[Compromise on Polish and Saxon questions.]

[Prussia gains Rhenish Provinces.]

It would perhaps be unfair to the French Minister to believe that he actually desired to kindle a war on this gigantic scale. Talleyrand had not, like Napoleon, a love for war for its own sake. His object was rather to raise France from its position as a conquered and isolated Power; to surround it with allies; to make the House of Bourbon the representatives of a policy interesting to a great part of Europe; and, having thus undone the worst results of Napoleon's rule, to trust to some future complication for the recovery of Belgium and the frontier of the Rhine. Nor was Talleyrand's German policy adopted solely as the instrument of a passing intrigue. He appears to have had a true sense of the capacity of Prussia to transform Germany into a great military nation; and the policy of alliance with Austria and protection of the minor States which he pursued in 1814 was that which he had advocated throughout his career. The conclusion of the secret treaty of January 3rd marked the definite success of his plans. France was forthwith admitted into the council hitherto known as that of the Four Courts, and from this time its influence visibly affected the action of Russia and Prussia, reports of the secret treaty having reached the Czar immediately after its signature. [221] The spirit of compromise now began to animate the Congress. Alexander had already won a virtual decision in his favour on the Polish question, but he abated something of his claims, and while gaining the lion's share of the Duchy of Warsaw, he ultimately consented that Cracow, which threatened the Austrian frontier, should be formed into an independent Republic, and that Prussia should receive the fortresses of Dantzic and Thorn on the Vistula, with the district lying between Thorn and the border of Silesia. [222] This was little for Alexander to abandon; on the Saxon question the allies of Talleyrand gained most that they demanded. The King of Saxony was restored to his throne, and permitted to retain Dresden and about half of his dominions. Prussia received the remainder. In lieu of a further expansion in Saxony, Prussia was awarded territory on the left bank of the Rhine, which, with its recovered Westphalian provinces, restored the monarchy to an area and population equal to that which it had possessed in 1805. But the dominion given to Prussia beyond the Rhine, though considered at the time to be a poor equivalent for the second half of Saxony, was in reality a gift of far greater value. It made Prussia, in defence of its own soil, the guardian and bulwark of Germany against France. It brought an element into the life of the State in striking contrast with the aristocratic and Protestant type predominant in the older Prussian provinces,—a Catholic population, liberal in its political opinions, and habituated by twenty years' union with France to the democratic tendencies of French social life. It gave to Prussia something more in common with Bavaria and the South, and qualified it, as it had not been qualified before, for its future task of uniting Germany under its own leadership.

[Napoleon leaves Elba, Feb. 26.]

[Lands in France, March 1.]

The Polish and Saxon difficulties, which had threatened the peace of Europe, were virtually settled before the end of the month of January. Early in February Lord Castlereagh left Vienna, to give an account of his labours and to justify his policy before the English House of Commons. His place at the Congress was taken by the Duke of Wellington. There remained the question of Naples, the formation of a Federal Constitution for Germany, and several matters of minor political importance, none of which endangered the good understanding of the Powers. Suddenly the action of the Congress was interrupted by the most startling intelligence. On the night of March 6th Metternich was roused from sleep to receive a despatch informing him that Napoleon had quitted Elba. The news had taken eight days to reach Vienna. Napoleon had set sail on the 26th of February. In the silence of his exile he had watched the progress of events in France: he had convinced himself of the strength of the popular reaction against the priests and emigrants; and the latest intelligence which he had received from Vienna led him to believe that the Congress itself was on the point of breaking up. There was at least some chance of success in an attempt to regain his throne; and, the decision once formed, Napoleon executed it with characteristic audacity and despatch. Talleyrand, on hearing that Napoleon had left Elba, declared that he would only cross into Italy and there raise the standard of Italian independence: instead of doing this, Napoleon made straight for France, with the whole of his guard, eleven hundred in number, embarked on a little flotilla of seven ships. The voyage lasted three days: no French or English vessels capable of offering resistance met the squadron. On the 1st of March Napoleon landed at the bay of Jouan, three miles to the west of Antibes. A detachment of his guards called upon the commandant of Antibes to deliver up the town to the Emperor; the commandant refused, and the troops bivouacked that evening, with Napoleon among them, in the olive-woods by the shore of the Mediterranean.

