 more men. The storm of attack grew wilder and wilder: there were no new forces to call up for the defence. Before the day was half over Napoleon drew in his outer line, and began to make dispositions for a retreat from Leipzig. At evening long trains of wounded from the hospitals passed through the western gates of the city along the road towards the Rhine. In the darkness of night the whole army was withdrawn from its positions, and dense masses poured into the town, until every street was blocked with confused and impenetrable crowds of cavalry and infantry. The leading divisions moved out of the gates before sunrise. As the throng lessened, some degree of order was restored, and the troops which Napoleon intended to cover the retreat took their places under the walls of Leipzig. The Allies advanced to the storm on the morning of the 19th. The French were driven into the town; the victorious enemy pressed on towards the rear of the retreating columns. In the midst of the struggle an explosion was heard above the roar of the battle. The bridge over the Elster, the only outlet from Leipzig to the west, had been blown up by —the mistake of a French soldier before the rear-guard began to cross. The mass of fugitives, driven from the streets of the town, found before them an impassable river. Some swam to the opposite bank or perished in attempting to do so; the rest, to the number of 15,000, laid down their arms. This was the end of the battle. Napoleon had lost in the three days 40,000 killed and wounded, 260 guns, and 30,000 prisoners. The killed and wounded of the Allies reached the enormous sum of 54,000.

[Conditions of peace offered to Napoleon at Frankfort, Nov. 9th.]

[Allies follow Napoleon to the Rhine.]

The campaign was at an end. Napoleon led off a large army, but one that was in no condition to turn upon its pursuers. At each stage in the retreat thousands of fever-stricken wretches were left to terrify even the pursuing army with the dread of their infection. It was only when the French found the road to Frankfort blocked at Hanau by a Bavarian force that they rallied to the order of battle. The Bavarians were cut to pieces; the road was opened; and, a fortnight after the Battle of Leipzig, Napoleon, with the remnant of his great army, re-crossed the Rhine. Behind him the fabric of his Empire fell to the ground. Jerome fled from Westphalia; [186] the princes of the Rhenish Confederacy came one after another to make their peace with the Allies; Buelow, with the army which had conquered Ney at Dennewitz, marched through the north of Germany to the deliverance of Holland. Three days after Napoleon had crossed the Rhine the Czar reached Frankfort; and here, on the 7th of November, a military council was held, in which Bluecher and Gneisenau, against almost all the other generals, advocated an immediate invasion of France. The soldiers, however, had time to re-consider their opinions, for, on the 9th, it was decided by the representatives of the Powers to send an offer of peace to Napoleon, and the operations of the war were suspended by common consent. The condition on which peace was offered to Napoleon was the surrender of the conquests of France beyond the Alps and the Rhine. The Allies were still willing to permit the Emperor to retain Belgium, Savoy, and the Rhenish Provinces; they declined, however, to enter into any negotiation until Napoleon had accepted this basis of peace; and they demanded a distinct reply before the end of the month of November.

[Offer of peace withdrawn, Dec. 1.]

[Plan of invasion of France.]

[Allies enter France, Jan., 1814.]

Napoleon, who had now arrived in Paris, and saw around him all the signs of power, returned indefinite answers. The month ended without the reply which the Allies required; and on the 1st of December the offer of peace was declared to be withdrawn. It was still undecided whether the war should take the form of an actual invasion of France. The memory of Brunswick's campaign of 1792, and of the disasters of the first coalition in 1793, even now exercised a powerful influence over men's minds. Austria was unwilling to drive Napoleon to extremities, or to give to Russia and Prussia the increased influence which they would gain in Europe from the total overthrow of Napoleon's power. It was ultimately determined that the allied armies should enter France, but that the Austrians, instead of crossing the north-eastern frontier, should make a detour by Switzerland, and gain the plateau of Langres in Champagne, from which the rivers Seine, Marne, and Aube, with the roads following their valleys, descend in the direction of the capital. The plateau of Langres was said to be of such strategical importance that its occupation by an invader would immediately force Napoleon to make peace. As a matter of fact, the plateau was of no strategical importance whatever; but the Austrians desired to occupy it, partly with the view of guarding against any attack from the direction of Italy and Lyons, partly from their want of the heavy artillery necessary for besieging the fortresses farther north, [187] and from a just appreciation of the dangers of a campaign conducted in a hostile country intersected by several rivers. Anything was welcomed by Metternich that seemed likely to avert, or even to postpone, a struggle with Napoleon for life or death. Bluecher correctly judged the march through Switzerland to be mere procrastination. He was himself permitted to take the straight road into France, though his movements were retarded in order to keep pace with the cautious steps of Schwarzenberg. On the last day of the year 1813 the Prussian general crossed the Rhine near Coblentz; on the 18th of January, 1814, the Austrian army, having advanced from Switzerland by Belfort and Vesoul, reached its halting-place on the plateau of Langres. Here the march stopped; and here it was expected that terms of peace would be proposed by Napoleon.

[Wellington entering France from the south.]

It was not on the eastern side alone that the invader was now entering France. Wellington had passed the Pyrenees. His last victorious march into the north of Spain began on the day when the Prussian and Russian armies were defeated by Napoleon at Bautzen (May 21, 1813). During the armistice of Dresden, a week before Austria signed the treaty which fixed the conditions of its armed mediation, he had gained an overwhelming triumph at Vittoria over King Joseph and the French army, as it retreated with all the spoils gathered in five years' occupation of Spain (June 21). A series of bloody engagements had given the English the passes of the Pyrenees in those same days of August and September that saw the allied armies close around Napoleon at Dresden; and when, after the catastrophe of Leipzig, the wreck of Napoleon's host was retreating beyond the Rhine, Soult, the defender of the Pyrenees, was driven by the British general from his entrenchments on the Nivelle, and forced back under the walls of Bayonne.

[French armies unable to hold the frontier.]

[Napoleon's plan of defence.]

Twenty years had passed since, in the tempestuous morn of the Revolution, Hoche swept the armies of the first coalition across the Alsatian frontier. Since then, French soldiers had visited every capital, and watered every soil with their blood; but no foreign soldier had set foot on French soil. Now the cruel goads of Napoleon's military glory had spent the nation's strength, and the force no longer existed which could bar the way to its gathered enemies. The armies placed upon the eastern frontier had to fall back before an enemy five times more numerous than themselves. Napoleon had not expected that the Allies would enter France before the spring. With three months given him for organisation, he could have made the frontier-armies strong enough to maintain their actual positions; the winter advance of the Allies compelled him to abandon the border districts of France, and to concentrate his defence in Champagne, between the Marne, the Seine, and the Aube. This district was one which offered extraordinary advantages to a great general acting against an irresolute and ill-commanded enemy. By holding the bridges over the three rivers, and drawing his own supplies along the central road from Paris to Arcis-sur-Aube, Napoleon could securely throw the bulk of his forces from one side to the other against the flank of the Allies, while his own movements were covered by the rivers, which could not be passed except at the bridges. A capable commander at the head of the Allies would have employed the same river-strategy against Napoleon himself, after conquering one or two points of passage by main force; but Napoleon had nothing of the kind to fear from Schwarzenberg; and if the Austrian head-quarters continued to control the movements of the allied armies, it was even now doubtful whether the campaign would close at Paris or on the Rhine.

[Campaign of 1814.]

For some days after the arrival of the monarchs and diplomatists at Langres (Jan. 22), Metternich and the more timorous among the generals opposed any further advance into France, and argued that the army had already gained all it needed by the occupation of the border provinces. It was only upon the threat of the Czar to continue the war by himself that the Austrians consented to move forward upon Paris. After several days had been lost in discussion, the advance from Langres was begun. Orders were given to Bluecher, who had pushed back the French divisions commanded by Marmont and Mortier, and who was now near St. Dizier on the Marne, to meet the Great Army at Brienne. This was the situation of the Allies when, on the 25th of January, Napoleon left Paris, and placed himself at Chalons on the Marne, at the head of his left wing, having his right at Troyes and at Arcis, guarding the bridges over the Seine and the Aube. Napoleon knew that Bluecher was moving towards the Austrians; he hoped to hold the Prussian general in check at St. Dizier, and to throw himself upon the heads of Schwarzenberg's columns as they moved towards the Aube. Bluecher, however, had already passed St. Dizier when Napoleon reached it. Napoleon pursued, and overtook the Prussians at Brienne. After an indecisive battle, Bluecher fell back towards Schwarzenberg. The allied armies effected their junction, and Bluecher, now supported by the Austrians, turned and marched down the right bank of the Aube to meet Napoleon. Napoleon, though far outnumbered, accepted battle. He was attacked at La Rothiere close above Brienne, and defeated with heavy loss (Feb. 1). A vigorous pursuit would probably have ended the war; but the Austrians held back. Schwarzenberg believed peace to be already gained, and condemned all further action as useless waste of life. In spite of the protests of the Emperor Alexander, he allowed Napoleon to retire unmolested. Schwarzenberg's inaction was no mere error in military judgment. There was a direct conflict between the Czar and the Austrian Cabinet as to the end to be obtained by the war. Alexander already insisted on the dethronement of Napoleon; the Austrian Government would have been content to leave Napoleon in power if he would accept a peace giving France no worse a frontier than it had possessed in 1791. Castlereagh, who had come from England, and Hardenberg were as yet inclined to support Metternich's policy, although the whole Prussian army, the public opinion of Great Britain, and the counsels of Stein and all the bolder Prussian statesmen, were on the side of the Czar. [188]

[Congress of Chatillon, Feb. 5-9.]