[Moves on Grenoble.]

[Troops at La Mure.]

Before daybreak began the march that was to end in Paris. Instead of following the coast road of Provence, which would have brought him to Toulon and Marseilles, where most of the population were fiercely Royalist, [223] and where Massena and other great officers might have offered resistance, Napoleon struck northwards into the mountains, intending to descend upon Lyons by way of Grenoble. There were few troops in this district, and no generals capable of influencing them. The peasantry of Dauphine were in great part holders of land that had been taken from the Church and the nobles: they were exasperated against the Bourbons, and, like the peasantry of France generally, they identified the glory of the country which they loved with the name and the person of Napoleon. As the little band penetrated into the mountains the villagers thronged around them, and by offering their carts and horses enabled Napoleon to march continuously over steep and snowy roads at the rate of forty miles a day. No troops appeared to dispute these mountain passages: it was not until the close of the fifth day's march that Napoleon's mounted guard, pressing on in front of the marching column, encountered, in the village of La Mure, twenty miles south of Grenoble, a regiment of infantry wearing the white cockade of the House of Bourbon. The two bodies of troops mingled and conversed in the street: the officer commanding the royal infantry fearing the effect on his men, led them back on the road towards Grenoble. Napoleon's lancers also retired, and the night passed without further communication. At noon on the following day the lancers, again advancing towards Grenoble, found the infantry drawn up to defend the road. They called out that Napoleon was at hand, and begged the infantry not to fire. Presently Napoleon's column came in sight; one of his aides-de-camp rode to the front of the royal troops, addressed them, and pointed out Napoleon. The regiment was already wavering, the officer commanding had already given the order of retreat, when the men saw their Emperor advancing towards them. They saw his face, they heard his voice: in another moment the ranks were broken, and the soldiers were pressing with shouts and tears round the leader whom nature had created with such transcendent capacity for evil, and endowed with such surpassing power of attracting love.

[Enters Grenoble, March 7.]

[Declaration of his purpose.]

Everything was decided by this first encounter. "In six days," said Napoleon, "we shall be in the Tuileries." The next pledge of victory came swiftly. Colonel Labedoyere, commander of the 7th Regiment of the Line, had openly declared for Napoleon in Grenoble, and appeared on the road at the head of his men a few hours after the meeting at La Mure. Napoleon reached Grenoble the same evening. The town had been in tumult all day. The Prefet fled: the general in command sent part of his troops away, and closed the gates. On Napoleon's approach the population thronged the ramparts with torches; the gates were burst open; Napoleon was borne through the town in triumph by a wild and intermingled crowd of soldiers and workpeople. The whole mass of the poorer classes of the town welcomed him with enthusiasm: the middle classes, though hostile to the Church and the Bourbons, saw too clearly the dangers to France involved in Napoleon's return to feel the same joy. [224] They remained in the background, neither welcoming Napoleon nor interfering with the welcome offered him by others. Thus the night passed. On the morning of the next day Napoleon received the magistrates and principal inhabitants of the town, and addressed them in terms which formed the substance of every subsequent declaration of his policy. "He had come," he said, "to save France from the outrages of the returning nobles; to secure to the peasant the possession of his land; to uphold the rights won in 1789 against a minority which sought to re-establish the privileges of caste and the feudal burdens of the last century. France had made trial of the Bourbons: it had done well to do so; but the experiment had failed. The Bourbon monarchy had proved incapable of detaching itself from its worst supports, the priests and nobles: only the dynasty which owed its throne to the Revolution could maintain the social work of the Revolution. As for himself, he had learnt wisdom by misfortune. He renounced conquest. He should give France peace without and liberty within. He accepted the Treaty of Paris and the frontiers of 1792. Freed from the necessities which had forced him in earlier days to found a military Empire, he recognised and bowed to the desire of the French nation for constitutional government. He should henceforth govern only as a constitutional sovereign, and seek only to leave a constitutional crown to his son."

[Feeling of the various classes.]

[Napoleon enters Lyons, March 10.]