Already the influence of the peace-party was so far in the ascendant that negotiations had been opened with Napoleon. Representatives of all the Powers assembled at Chatillon, in Burgundy; and there, towards the end of January, Caulaincourt appeared on behalf of France. The first sitting took place on the 5th of February; on the following day Caulaincourt received full powers from Napoleon to conclude peace. The Allies laid down as the condition of peace the limitation of France to the frontiers of 1791. Had Caulaincourt dared to conclude peace instantly on these terms, Napoleon would have retained his throne; but he was aware that Napoleon had only granted him full powers in consequence of the disastrous battle of La Rothiere, and he feared to be disavowed by his master as soon as the army had escaped from danger. Instead of simply accepting the Allies' offer, he raised questions as to the future of Italy and Germany. The moment was lost; on the 9th of February the Czar recalled his envoy from Chatillon, and the sittings of the Congress were broken off.

[Defeats of Bluecher on the Marne Feb. 10-14.]

[Montereau, Feb 18.]

[Austrians fall back towards Langres.]

Schwarzenberg was now slowly and unwillingly moving forwards along the Seine towards Troyes. Bluecher was permitted to return to the Marne, and to advance upon Paris by an independent line of march. He crossed the country between the Aube and the Marne, and joined some divisions which he had left behind him on the latter river. But his dispositions were outrageously careless: his troops were scattered over a space of sixty miles from Chalons westward, as if he had no enemy to guard against except the weak divisions commanded by Mortier and Marmont, which had uniformly fallen back before his advance. Suddenly Napoleon himself appeared at the centre of the long Prussian line at Champaubert. He had hastened northwards in pursuit of Bluecher with 30,000 men, as soon as Schwarzenberg entered Troyes; and on February 10th a weak Russian corps that lay in the centre of Bluecher's column was overwhelmed before it was known the Emperor had left the Seine. Then, turning leftwards, Napoleon overthrew the Prussian vanguard at Montmirail, and two days later attacked and defeated Bluecher himself, who was bringing up the remainder of his troops in total ignorance of the enemy with whom he had to deal. In four days Bluecher's army, which numbered 70,000 men, had thrice been defeated in detail by a force of 30,000. Bluecher was compelled to fall back upon Chalons; Napoleon instantly returned to the support of Oudinot's division, which he had left in front of Schwarzenberg. In order to relieve Bluecher, the Austrians had pushed forward on the Seine beyond Montereau. Within three days after the battle with Bluecher, Napoleon was back upon the Seine, and attacking the heads of the Austrian column. On the 18th of February he gained so decisive a victory at Montereau that Schwarzenberg abandoned the advance, and fell back upon Troyes, sending word to Bluecher to come southwards again and help him to fight a great battle. Bluecher moved off with admirable energy, and came into the neighbourhood of Troyes within a week after his defeats upon the Marne. But the design of fighting a great battle was given up. The disinclination of the Austrians to vigorous action was too strong to be overcome; and it was finally determined that Schwarzenberg should fall back almost to the plateau of Langres, leaving Bluecher to unite with the troops of Buelow which had conquered Holland, and to operate on the enemy's flank and rear.

[Congress of Chatillon resumed, Feb. 17-March 15.]

The effect of Napoleon's sudden victories on the Marne was instantly seen in the councils of the allied sovereigns. Alexander, who had withdrawn his envoy from Chatillon, could no longer hold out against negotiations with Napoleon. He restored the powers of his envoy, and the Congress re-assembled. But Napoleon already saw himself in imagination driving the invaders beyond the Rhine, and sent orders to Caulaincourt to insist upon the terms proposed at Frankfort, which left to France both the Rhenish Provinces and Belgium. At the same time he attempted to open a private negotiation with his father-in-law the Emperor of Austria, and to detach him from the cause of the Allies. The attempt failed; the demands now made by Caulaincourt overcame even the peaceful inclinations of the Austrian Minister; and on the 1st of March the Allies signed a new treaty at Chaumont, pledging themselves to conclude no peace with Napoleon that did not restore the frontier of 1791, and to maintain a defensive alliance against France for a period of twenty years. [189] Caulaincourt continued for another fortnight at Chatillon, instructed by Napoleon to prolong the negotiations, but forbidden to accept the only conditions which the Allies were willing to grant.

[Napoleon follows Bluecher to the north. Battle of Laon, March 10.]

Bluecher was now on his way northwards to join the so-called army of Bernadotte upon the Aisne. Since the Battle of Leipzig, Bernadotte himself had taken no part in the movements of the army nominally under his command. The Netherlands had been conquered by Buelow and the Russian general Winzingerode, and these officers were now pushing southwards in order to take part with Bluecher in a movement against Paris. Napoleon calculated that the fortress of Soissons would bar the way to the northern army, and enable him to attack and crush Bluecher before he could effect a junction with his colleagues. He set out in pursuit of the Prussians, still hoping for a second series of victories like those he had won upon the Marne. But the cowardice of the commander of Soissons ruined his chances of success. The fortress surrendered to the Russians at the first summons. Bluecher met the advanced guard of the northern army upon the Aisne on the 4th of March, and continued his march towards Laon for the purpose of uniting with its divisions which lay in the rear. The French followed, but the only advantage gained by Napoleon was a victory over a detached Russian corps at Craonne. Marmont was defeated with heavy loss by a sally of Bluecher from his strong position on the hill of Laon (March 10); and the Emperor himself, unable to restore the fortune of the battle, fell back upon Soissons, and thence marched southward to throw himself again upon the line of the southern army.

[Napoleon marches to the rear of the Allies, March 23.]

[The Allies advance on Paris.]

Schwarzenberg had once more begun to move forward on the news of Bluecher's victory at Laon. His troops were so widely dispersed that Napoleon might even now have cut the line in halves had he known Schwarzenberg's real position. But he made a detour in order to meet Oudinot's corps, and gave the Austrians time to concentrate at Arcis-sur-Aube. Here, on the 20th of March, Napoleon found himself in face of an army of 100,000 men. His own army was less than a third of that number; yet with unalterable contempt for the enemy he risked another battle. No decided issue was reached in the first day's fighting, and Napoleon remained in position, expecting that Schwarzenberg would retreat during the night. But on the morrow the Austrians were still fronting him. Schwarzenberg had at length learnt his own real superiority, and resolved to assist the enemy no longer by a wretched system of retreat. A single act of firmness on the part of the Austrian commander showed Napoleon that the war of battles was at an end. He abandoned all hope of resisting the invaders in front: it only remained for him to throw himself on to their rear, and, in company with the frontier-garrisons and the army of Lyons, to attack their communications with Germany. The plan was no unreasonable one, if Paris could either have sustained a siege or have fallen into the enemy's hands without terminating the war. But the Allies rightly judged that Napoleon's power would be extinct from the moment that Paris submitted. They received the intelligence of the Emperor's march to the east, and declined to follow him. The armies of Schwarzenberg and Bluecher approached one another, and moved together on Paris. It was at Vitry, on March 27th, that Napoleon first discovered that the troops which had appeared to be following his eastward movement were but a detachment of cavalry, and that the allied armies were in full march upon the capital. He instantly called up every division within reach, and pushed forward by forced marches for the Seine, hoping to fall upon Schwarzenberg's rear before the allied vanguard could reach Paris. But at each hour of the march it became more evident that the enemy was far in advance. For two days Napoleon urged his men forward; at length, unable to bear the intolerable suspense, he quitted the army on the morning of the 30th, and drove forward at the utmost speed along the road through Fontainebleau to the capital. As day sank, he met reports of a battle already begun. When he reached the village of Fromenteau, fifteen miles from Paris, at ten o'clock at night, he heard that Paris had actually surrendered.

[Attack on Paris, March 30.]

[Capitulation of Marmont.]

[Allies enter Paris, March 31.]