This language was excellently chosen. It satisfied the peasants and the workmen, who wished to see the nobles crushed, and it showed at least a comprehension of the feelings uppermost in the minds of the wealthier and more educated middle classes, the longing for peace, and the aspiration towards political liberty. It was also calculated to temper the unwelcome impression that an exiled ruler was being forced upon France by the soldiery. The military movement was indeed overwhelmingly decisive, yet the popular movement was scarcely less so. The Royalists were furious, but impotent to act; thoughtful men in all classes held back, with sad apprehensions of returning war and calamity; [225] but from the time when Napoleon left Grenoble, the nation at large was on his side. There was nowhere an effective centre of resistance. The Prefets and other civil officers appointed under the Empire still for the most part held their posts; they knew themselves to be threatened by the Bourbonist reaction, but they had not yet been displaced; their professions of loyalty to Louis XVIII. were forced, their instincts of obedience to their old master, even if they wished to have done with him, profound. From this class, whose cowardice and servility find too many parallels in history, [226] Napoleon had little to fear. Among the marshals and higher officers charged with the defence of the monarchy, those who sincerely desired to serve the Bourbons found themselves powerless in the midst of their troops. Macdonald, who commanded at Lyons, had to fly from his men, in order to escape being made a prisoner. The Count of Artois, who had come to join him, discovered that the only service he could render to the cause of his family was to take himself out of sight. Napoleon entered Lyons on the 10th of March, and now formally resumed his rank and functions as Emperor. His first edicts renewed that appeal to the ideas and passions of the Revolution which had been the key-note of every one of his public utterances since leaving Elba. Treating the episode of Bourbon restoration as null and void, the edicts of Lyons expelled from France every emigrant who had returned without the permission of the Republic or the Emperor; they drove from the army the whole mass of officers intruded by the Government of Louis XVIII.; they invalidated every appointment and every dismissal made in the magistracy since the 1st of April, 1814; and, reverting to the law of the Constituent Assembly of 1789, abolished all nobility except that which had been conferred by the Emperor himself.

[Marshal Ney.]

[The Chambers in Paris.]

[Napoleon enters Paris, March 20.]

From this time all was over. Marshal Ney, who had set out from Paris protesting that Napoleon deserved to be confined in an iron cage, [227] found, when at some distance from Lyons, that the nation and army were on the side of the Emperor, and proclaimed his own adherence to him in an address to his troops. The two Chambers of Legislature, which had been prorogued, were summoned by King Louis XVIII. as soon as the news of Napoleon's landing reached the capital. The Chambers met on the 13th of March. The constitutionalist party, though they had opposed various measures of King Louis' Government as reactionary, were sincerely loyal to the Charta, and hastened, in the cause of constitutional liberty, to offer to the King their cordial support in resisting Bonaparte's military despotism. The King came down to the Legislative Chamber, and, in a scene concerted with his brother, the Count of Artois, made, with great dramatic effect, a declaration of fidelity to the Constitution. Lafayette and the chiefs of the Parliamentary Liberals hoped to raise a sufficient force from the National Guard of Paris to hold Napoleon in check. The project, however, came to nought. The National Guard, which represented the middle classes of Paris, was decidedly in favour of the Charta and Constitutional Government; but it had no leaders, no fighting-organisation, and no military spirit. The regular troops who were sent out against Napoleon mounted the tricolor as soon as they were out of sight of Paris, and joined their comrades. The courtiers passed from threats to consternation and helplessness. On the night of March 19th King Louis fled from the Tuileries. Napoleon entered the capital the next evening, welcomed with acclamations by the soldiers and populace, but not with that general rejoicing which had met him at Lyons, and at many of the smaller towns through which he had passed.

[Congress of Vienna outlaws Napoleon.]

[Napoleon's preparations for defence.]

France was won: Europe remained behind. On the 13th of March the Ministers of all the Great Powers, assembled at Vienna, published a manifesto denouncing Napoleon Bonaparte as the common enemy of mankind, and declaring him an outlaw. The whole political structure which had been reared with so much skill by Talleyrand vanished away. France was again alone, with all Europe combined against it. Affairs reverted to the position in which they had stood in the month of March, 1814, when the Treaty of Chaumont was signed, which bound the Powers to sustain their armed concert against France, if necessary, for a period of twenty years. That treaty was now formally renewed. [228] The four great Powers undertook to employ their whole available resources against Bonaparte until he should be absolutely unable to create disturbance, and each pledged itself to keep permanently in the field a force of at least a hundred and fifty thousand men. The presence of the Duke of Wellington at Vienna enabled the Allies to decide without delay upon the general plan for their invasion of France. It was resolved to group the allied troops in three masses; one, composed of the English and the Prussians under Wellington and Bluecher, to enter France by the Netherlands; the two others, commanded by the Czar and Prince Schwarzenberg, to advance from the middle and upper Rhine. Nowhere was there the least sign of political indecision. The couriers sent by Napoleon with messages of amity to the various Courts were turned back at the frontiers with their despatches undelivered. It was in vain for the Emperor to attempt to keep up any illusion that peace was possible. After a brief interval he himself acquainted France with the true resolution of his enemies. The most strenuous efforts were made for defence. The old soldiers were called from their homes. Factories of arms and ammunition began their hurried work in the principal towns. The Emperor organised with an energy and a command of detail never surpassed at any period of his life; the nature of the situation lent a new character to his genius, and evoked in the organisation of systematic defence all that imagination and resource which had dazzled the world in his schemes of invasion and surprise. Nor, as hitherto, was the nation to be the mere spectator of his exploits. The population of France, its National Guard, its levee en masse, as well as its armies and its Emperor, was to drive the foreigner from French soil. Every operation of defensive warfare, from the accumulation of artillery round the capital to the gathering of forest-guards and free-shooters in the thickets of the Vosges and the Ardennes, occupied in its turn the thoughts of Napoleon. [229] Had France shared his resolution or his madness, had the Allies found at the outset no chief superior to their Austrian leader in 1814, the war on which they were now about to enter would have been one of immense difficulty and risk, its ultimate issue perhaps doubtful.

[Campaign and fall of Murat, April, 1815]

Before Napoleon or his adversaries were ready to move, hostilities broke out in Italy. Murat, King of Naples, had during the winter of 1814 been represented at Vienna by an envoy: he was aware of the efforts made by Talleyrand to expel him from his throne, and knew that the Government of Great Britain, convinced of his own treachery during the pretended combination with the Allies in 1814, now inclined to act with France. [230] The instinct of self-preservation led him to risk everything in raising the standard of Italian independence, rather than await the loss of his kingdom; and the return of Napoleon precipitated his fall. At the moment when Napoleon was about to leave Elba, Murat, who knew his intention, asked the permission of Austria to move a body of troops through Northern Italy for the alleged purpose of attacking the French Bourbons, who were preparing to restore his rival, Ferdinand. Austria declared that it should treat the entry either of French or of Neapolitan troops into Northern Italy as an act of war. Murat, as soon as Napoleon's landing in France became known, protested to the Allies that he intended to remain faithful to them, but he also sent assurances of friendship to Napoleon, and forthwith invaded the Papal States. He acted without waiting for Napoleon's instructions, and probably with the intention of winning all Italy for himself even if Napoleon should victoriously re-establish his Empire. On the 10th of April, Austria declared war against him. Murat pressed forward and entered Bologna, now openly proclaiming the unity and independence of Italy. The feeling of the towns and of the educated classes generally seemed to be in his favour, but no national rising took place. After some indecisive encounters with the Austrians, Murat retreated. As he fell back towards the Neapolitan frontier, his troops melted away. The enterprise ended in swift and total ruin; and on the 22nd of May an English and Austrian force took possession of the city of Naples in the name of King Ferdinand. Murat, leaving his family behind him, fled to France, and sought in vain to gain a place by the side of Napoleon in his last great struggle, and to retrieve as a soldier the honour which he had lost as a king. [231]

[The Acte Additionnel, April 23, 1815.]