The Allies had pressed forward without taking any notice of Napoleon's movements, and at early morning on the 30th they had opened the attack on the north-eastern heights of Paris. Marmont, with the fragments of a beaten army and some weak divisions of the National Guard, had but 35,000 men to oppose to three times that number of the enemy. The Government had taken no steps to arm the people, or to prolong resistance after the outside line of defence was lost, although the erection of barricades would have held the Allies in check until Napoleon arrived with his army. While Marmont fought in the outer suburbs, masses of the people were drawn up on Montmartre, expecting the Emperor's appearance, and the spectacle of a great and decisive battle. But the firing in the outskirts stopped soon after noon: it was announced that Marmont had capitulated. The report struck the people with stupor and fury. They had vainly been demanding arms since early morning; and even after the capitulation unsigned papers were handed about by men of the working classes, advocating further resistance. [190] But the people no longer knew how to follow leaders of its own. Napoleon had trained France to look only to himself: his absence left the masses, who were still eager to fight for France, helpless in the presence of the conqueror: there were enemies enough of the Government among the richer classes to make the entry of the foreigner into Paris a scene of actual joy and exultation. To such an extent had the spirit of caste and the malignant delight in Napoleon's ruin overpowered the love of France among the party of the old noblesse, that upon the entry of the allied forces into Paris on the 31st of March hundreds of aristocratic women kissed the hands, or the very boots and horses, of the leaders of the train, and cheered the Cossacks who escorted a band of French prisoners, bleeding and exhausted, through the streets.

[Napoleon dethroned, April 2.]

Napoleon's reign was indeed at an end. Since the rupture of the Congress of Chatillon on the 18th of March, the Allies had determined to make his dethronement a condition of peace. As the end approached, it was seen that no successor was possible but the chief of the House of Bourbon, although Austria would perhaps have consented to the establishment of a Regency under the Empress Marie Louise, and the Czar had for a time entertained the project of placing Bernadotte at the head of the French State. Immediately after the entry into Paris it was determined to raise the exile Louis XVIII. to the throne. The politicians of the Empire who followed Talleyrand were not unwilling to unite with the conquerors, and with the small party of Royalist noblesse, in recalling the Bourbon dynasty. Alexander, who was the real master of the situation, rightly judged Talleyrand to be the man most capable of enlisting the public opinion of France on the side of the new order. He took up his abode at Talleyrand's house, and employed this dexterous statesman as the advocate both of the policy of the Allies, and of the principles of constitutional liberty, which at this time Alexander himself sincerely befriended. A Provisional Government was appointed under Talleyrand's leadership. On the 2nd of April the Senate proclaimed the dethronement of Napoleon. On the 6th it published a Constitution, and recalled the House of Bourbon.

Louis XVIII. was still in England: his brother, the Count of Artois, had joined the invaders in France and assumed the title of Lieutenant of the Kingdom; but the influence of Alexander was necessary to force this obstinate and unteachable man into anything like a constitutional position. The Provisional Government invited the Count to take up the administration until the King's arrival, in virtue of a decree of the Senate. D'Artois declined to recognise the Senate's competency, and claimed the Lieutenancy of the Kingdom as his brother's representative. The Senate refusing to admit the Count's divine right, some unmeaning words were exchanged when d'Artois entered Paris; and the Provisional Government, disregarding the claims of the Royal Lieutenant, continued in the full exercise of its powers. At length the Czar insisted that d'Artois should give way. The decree of the Senate was accordingly accepted by him at the Tuileries on the 14th of April; the Provisional Government retired, and a Council of State was formed, in which Talleyrand still continued to exercise the real powers of government. In the address made by d'Artois on this occasion, he stated that although the King had not empowered him to accept the Constitution made by the Senate on the 6th of April, he entertained no doubt that the King would accept the principles embodied in that Constitution, which were those of Representative Government, of the freedom of the press, and of the responsibility of ministers. A week after d'Artois' declaration, Louis XVIII. arrived in France.

[Louis XVIII. and the Czar.]

[Louis XVIII. enters Paris, May 3.]

Louis XVIII., though capable of adapting himself in practice to a constitutional system, had never permitted himself to question the divine right of the House of Bourbon to sovereign power. The exiles who surrounded him were slow to understand the needs of the time. They recommended the King to reject the Constitution. Louis made an ambiguous answer when the Legislative Body met him at Compiegne and invited an expression of the royal policy. It was again necessary for the Czar to interfere, and to explain to the King that France could no longer be an absolute monarchy. Louis, however, was a better arguer than the Count of Artois. He reasoned as a man whom the sovereigns of Europe had felt it their duty to restore without any request from himself. If the Senate of Napoleon, he urged, had the right to give France a Constitution, he himself ought never to have been brought from his peaceful English home. He was willing to grant a free Constitution to his people in exercise of his own royal rights, but he could not recognise one created by the servants of an usurper. Alexander was but half satisfied with the liberal professions of Louis: he did not, however, insist on his acceptance of the Constitution drawn up by the Senate, but he informed him that until the promises made by d'Artois were confirmed by a royal proclamation, there would be no entry into Paris. The King at length signed a proclamation written by Talleyrand, and made his festal entry into the capital on the 3rd of May.

[Feeling of Paris.]

The promises of Louis himself, the unbroken courtesy and friendliness shown by the Allies to Paris since their victory a month before, had almost extinguished the popular feeling of hostility towards a dynasty which owed its recall to the overthrow of French armies. The foreign leaders themselves had begun to excite a certain admiration and interest. Alexander was considered, and with good reason, as a generous enemy; the simplicity of the King of Prussia, his misfortunes, his well-remembered gallantry at the Battle of Jena, gained him general sympathy. It needed but little on the part of the returning Bourbons to convert the interest and curiosity of Paris into affection. The cortege which entered the capital with Louis XVIII. brought back, in a singular motley of obsolete and of foreign costumes, the bearers of many unforgotten names. The look of the King himself, as he drove through Paris, pleased the people. The childless father of the murdered Duke of Enghien gained the pitying attention of those few who knew the face of a man twenty-five years an exile. But there was one among the members of the returning families whom every heart in Paris went out to meet. The daughter of Louis XVI., who had shared the captivity of her parents and of her brother, the sole survivor of her deeply-wronged house, now returned as Duchess of Angouleme. The uniquely mournful history of her girlhood, and her subsequent marriage with her cousin, the son of the Count of Artois, made her the natural object of a warmer sympathy than could attach to either of the brothers of Louis XVI. But adversity had imprinted its lines too deeply upon the features and the disposition of this joyless woman for a moment's light to return. Her voice and her aspect repelled the affection which thousands were eager to offer to her. Before the close of the first days of the restored monarchy, it was felt that the Bourbons had brought back no single person among them who was capable of winning the French nation's love.

[Napoleon sent to Elba.]

[Napoleon.]

The recall of the ancient line had been allowed to appear to the world as the work of France itself; Napoleon's fate could only be fixed by his conquerors. After the fall of Paris, Napoleon remained at Fontainebleau awaiting events. The soldiers and the younger officers of his army were still ready to fight for him; the marshals, however, were utterly weary, and determined that France should no longer suffer for the sake of a single man. They informed Napoleon that he must abdicate. Yielding to their pressure, Napoleon, on the 3rd of April, drew up an act of abdication in favour of his infant son, and sent it by Caulaincourt to the allied sovereigns at Paris. The document was rejected by the Allies; Caulaincourt returned with the intelligence that Napoleon must renounce the throne for himself and all his family. For a moment the Emperor thought of renewing the war; but the marshals refused their aid more resolutely than before, and, on the 6th of April, Napoleon signed an unconditional surrender of the throne for himself and his heirs. He was permitted by the Allies to retain the unmeaning title of Emperor, and to carry with him a body-guard and a considerable revenue to the island of Elba, henceforward to be his principality and his prison. The choice of this island, within easy reach of France and Italy, and too extensive to be guarded without a large fleet, was due to Alexander's ill-judged generosity towards Napoleon, and to a promise made to Marmont that the liberty of the Emperor should be respected. Alexander was not left without warning of the probable effects of his leniency. Sir Charles Stewart, military representative of Great Britain at the allied head-quarters, urged both his own and the allied Governments to substitute some more distant island for Elba, if they desired to save Europe from a renewed Napoleonic war, and France from the misery of a second invasion. The Allies, though not without misgivings, adhered to their original plan, and left it to time to justify the predictions of their adviser.

[Treaty of Paris, May 30.]

It was well known what would be the terms of peace, now that Napoleon was removed from the throne. The Allies had no intention of depriving France of any of the territory that it had held before 1792: the conclusion of a definitive Treaty was only postponed until the Constitution, which Alexander required King Louis XVIII. to grant, had been drawn up by a royal commission and approved by the King. On the 27th of May the draft of this Constitution, known as the Charta, was laid before the King, and sanctioned by him; on the 30th, the Treaty of Paris was signed by the representatives of France and of all the great Powers. [191] France, surrendering all its conquests, accepted the frontier of the 1st of January, 1792, with a slight addition of territory on the side of Savoy and at points on its northern and eastern border. It paid no indemnity. It was permitted to retain all the works of art accumulated by twenty years of rapine, except the trophies carried from the Brandenburg Gate of Berlin and the spoils of the Library of Vienna. It received back nearly all the colonies which had been taken from it by Great Britain. By the clauses of the Treaty disposing of the territory that had formed the Empire and the dependencies of Napoleon, Holland was restored to the House of Orange, with the provision that its territory should be largely increased; Switzerland was declared independent; it was stipulated that Italy, with the exception of the Austrian Provinces, should consist of independent States, and that Germany should remain distributed among a multitude of sovereigns, independent, but united by a Federal tie. The navigation of the Rhine was thrown open. By a special agreement with Great Britain the French Government undertook to unite its efforts to those of England in procuring the suppression of the Slave-trade by all the Powers, and pledged itself to abolish the Slave-trade among French subjects within five years at the latest. For the settlement of all European questions not included in the Treaty of Paris it was agreed that a Congress of the Powers should, within two months, assemble at Vienna. These were the public articles of the Treaty of Paris. Secret clauses provided that the Allies—that is, the Allies independently of France—should control the distributions of territory to be made at the Congress; that Austria should receive Venetia and all Northern Italy as far as the Ticino; that Genoa should be given to the King of Sardinia; and that the Southern Netherlands should be united into a single kingdom with Holland, and thus form a solid bulwark against France on the north. No mention was made of Naples, whose sovereign, Murat, had abandoned Napoleon and allied himself with Austria, but without fulfilling in good faith the engagements into which he had entered against his former master. A nominal friend of the Allies, he knew that he had played a double game, and that his sovereignty, though not yet threatened, was insecure. [192]

[Territorial arrangements of 1814.]

Much yet remained to be settled by the Congress at Vienna, but in the Treaty of Paris two at least of the great Powers saw the objects attained for which they had straggled so persistently through all the earlier years of the war, and which at a later time had appeared to pass almost out of the range of possibility. England saw the Netherlands once more converted into a barrier against France, and Antwerp held by friendly hands. Austria reaped the full reward of its cool and well-balanced diplomacy during the crisis of 1813, in the annexation of an Italian territory that made it the real mistress of the Peninsula. Castlereagh and every other English politician felt that Europe had done itself small honour in handing Venice back to the Hapsburg; but this had been the condition exacted by Metternich at Prague before he consented to throw the sword of Austria into the trembling scale; [193] and the Republican traditions both of Venice and of Genoa counted for little among the statesmen of 1814, in comparison with the divine right of a Duke of Modena or a Prince of Hesse Cassel. [194] France itself, though stripped of the dominion won by twenty years of warfare, was permitted to retain, for the benefit of a restored line of kings, the whole of its ancient territory, and the spoil of all the galleries and museums of Western Europe. It would have been no unnatural wrong if the conquerors of 1814 had dealt with the soil of France as France had dealt with other lands; it would have been an act of bare justice to restore to its rightful owners the pillage that had been brought to Paris, and to recover from the French treasury a part of the enormous sums which Napoleon had extorted from conquered States. But the Courts were too well satisfied with their victory to enter into a strict account upon secondary matters; and a prudent regard on the part of the Allies to the prospects of the House of Bourbon saved France from experiencing what it had inflicted upon others.

[All the Powers except France gained territory by the war, 1792-1814.]

The policy which now restored to France the frontier of 1792 was viewed with a very different feeling in France and in all other countries. Europe looked with a kind of wonder upon its own generosity; France forgot the unparalleled provocations which it had offered to mankind, and only remembered that Belgium and the Rhenish Provinces had formed part of the Republic and the Empire for nearly twenty years. These early conquests of the Republic, which no one had attempted to wrest from France since 1795, had undoubtedly been the equivalent for which, in the days of the Directory, Austria had been permitted to extend itself in Italy, and Prussia in Germany. In the opinion of men who sincerely condemned Napoleon's distant conquests, the territory between France and the Rhine was no more than France might legitimately demand, as a counterpoise to the vast accessions falling to one or other of the Continental Powers out of the territory of Poland, Venice, and the body of suppressed States in Germany. Poland, excluding the districts taken from it before 1792, contained a population twice as great as that of Belgium and the Rhenish Provinces together: Venice carried with it, in addition to a commanding province on the Italian mainland, the Eastern Adriatic Coast as far as Ragusa. If it were true that the proportionate increase of power formed the only solid principle of European policy, France sustained a grievous injury in receiving back the limits of 1791, when every other State on the Continent was permitted to retain the territory, or an equivalent for the territory, which it had gained in the great changes that took place between 1791 and 1814. But in fact there had never been a time during the last hundred and fifty years when France, under an energetic Government, had not possessed a force threatening to all its neighbours. France, reduced to its ancient limits, was still the equal, and far more than the equal, of any of the Continental Powers, with all that they had gained during the Revolutionary War. It remained the first of European nations, though no longer, as in the eighteenth century, the one great nation of the western continent. Its efforts after universal empire had aroused other nations into life. Had the course of French conquest ceased before Napoleon grasped power, France would have retained its frontier of the Rhine, and long have exercised an unbounded influence over both Germany and Italy, through the incomparably juster and brighter social life which the Revolution, combined with all that France had inherited from the past, enabled it to display to those countries. Napoleon, in the attempt to impose his rule upon all Europe, created a power in Germany whose military future was to be not less solid than that of France itself, and left to Europe, in the accord of his enemies, a firmer security against French attack than any that the efforts of statesmen had ever framed.

[Permanent effect on Europe of period 1792-1814.]

[National sense excited in Germany and Italy.]

The league of the older monarchies had proved stronger in the end than the genius and the ambition of a single man. But if, in the service of Napoleon, France had exhausted its wealth, sunk its fleets, and sacrificed a million lives, only that it might lose all its earlier conquests, and resume limits which it had outgrown before Napoleon held his first command, it was not thus with the work which, for or against itself, France had effected in Europe during the movements of the last twenty years. In the course of the epoch now ending the whole of the Continent up to the frontiers of Austria and Russia had gained the two fruitful ideas of nationality and political freedom. There were now two nations in Europe where before there had been but aggregates of artificial States. Germany and Italy were no longer mere geographical expressions: in both countries, though in a very unequal degree, the newly-aroused sense of nationality had brought with it the claim for unity and independence. In Germany, Prussia had set a great example, and was hereafter to reap its reward; in Italy there had been no State and no statesman to take the lead either in throwing off Napoleon's rule, or in forcing him, as the price of support, to give to his Italian kingdom a really national government. Failing to act for itself, the population of all Italy, except Naples, was parcelled out between Austria and the ancient dynasties; but the old days of passive submission to the foreigner were gone for ever, and time was to show whether those were the dreamers who thought of a united Italy, or those who thought that Metternich's statesmanship had for ever settled the fate of Venice and of Milan.

[Desire for political liberty.]

The second legacy of the Revolutionary epoch, the idea of constitutional freedom, which in 1789 had been as much wanting in Spain, where national spirit was the strongest, as in those German States where it was the weakest, had been excited in Italy by the events of 1796 and 1798, in Spain by the disappearance of the Bourbon king and the self-directed struggle of the nation against the invader; in Prussia it had been introduced by the Government itself when Stein was at the head of the State. "It is impossible," wrote Lord Castlereagh in the spring of 1814, "not to perceive a great moral change coming on in Europe, and that the principles of freedom are in full operation." [195] There was in fact scarcely a Court in Europe which was not now declaring its intention to frame a Constitution. The professions might be lightly made; the desire and the capacity for self-government might still be limited to a narrower class than the friends of liberty imagined; but the seed was sown, and a movement had begun which was to gather strength during the next thirty years of European history, while one revolution after another proved that Governments could no longer with safety disregard the rights of their subjects.

[Social changes.]