In the midst of his preparations for war with all Europe, Napoleon found it necessary to give some satisfaction to that desire for liberty which was again so strong in France. He would gladly have deferred all political change until victory over the foreigner had restored his own undisputed ascendency over men's minds; he was resolved at any rate not to be harassed by a Constituent Assembly, like that of 1789, at the moment of his greatest peril; and the action of King Louis XVIII. in granting liberty by Charta gave him a precedent for creating a Constitution by an Edict supplementary to the existing laws of the Empire. Among the Liberal politicians who had declared for King Louis XVIII. while Napoleon was approaching Paris, one of the most eminent was Benjamin Constant, who had published an article attacking the Emperor with great severity on the very day when he entered the capital. Napoleon now invited Constant to the Tuileries, assured him that he no longer either desired or considered it possible to maintain an absolute rule in France, and requested Constant himself to undertake the task of drawing up a Constitution. Constant, believing the Emperor to be in some degree sincere, accepted the proposals made to him, and, at the cost of some personal consistency, entered upon the work, in which Napoleon by no means allowed him entire freedom. [232] The result of Constant's labours was the Decree known as the Acte Additionnel of 1815. The leading provisions of this Act resembled those of the Charta: both professed to establish a representative Government and the responsibility of Ministers; both contained the usual phrases guaranteeing freedom of religion and security of person and property. The principal differences were that the Chamber of Peers was now made wholly hereditary, and that the Emperor absolutely refused to admit the clause of the Charta abolishing confiscation as a penalty for political offences. On the other hand, Constant definitely extinguished the censorship of the Press, and provided some real guarantee for the free expression of opinion by enacting that Press-offences should be judged only in the ordinary Jury-courts. Constant was sanguine enough to believe that the document which he had composed would reduce Napoleon to the condition of a constitutional king. As a Liberal statesman, he pressed the Emperor to submit the scheme to a Representative Assembly, where it could be examined and amended. This Napoleon refused to do, preferring to resort to the fiction of a Plebiscite for the purpose of procuring some kind of national sanction for his Edict. The Act was published on the 23rd of April, 1815. Voting lists were then opened in all the Departments, and the population of France, most of whom were unable to read or write, were invited to answer Yes or No to the question whether they approved of Napoleon's plan for giving his subjects Parliamentary government.

[The Chambers summoned for June.]

There would have been no difficulty in obtaining some millions of votes for any absurdity that the Emperor might be pleased to lay before the French people; but among the educated minority who had political theories of their own, the publication of this reform by Edict produced the worst possible impression. No stronger evidence, it was said, could have been given of the Emperor's insincerity than the dictatorial form in which he affected to bestow liberty upon France. Scarcely a voice was raised in favour of the new Constitution. The measure had in fact failed of its effect. Napoleon's object was to excite an enthusiasm that should lead the entire nation, the educated classes as well as the peasantry, to rally round him in a struggle with the foreigner for life or death: he found, on the contrary, that he had actually injured his cause. The hostility of public opinion was so serious that Napoleon judged it wise to make advances to the Liberal party, and sent his brother Joseph to Lafayette, to ascertain on what terms he might gain his support. [233] Lafayette, strongly condemning the form of the Acte Additionnel, stated that the Emperor could only restore public confidence by immediately convoking the Chambers. This was exactly what Napoleon desired to avoid, until he had defeated the English and Prussians; nor in fact had the vote of the nation accepting the new Constitution yet been given. But the urgency of the need overcame the Emperor's inclinations and the forms of law. Lafayette's demand was granted: orders were issued for an immediate election, and the meeting of the Chambers fixed for the beginning of June, a few days earlier than the probable departure of the Emperor to open hostilities on the northern frontier.

[Elections.]

Lafayette's counsel had been given in sincerity, but Napoleon gained little by following it. The nation at large had nothing of the faith in the elections which was felt by Lafayette and his friends. In some places not a single person appeared at the poll: in most, the candidates were elected by a few scores of voters. The Royalists absented themselves on principle: the population generally thought only of the coming war, and let the professed politicians conduct the business of the day by themselves. Among the deputies chosen there were several who had sat in the earlier Assemblies of the Revolution; and, mingled with placemen and soldiers of the Empire, a considerable body of men whose known object was to reduce Napoleon's power. One interest alone was unrepresented—that of the Bourbon family, which so lately seemed to have been called to the task of uniting the old and the new France around itself.

[Champ de Mai.]