Lastly, in all the territory that had formed Napoleon's Empire and dependencies, and also in Prussia, legal changes had been made in the rights and relations of the different classes of society, so important as almost to create a new type of social life. Within the Empire itself the Code Napoleon, conferring upon the subjects of France the benefits which the French had already won for themselves, had superseded a society resting on class-privilege, on feudal service, and on the despotism of custom, by a society resting on equality before the law, on freedom of contract, and on the unshackled ownership and enjoyment of land, whether the holder possessed an acre or a league. The principles of the French Code, if not the Code itself, had been introduced into Napoleon's kingdom of Italy, into Naples, and into almost all the German dependencies of France. In Prussia the reforms of Stein and Hardenberg had been directed, though less boldly, towards the same end; and when, after 1814, the Rhenish Provinces were annexed to Prussia by the Congress of Vienna, the Government was wise enough and liberal enough to leave these districts in the enjoyment of the laws which France had given them, and not to risk a comparison between even the best Prussian legislation and the Code Napoleon. In other territory now severed from France and restored to German or Italian princes, attempts were not wanting to obliterate the new order and to re-introduce the burdens and confusions of the old regime. But these reactions, even where unopposed for a time, were too much in conflict with the spirit of the age to gain more than a temporary and precarious success. The people had begun to know good and evil: examples of a free social order were too close at hand to render it possible for any part of the western continent to relapse for any very long period into the condition of the eighteenth century.

[Limits.]

It was indeed within a distinct limit that the Revolutionary epoch effected its work of political and social change. Neither England nor Austria received the slightest impulse to progress. England, on the contrary, suspended almost all internal improvement during the course of the war; the domestic policy of the Austrian Court, so energetic in the reign immediately preceding the Revolution, became for the next twenty years, except where it was a policy of repression, a policy of pure vacancy and inaction. But in all other States of Western Europe the period which reached its close with Napoleon's fall left deep and lasting traces behind it. Like other great epochs of change, it bore its own peculiar character. It was not, like the Renaissance and the Reformation, a time when new worlds of faith and knowledge transformed the whole scope and conception of human life; it was not, like our own age, a time when scientific discovery and increased means of communication silently altered the physical conditions of existence; it was a time of changes directly political in their nature, and directly effected by the political agencies of legislation and of war. In the perspective of history the Napoleonic age will take its true place among other, and perhaps greater, epochs. Its elements of mere violence and disturbance will fill less space in the eyes of mankind; its permanent creations, more. As an epoch of purely political energy, concentrating the work of generations within the compass of twenty five years, it will perhaps scarcely find a parallel.



CHAPTER XII.

The Restoration of 1814—Norway—Naples—Westphalia—Spain—The Spanish Constitution overthrown: Victory of the Clergy—Restoration in France—The Charta—Encroachments of the Nobles and Clergy—Growing Hostility to the Bourbons—Congress of Vienna—Talleyrand and the Four Powers—The Polish Question—The Saxon Question—Theory of Legitimacy—Secret Alliance against Russia and Prussia—Compromise—The Rhenish Provinces—Napoleon leaves Elba and lands in France—His Declarations—Napoleon at Grenoble, at Lyon, at Paris—The Congress of Vienna unites Europe against France—Murat's Action in Italy—The Acte Additionnel—The Champ de Mai—Napoleon takes up the offensive—Battles of Ligny, Quatre Bras, Waterloo—Affairs at Paris—Napoleon sent to St. Helena—Wellington and Fouche—Arguments on the proposed Cession of French Territory—Treaty of Holy Alliance—Second Treaty of Paris—Conclusion of the Work of the Congress of Vienna— Federation of Germany—Estimate of the Congress of Vienna and of the Treaties of 1815—The Slave Trade.

Of all the events which, in the more recent history of mankind, have struck the minds of nations with awe, and appeared to reveal in its direct operation a power overruling the highest human effort, there is none equal in grandeur and terror to the annihilation of Napoleon's army in the invasion of Russia. It was natural that a generation which had seen State after State overthrown, and each new violation of right followed by an apparent consolidation of the conqueror's strength, should view in the catastrophe of 1812 the hand of Providence visibly outstretched for the deliverance of Europe. [196] Since that time many years have passed. Perils which then seemed to envelop the future of mankind now appear in part illusory; sacrifices then counted cheap have proved of heavy cost. The history of the two last generations shows that not everything was lost to Europe in passing subjection to a usurper, nor everything gained by the victory of his opponents. It is now not easy to suppress the doubt whether the permanent interests of mankind would not have been best served by Napoleon's success in 1812. His empire had already attained dimensions that rendered its ultimate disruption certain: less depended upon the postponement or the acceleration of its downfall than on the order of things ready to take its place. The victory of Napoleon in 1812 would have been followed by the establishment of a Polish kingdom in the provinces taken from Russia. From no generosity in the conqueror, from no sympathy on his part with a fallen people, but from the necessities of his political situation, Poland must have been so organised as to render it the bulwark of French supremacy in the East. The serf would have been emancipated. The just hatred of the peasant to the noble, which made the partition of 1772 easy, and has proved fatal to every Polish uprising from that time to the present, would have been appeased by an agrarian reform executed with Napoleon's own unrivalled energy and intelligence, and ushered in with brighter hopes than have at any time in the history of Poland lit the dark shades of peasant-life. The motives which in 1807 had led Napoleon to stay his hand, and to content himself with half-measures of emancipation in the Duchy of Warsaw [197], could have had no place after 1812, when Russia remained by his side, a mutilated but inexorable enemy, ever on the watch to turn to its own advantage the first murmurs of popular discontent beyond the border. Political independence, the heritage of the Polish noble, might have been withheld, but the blessing of landed independence would have been bestowed on the mass of the Polish people. In the course of some years this restored kingdom, though governed by a member of the house of Bonaparte, would probably have gained sufficient internal strength to survive the downfall of Napoleon's Empire or his own decease. England, Austria, and Turkey would have found it no impossible task to prevent its absorption by Alexander at the re-settlement of Europe, if indeed the collapse of Russia had not been followed by the overthrow of the Porte, and the establishment of a Greek, a Bulgarian, and a Roumanian Kingdom under the supremacy of France. By the side of the three absolute monarchs of Central and Eastern Europe there would have remained, upon Napoleon's downfall, at least one people in possession of the tradition of liberty: and from the example of Poland, raised from the deep but not incurable degradation of its social life, the rulers of Russia might have gained courage to emancipate the serf, without waiting for the lapse of another half-century and the occurrence of a second ruinous war. To compare a possible sequence of events with the real course of history, to estimate the good lost and evil got through events which at the time seemed to vindicate the moral governance of the world, is no idle exercise of the imagination. It may serve to give caution to the judgment: it may guard us against an arbitrary and fanciful interpretation of the actual. The generation which witnessed the fall of Napoleon is not the only one which has seen Providence in the fulfilment of its own desire, and in the storm-cloud of nature and history has traced with too sanguine gaze the sacred lineaments of human equity and love.

[Settlement of 1814.]

[Norway.]

[Naples.]

The Empire of Napoleon had indeed passed away. The conquests won by the first soldiers of the Republic were lost to France along with all the latest spoils of its Emperor; but the restoration which was effected in 1814 was no restoration of the political order which had existed on the Continent before the outbreak of the Revolutionary War. The Powers which had overthrown Napoleon had been partakers, each in its own season, in the system of aggrandisement which had obliterated the old frontiers of Europe. Russia had gained Finland, Bessarabia, and the greater part of Poland; Austria had won Venice, Dalmatia, and Salzburg; Prussia had received between the years 1792 and 1806 an extension of territory in Poland and Northern Germany that more than doubled its area. It was now no part of the policy of the victorious Courts to reinstate the governments which they had themselves dispossessed: the settlement of 1814, in so far as it deserved the name of a restoration, was confined to the territory taken from Napoleon and from princes of his house. Here, though the claims of Republics and Ecclesiastical Princes were forgotten, the titles of the old dynasties were freely recognised. In France itself, in the Spanish Peninsula, in Holland, Westphalia, Piedmont, and Tuscany, the banished houses resumed their sovereignty. It cost the Allies nothing to restore these countries to their hereditary rulers, and it enabled them to describe the work of 1814 in general terms as the restoration of lawful government and national independence. But the claims of legitimacy, as well as of national right, were, as a matter of fact, only remembered where there existed no motive to disregard them; where they conflicted with arrangements of policy, they received small consideration. Norway, which formed part of the Danish monarchy, had been promised by Alexander to Bernadotte, Crown Prince of Sweden, in 1812, in return for his support against Napoleon, and the bargain had been ratified by the Allies. As soon as Napoleon was overthrown, Bernadotte claimed his reward. It was in vain that the Norwegians, abandoned by their king, declared themselves independent, and protested against being handed over like a flock of sheep by the liberators of Europe. The Allies held to their contract; a British fleet was sent to assist Bernadotte in overpowering his new subjects, and after a brief resistance the Norwegians found themselves compelled to submit to their fate (April—Aug., 1814). [198] At the other extremity of Europe a second of Napoleon's generals still held his throne among the restored legitimate monarchs. Murat, King of Naples, had forsaken Napoleon in time to make peace and alliance with Austria. Great Britain, though entering into a military convention, had not been a party to this treaty; and it had declared that its own subsequent support of Murat would depend upon the condition that he should honourably exert himself in Italy against Napoleon's forces. This condition Murat had not fulfilled. The British Government was, however, but gradually supplied with proofs of his treachery; nor was Lord Liverpool, the Prime Minister, inclined to raise new difficulties at Vienna by pressing the claim of Ferdinand of Sicily to his territories on the mainland. [199] Talleyrand, on behalf of the restored Bourbons of Paris, intended to throw all his strength into a diplomatic attack upon Murat before the end of the Congress; but for the present Murat's chances seemed to be superior to those of his rival. Southern Italy thus continued in the hands of a soldier of fortune, who, unlike Bernadotte, was secretly the friend of Napoleon, and ready to support him in any attempt to regain his throne.

[Restoration in Westphalia.]

The engagement of the Allies towards Bernadotte, added to the stipulations of the Peace of Paris, left little to be decided by the Congress of Vienna beyond the fate of Poland, Saxony, and Naples, and the form of political union to be established in Germany. It had been agreed that the Congress should assemble within two months after the signature of the Peace of Paris: this interval, however, proved to be insufficient, and the autumn had set in before the first diplomatists arrived at Vienna, and began the conferences which preceded the formal opening of the Congress. In the meantime a singular spectacle was offered to Europe by the Courts whose restoration was the subject of so much official thanksgiving. Before King Louis XVIII. returned to Paris, the exiled dynasties had regained their thrones in Northern Germany and in Spain. The process of reaction had begun in Hanover and in Hesse as soon as the battle of Leipzig had dissolved the Kingdom of Westphalia and driven Napoleon across the Rhine. Hanover indeed did not enjoy the bodily presence of its Sovereign: its character was oligarchical, and the reaction here was more the affair of the privileged classes than of the Government. In Hesse a prince returned who was the very embodiment of divine right, a prince who had sturdily fought against French demagogues in 1792, and over whose stubborn, despotic nature the revolutions of a whole generation and the loss of his own dominions since the battle of Jena had passed without leaving a trace. The Elector was seventy years old when, at the end of the year 1813, his faithful subjects dragged his carriage in triumph into the streets of Cassel. On the day after his arrival he gave orders that the Hessian soldiery who had been sent on furlough after the battle of Jena should present themselves, every man in the garrison-town where he had stood on the 1st of November, 1806. A few weeks later all the reforms of the last seven years were swept away together. The Code Napoleon ceased to be the law of the land; the old oppressive distinctions of caste, with the special courts for the privileged orders, came again into force, in defiance of the spirit of the age. The feudal burdens of the peasantry were revived, the purchasers of State-lands compelled to relinquish the land without receiving back any of their purchase-money. The decimal coinage was driven out of the country. The old system of taxation, with its iniquitous exemptions, was renewed. All promotions, all grants of rank made by Jerome's Government were annulled: every officer, every public servant resumed the station which he had occupied on the 1st of November, 1806. The very pigtails and powder of the common soldier under the old regime were revived. [200]

[Restoration in Spain.]

The Hessians and their neighbours in North-Western Germany had from of old been treated with very little ceremony by their rulers; and if they welcomed back a family which had been accustomed to hire them out at so much a head to fight against the Hindoos or by the side of the North American Indians, it only proved that they preferred their native taskmasters to Jerome Bonaparte and his French crew of revellers and usurers. The next scene in the European reaction was a far more mournful one. Ferdinand of Spain had no sooner re-crossed the Pyrenees in the spring of 1814, than, convinced of his power by the transports of popular enthusiasm that attended his progress through Northern Spain, he determined to overthrow the Constitution of 1812, and to re-establish the absolute monarchy which had existed before the war. The courtiers and ecclesiastics who gathered round the King dispelled any scruples that he might have felt in lifting his hand against a settlement accepted by the nation. They represented to him that the Cortes of 1812—which, whatever their faults, had been recognised as the legitimate Government of Spain by both England and Russia—consisted of a handful of desperate men, collected from the streets of Cadiz, who had taken upon themselves to insult the Crown, to rob the Church, and to imperil the existence of the Catholic Faith. On the entry of the King into Valencia, the cathedral clergy expressed the wishes of their order in the address of homage which they offered to Ferdinand. "We beg your Majesty," their spokesman concluded, "to take the most vigorous measures for the restoration of the Inquisition, and of the ecclesiastical system that existed in Spain before your Majesty's departure." "These," replied the King, "are my own wishes, and I will not rest until they are fulfilled." [201]

[Spanish Constitution overthrown.]

The victory of the clergy was soon declared. On the 11th of May the King issued a manifesto at Valencia, proclaiming the Constitution of 1812 and every decree of the Cortes null and void, and denouncing the penalties of high treason against everyone who should defend the Constitution by act, word, or writing. A variety of promises, made only to be broken, accompanied this assertion of the rights of the Crown. The King pledged himself to summon new Cortes as soon as public order should be restored, to submit the expenditure to the control of the nation, and to maintain inviolate the security of person and property. It was a significant comment upon Ferdinand's professions of Liberalism that on the very day on which the proclamation was issued the censorship of the Press was restored. But the King had not miscalculated his power over the Spanish people. The same storm of wild, unreasoning loyalty which had followed Ferdinand's reappearance in Spain followed the overthrow of the Constitution. The mass of the Spaniards were ignorant of the very meaning of political liberty: they adored the King as a savage adores his fetish: their passions were at the call of a priesthood as brutish and unscrupulous as that which in 1798 had excited the Lazzaroni of Naples against the Republicans of Southern Italy. No sooner had Ferdinand set the example, by arresting thirty of the most distinguished of the Liberals, than tumults broke out in every part of the country against Constitutionalist magistrates and citizens. Mobs, headed by priests bearing the standard of the Inquisition, destroyed the tablets erected in honour of the Constitution of 1812, and burned Liberal writings in bonfires in the market-places. The prisons were filled with men who, but a short time before, had been the objects of popular adulation.

[The clergy in power.]

Whatever pledges of allegiance had been given to the Constitution of 1812, it was clear that this Constitution had no real hold on the nation, and that Ferdinand fulfilled the wish of the majority of Spaniards in overthrowing it. A wise and energetic sovereign would perhaps have allowed himself to use this outburst of religious fanaticism for the purpose of substituting some better order for the imprudent arrangements of 1812. Ferdinand, an ignorant, hypocritical buffoon, with no more notion of political justice or generosity than the beasts of the field, could only substitute for the fallen Cortes a government by palace-favourites and confessors. It was in vain, that the representatives of Great Britain urged the King to fulfil his constitutional promises, and to liberate the persons who had unjustly been thrown into prison. [202] The clergy were masters of Spain and of the King: their influence daily outweighed even that of Ferdinand's own Ministers, when, under the pressure of financial necessity, the Ministers began to offer some resistance to the exorbitant demands of the priesthood. On the 23rd of May the King signed an edict restoring all monasteries throughout Spain, and reinstating them in their lands. On the 24th of June the clergy were declared exempt from taxation. On the 21st of July the Church won its crowning triumph in the re-establishment of the Inquisition. In the meantime the army was left without pay, in some places actually without food. The country was at the mercy of bands of guerillas, who, since the disappearance of the enemy, had turned into common brigands, and preyed upon their own countrymen. Commerce was extinct; agriculture abandoned; innumerable villages were lying in ruins; the population was barbarised by the savage warfare with which for years past it had avenged its own sufferings upon the invader. Of all the countries of Europe, Spain was the one in which the events of the Revolutionary epoch seemed to have left an effect most nearly approaching to unmixed evil.

[Restoration in France.]

In comparison with the reaction in the Spanish Peninsula the reaction in France was sober and dignified. Louis XVIII. was at least a scholar and a man of the world. In the old days, among companions whose names were now almost forgotten, he had revelled in Voltaire and dallied with the fashionable Liberalism of the time. In his exile he had played the king with some dignity; he was even believed to have learnt some political wisdom by his six years' residence in England. If he had not character, [203] he had at least some tact and some sense of humour; and if not a profound philosopher, he was at least an accomplished epicurean. He hated the zealotry of his brother, the Count of Artois. He was more inclined to quiz the emigrants than to sacrifice anything on their behalf; and the whole bent of his mind made him but an insincere ally of the priesthood, who indeed could hardly expect to enjoy such an orgy in France as their brethren were celebrating in Spain. The King, however, was unable to impart his own indifference to the emigrants who returned with him, nor had he imagination enough to identify himself, as King of France, with the military glories of the nation and with the democratic army that had won them. Louis held high notions of the royal prerogative: this would not in itself have prevented him from being a successful ruler, if he had been capable of governing in the interest of the nation at large. There were few Republicans remaining in France; the centralised institutions of the Empire remained in full vigour; and although the last months of Napoleon's rule had excited among the educated classes a strong spirit of constitutional opposition, an able and patriotic Bourbon accepting his new position, and wielding power for the benefit of the people and not of a class, might perhaps have exercised an authority not much inferior to that possessed by the Crown before 1789. But Louis, though rational, was inexperienced and supine. He was ready enough to admit into his Ministry and to retain in administrative posts throughout the country men who had served under Napoleon; but when the emigrants and the nobles, led by the Count of Artois, pushed themselves to the front of the public service, and treated the restoration of the Bourbons as the victory of their own order, the King offered but a faint resistance, and allowed the narrowest class-interests to discredit a monarchy whose own better traditions identified it not with an aristocracy but with the State.

[The Charta.]

The Constitution promulgated by King Louis XVIII. on the 4th of June, 1814, and known as the Charta, [204] was well received by the French nation. Though far less liberal than the Constitution accepted by Louis XVI. in 1791, it gave to the French a measure of representative government to which they had been strangers under Napoleon. It created two legislative chambers, the Upper House consisting of peers who were nominated by the Crown at its pleasure, whether for life-peerages or hereditary dignity; the Lower House formed by national election, but by election restricted by so high a property-qualification [205] that not one person in two hundred possessed a vote. The Crown reserved to itself the sole power of proposing laws. In spite of this serious limitation of the competence of the two houses, the Lower Chamber possessed, in its right of refusing taxes and of discussing and rejecting all measures laid before it, a reality of power such as no representative body had possessed in France since the beginning of the Consulate. The Napoleonic nobility was placed on an equality with the old noblesse of France, though neither enjoyed, as nobles, anything more than a titular distinction. [206] Purchasers of landed property sold by the State since the beginning of the Revolution were guaranteed in their possessions. The principles of religious freedom, of equality before the law, and of the admissibility of all classes to public employment, which had taken such deep root during the Republic and the Empire, were declared to form part of the public law of France; and by the side of these deeply-cherished rights the Charta of King Louis XVIII. placed, though in a qualified form, the long-forgotten principle of the freedom of the Press.

[Encroachments of Nobles.]

Under such a Constitution there was little room for the old noblesse to arrogate to itself any legal superiority over the mass of the French nation. What was wanting in law might, however, in the opinion of the Count of Artois and his friends, be effected by administration. Of all the institutions of France the most thoroughly national and the most thoroughly democratic was the arrny; it was accordingly against the army that the noblesse directed its first efforts. Financial difficulties made a large reduction in the forces necessary. Fourteen thousand officers and sergeants were accordingly dismissed on half-pay; but no sooner had this measure of economy been effected than a multitude of emigrants who had served against the Republic in the army of the Prince of Conde or in La Vendee were rewarded with all degrees of military rank. Naval officers who had quitted the service of France and entered that of its enemies were reinstated with the rank which they had held in foreign navies. [207] The tricolor, under which every battle of France had been fought from Jemappes to Montmartre, was superseded by the white flag of the House of Bourbon, under which no living soldier had marched to victory. General Dupont, known only by his capitulation at Baylen in 1808, was appointed Minister of War. The Imperial Guard was removed from service at the Palace, and the so-called Military Household of the old Bourbon monarchy revived, with the privileges and the insignia belonging to the period before 1775. Young nobles who had never seen a shot fired crowded into this favoured corps, where the musketeer and the trooper held the rank and the pay of a lieutenant in the army. While in every village of France some battered soldier of Napoleon cursed the Government that had driven him from his comrades, the Court revived at Paris all the details of military ceremonial that could be gathered from old almanacks, from the records of court-tailors, and from the memories of decayed gallants. As if to convince the public that nothing had happened during the last twenty-two years, the aged Marquis de Chansenets, who had been Governor of the Tuileries on the 10th of August, 1792, and had then escaped by hiding among the bodies of the dead, [208] resumed his place at the head of the officers of the Palace.

[Encroachments of the clergy.]

[Growing hostility to the Bourbons.]

These were but petty triumphs for the emigrants and nobles, but they were sufficient to make the restored monarchy unpopular. Equally injurious was their behaviour in insulting the families of Napoleon's generals, in persecuting men who had taken part in the great movement of 1789, and in intimidating the peasant-owners of land that had been confiscated and sold by the State. Nor were the priesthood backward in discrediting the Government of Louis XVIII. in the service of their own order. It might be vain to think of recovering the Churchlands, or of introducing the Inquisition into France, but the Court might at least be brought to invest itself with the odour of sanctity, and the parish-priest might be made as formidable a person within his own village as the mayor or the agent of the police-minister. Louis XVIII. was himself sceptical and self-indulgent. This, however, did not prevent him from publishing a letter to the Bishops placing his kingdom under the especial protection of the Virgin Mary, and from escorting the image of the patron-saint through the streets of Paris in a procession in which Marshal Soult and other regenerate Jacobins of the Court braved the ridicule of the populace by acting as candle-bearers. Another sign of the King's submission to the clergy was the publication of an edict which forbade buying and selling on Sundays and festivals.

Whatever the benefits of a freely-observed day of rest, this enactment, which was not submitted to the Chambers, passed for an arrogant piece of interference on the part of the clergy with national habits; and while it caused no inconvenience to the rich, it inflicted substantial loss upon a numerous and voluble class of petty traders. The wrongs done to the French nation by the priests and emigrants who rose to power in 1814 were indeed the merest trifle in comparison with the wrongs which it had uncomplainingly borne at the hands of Napoleon. But the glory of the Empire, the strength and genius of its absolute rule, were gone. In its place there was a family which had been dissociated from France during twenty years, which had returned only to ally itself with an unpopular and dreaded caste, and to prove that even the unexpected warmth with which it had been welcomed home could not prevent it from becoming, at the end of a few months, utterly alien and uninteresting. The indifference of the nation would not have endangered the Bourbon monarchy if the army had been won over by the King. But here the Court had excited the bitterest enmity. The accord which for a moment had seemed possible even to Republicans of the type of Carnot had vanished at a touch. [209] Rumours of military conspiracies grew stronger with every month. Wellington, now British Ambassador at Paris, warned his Government of the changed feeling of the capital, of the gatherings of disbanded officers, of possible attacks upon the Tuileries. "The truth is," he wrote, "that the King of France without the army is no King." Wellington saw the more immediate danger: [210] he failed to see the depth and universality of the movement passing over France, which before the end of the year 1814 had destroyed the hold of the Bourbon monarchy except in those provinces where it had always found support, and prepared the nation at large to welcome back the ruler who so lately seemed to have fallen for ever.

[Congress of Vienna, Sept., 1814.]

Paris and Madrid divided for some months after the conclusion of peace the attention of the political world. At the end of September the centre of European interest passed to Vienna. The great council of the Powers, so long delayed, was at length assembled. The Czar of Russia, the Kings of Prussia, Denmark, Bavaria, and Wuertemberg, and nearly all the statesmen of eminence in Europe, gathered round the Emperor Francis and his Minister, Metternich, to whom by common consent the presidency of the Congress was offered. Lord Castlereagh represented England, and Talleyrand France. Rasumoffsky and other Russian diplomatists acted under the immediate directions of their master, who on some occasions even entered into personal correspondence with the Ministers of the other Powers. Hardenberg stood in a somewhat freer relation to King Frederick William; Stein was present, but without official place. The subordinate envoys and attaches of the greater Courts, added to a host of petty princes and the representatives who came from the minor Powers, or from communities which had ceased to possess any political existence at all, crowded Vienna. In order to relieve the antagonisms which had already come too clearly into view, Metternich determined to entertain his visitors in the most magnificent fashion; and although the Austrian State was bankrupt, and in some districts the people were severely suffering, a sum of about L10,000 a day was for some time devoted to this purpose. The splendour and the gaieties of Metternich were emulated by his guests; and the guardians of Europe enjoyed or endured for months together a succession of fetes, banquets, dances, and excursions, varied, through the zeal of Talleyrand to ingratiate himself with his new master, by a Mass of great solemnity on the anniversary of the execution of Louis XVI. [211] One incident lights the faded and insipid record of vanished pageants and defunct gallantries. Beethoven was in Vienna. The Government placed the great Assembly-rooms at his disposal, and enabled the composer to gratify a harmless humour by sending invitations in his own name to each of the Sovereigns and grandees then in Vienna. Much personal homage, some substantial kindness from these gaudy creatures of the hour, made the period of the Congress a bright page in that wayward and afflicted life whose poverty has enriched mankind with such immortal gifts.

[Talleyrand and the four Powers.]

The Congress had need of its distractions, for the difficulties which faced it were so great that, even after the arrival of the Sovereigns, it was found necessary to postpone the opening of the regular sittings until November. By the secret articles of the Peace of Paris, the Allies had reserved to themselves the disposal of all vacant territory, although their conclusions required to be formally sanctioned by the Congress at large. The Ministers of Austria, England, Prussia, and Russia accordingly determined at the outset to decide upon all territorial questions among themselves, and only after their decisions were completely formed to submit them to France and the other Powers. [212] Talleyrand, on hearing of this arrangement, protested that France itself was now one of the Allies, and demanded that the whole body of European States should at once meet in open Congress. The four Courts held to their determination, and began their preliminary sittings without Talleyrand. But the French statesman had, under the form of a paradox, really stated the true political situation. The greater Powers were so deeply divided in their aims that their old bond of common interest, the interest of union against France, was now less powerful than the impulse that made them seek the support of France against one another. Two men had come to the Congress with a definite aim: Alexander had resolved to gain the Duchy of Warsaw, and to form it, with or without some part of Russian Poland, into a Polish kingdom, attached to his own crown: Talleyrand had determined, either on the question of Poland, or on the question of Saxony, which arose out of it, to break allied Europe into halves, and to range France by the side of two of the great Powers against the two others. The course of events favoured for a while the design of the Minister: Talleyrand himself prosecuted his plan with an ability which, but for the untimely return of Napoleon from Elba, would have left France, without a war, the arbiter and the leading Power of Europe.

[Polish question.]

Since the Russian victories of 1812, the Emperor Alexander had made no secret of his intention to restore a Polish Kingdom and a Polish nationality. [213] Like many other designs of this prince, the project combined a keen desire for personal glorification with a real generosity of feeling. Alexander was thoroughly sincere in his wish not only to make the Poles again a people, but to give them a Parliament and a free Constitution. The King of Poland, however, was to be no independent prince, but Alexander himself: although the Duchy of Warsaw, the chief if not the sole component of the proposed new kingdom, had belonged to Austria and Prussia after the last partition of Poland, and extended into the heart of the Prussian monarchy. Alexander insisted on his anxiety to atone for the crime of Catherine in dismembering Poland: the atonement, however, was to be made at the sole cost of those whom Catherine had allowed to share the booty. Among the other Governments, the Ministry of Great Britain would gladly have seen a Polish State established in a really independent form; [214] failing this, it desired that the Duchy of Warsaw should be divided, as formerly, between Austria and Prussia. Metternich was anxious that the fortress of Cracow, at any rate, should not fall into the hands of the Czar. Stein and Hardenberg, and even Alexander's own Russian counsellors, earnestly opposed the Czar's project, not only on account of the claims of Prussia on Warsaw, but from dread of the agitation likely to be produced by a Polish Parliament among all Poles outside the new State. King Frederick William, however, was unaccustomed to dispute the wishes of his ally; and the Czar's offer of Saxony in substitution for Warsaw gave to the Prussian Ministers, who were more in earnest than their master, at least the prospect of receiving a valuable equivalent for what they might surrender.

[Saxon question.]

By the Treaty of Kalisch, made when Prussia united its arms with those of Russia against Napoleon (Feb. 27th, 1813), the Czar had undertaken to restore the Prussian monarchy to an extent equal to that which it had possessed in 1805. It was known before the opening of the Congress that the Czar proposed to do this by handing over to King Frederick William the whole of Saxony, whose Sovereign, unlike his colleagues in the Rhenish Confederacy, had supported Napoleon up to his final overthrow at Leipzig. Since that time the King of Saxony had been held a prisoner, and his dominions had been occupied by the Allies. The Saxon question had thus already gained the attention of all the European Governments, and each of the Ministers now at Vienna brought with him some more or less distinct view upon the subject. Castlereagh, who was instructed to foster the union of Prussia and Austria against Alexander's threatening ambition, was willing that Prussia should annex Saxony if in return it would assist him in keeping Russia out of Warsaw: [215] Metternich disliked the annexation, but offered no serious objection, provided that in Western Germany Prussia would keep to the north of the Main: Talleyrand alone made the defence of the King of Saxony the very centre of his policy, and subordinated all other aims to this. His instructions, like those of Castlereagh, gave priority to the Polish question; [216] but Talleyrand saw that Saxony, not Poland, was the lever by which he could throw half of Europe on to the side of France; and before the four Allied Courts had come to any single conclusion, the French statesman had succeeded, on what at first passed for a subordinate point, in breaking up their concert.

[Talleyrand's action on Saxony.]

For a while the Ministers of Austria, Prussia, and England appeared to be acting in harmony; and throughout the month of October all three endeavoured to shake the purpose of Alexander regarding Warsaw. [217] Talleyrand, however, foresaw that the efforts of Prussia in this direction would not last very long, and he wrote to Louis XVIII. asking for his permission to make a definite offer of armed assistance to Austria in case of need. Events took the turn which Talleyrand expected. Early in November the King of Prussia completely yielded to Alexander, and ordered Hardenberg to withdraw his opposition to the Russian project. Metternich thus found himself abandoned on the Polish question by Prussia; and at the same moment the answer of King Louis XVIII. arrived, and enabled Talleyrand to assure the Austrian Minister that, if resistance to Russia and Prussia should become necessary, he might count on the support of a French army. Metternich now completely changed his position on the Saxon question, and wrote to Hardenberg (Dec. 10) stating that, inasmuch as Prussia had chosen to sacrifice Warsaw, the Emperor Francis absolutely forbade the annexation of more than a fifth part of the kingdom of Saxony. Castlereagh, disgusted with the obstinacy of Russia and the subserviency of King Frederick William, forgave Talleyrand for not supporting him earlier, and cordially entered into this new plan for thwarting the Northern Powers. The leading member of the late Rhenish Confederacy, the King of Bavaria, threw himself with eagerness into the struggle against Prussia and against German unity. In proportion as Stein and the patriots of 1813 urged the claims of German nationality under Prussian leadership against the forfeited rights of a Court which had always served on Napoleon's side, the politicians of the Rhenish Confederacy declaimed against the ambition and the Jacobinism of Prussia, and called upon Europe to defend the united principles of hereditary right and of national independence in the person of the King of Saxony.

[Theory of Legitimacy.]

Talleyrand's object was attained. He had isolated Russia and Prussia, and had drawn to his own side not only England and Austria but the whole body of the minor German States. Nothing was wanting but a phrase, or an idea, which should consecrate the new league in the opinion of Europe as a league of principle, and bind the Allies, in matters still remaining open, to the support of the interests of the House of Bourbon. Talleyrand had made his theory ready. In notes to Castlereagh and Metternich, [218] he declared that the whole drama of the last twenty years had been one great struggle between revolution and established right, a struggle at first between Republicanism and Monarchy, afterwards between usurping dynasties and legitimate dynasties. The overthrow of Napoleon had been the victory of the principle of legitimacy; the task of England and Austria was now to extend the work of restitution to all Europe, and to defend the principle against new threatened aggressions. In the note to Castlereagh, Talleyrand added a practical corollary. "To finish the revolution, the principle of legitimacy must triumph without exception. The kingdom of Saxony must be preserved; the kingdom of Naples must return to its legitimate king."

[Alliance against Russia and Prussia, Jan. 3, 1815.]

As an historical summary of the Napoleonic wars, Talleyrand's doctrine was baseless. No one but Pitt had cared about the fate of the Bourbons; no one would have hesitated to make peace with Napoleon, if Napoleon would have accepted terms of peace. The manifesto was not, however, intended to meet a scientific criticism. In the English Foreign Office it was correctly described as a piece of drollery; and Metternich was too familiar with the language of principles himself to attach much meaning to it in the mouth of anyone else. Talleyrand, however, kept a grave countenance. With inimitable composure the old Minister of the Directory wrote to Louis XVIII. lamenting that Castlereagh did not appear to care much about the principle of legitimacy, and in fact did not quite comprehend it; [219] and he added his fear that this moral dimness on the part of the English Minister arose from the dealing of his countrymen with Tippoo Sahib. But for Europe at large,—for the English Liberal party, who looked upon the Saxons and the Prussians as two distinct nations, and for the Tories, who forgot that Napoleon had made the Elector of Saxony a king; for the Emperor of Austria, who had no wish to see the Prussian frontier brought nearer to Prague; above all, for the minor German courts who dreaded every approach towards German unity,—Talleyrand's watchword was the best that could have been invented. His counsel prospered. On the 3rd of January, 1815, after a rash threat of war uttered by Hardenberg, a secret treaty [220] was signed by the representatives of France, England, and Austria, pledging these Powers to take the field, if necessary, against Russia and Prussia in defence of the principles of the Peace of Paris. The plan of the campaign was drawn up, the number of the forces fixed. Bavaria had already armed; Piedmont, Hanover, and even the Ottoman Porte, were named as future members of the alliance.