Napoleon, troubling himself little about the elections, laboured incessantly at his preparations for war, and by the end of May two hundred thousand men were ready to take the field. The delay of the Allies, though necessary, enabled their adversary to take up the offensive. It was the intention of the Emperor to leave a comparatively small force to watch the eastern frontier, and himself, at the head of a hundred and twenty-five thousand men, to fall upon Wellington and Bluecher in the Netherlands, and crush them before they could unite their forces. With this object the greater part of the army was gradually massed on the northern roads at points between Paris, Lille, and Maubeuge. Two acts of State remained to be performed by the Emperor before he quitted the capital; the inauguration of the new Constitution and the opening of the Chambers of Legislature. The first, which had been fixed for the 26th of May, and announced as a revival of the old Frankish Champ de Mai, was postponed till the beginning of the following month. On the 1st of June the solemnity was performed with extraordinary pomp and splendour, on that same Champ de Mars where, twenty-five years before, the grandest and most affecting of all the festivals of the Revolution, the Act of Federation, had been celebrated by King Louis XVI. and his people. Deputations from each of the constituencies of France, from the army, and from every public body, surrounded the Emperor in a great amphitheatre enclosed at the southern end of the plain: outside there were ranged twenty thousand soldiers of the Guard and other regiments; and behind them spread the dense crowd of Paris. When the total of the votes given in the Plebiscite had been summed up and declared, the Emperor took the oath to the Constitution, and delivered one of his masterpieces of political rhetoric. The great officers of State took the oath in their turn: mass was celebrated, and Napoleon, leaving the enclosed space, then presented their standards to the soldiery in the Champ de Mars, addressing some brief, soul-stirring word to each regiment as it passed. The spectacle was magnificent, but except among the soldiers themselves a sense of sadness and disappointment passed over the whole assembly. The speech of the Emperor showed that he was still the despot at heart: the applause was forced: all was felt to be ridiculous, all unreal. [234]

[Plan of Napoleon.]

The opening of the Legislative Chambers took place a few days later, and on the night of the 11th of June Napoleon started for the northern frontier. The situation of the forces opposed to him in this his last campaign strikingly resembled that which had given him his first Italian victory in 1796. Then the Austrians and Sardinians, resting on opposite bases, covered the approaches to the Sardinian capital, and invited the assailant to break through their centre and drive the two defeated wings along diverging and severed paths of retreat. Now the English and the Prussians covered Brussels, the English resting westward on Ostend, the Prussians eastward on Cologne, and barely joining hands in the middle of a series of posts nearly eighty miles long. The Emperor followed the strategy of 1796. He determined to enter Belgium by the central road of Charleroi, and to throw his main force upon Bluecher, whose retreat, if once he should be severed from his colleague, would carry him eastwards towards Liege, and place him outside the area of hostilities round Brussels. Bluecher driven eastwards, Napoleon believed that he might not only push the English commander out of Brussels, but possibly, by a movement westwards, intercept him from the sea and cut off his communication with Great Britain. [235]

[Situation of the armies.]

On the night of the 13th of June, the French army, numbering a hundred and twenty-nine thousand men, had completed its concentration, and lay gathered round Beaumont and Philippeville. Wellington was at Brussels; his troops, which consisted of thirty-five thousand English and about sixty thousand Dutch, Germans, and Belgians, [236] guarded the country west of the Charleroi road as far as Oudenarde on the Scheldt. Bluecher's headquarters were at Namur; he had a hundred and twenty thousand Prussians under his command, who were posted between Charleroi, Namur, and Liege. Both the English and Prussian generals were aware that very large French forces had been brought close to the frontier, but Wellington imagined Napoleon to be still in Paris, and believed that the war would be opened by a forward movement of Prince Schwarzenberg into Alsace. It was also his fixed conviction that if Napoleon entered Belgium he would throw himself not upon the Allied centre, but upon the extreme right of the English towards the sea. [237] In the course of the 14th, the Prussian outposts reported that the French were massed round Beaumont: later in the same day there were clear signs of an advance upon Charleroi. Early next morning the attack on Charleroi began. The Prussians were driven out of it, and retreated in the direction of Ligny, whither Bluecher now brought up all the forces within his reach. It was unknown to Wellington until the afternoon of the 15th that the French had made any movement whatever: on receiving the news of their advance, he ordered a concentrating movement of all his forces eastward, in order to cover the road to Brussels and to co-operate with the Prussian general. A small division of the British army took post at Quatre Bras that night, and on the morning of the 16th Wellington himself rode to Ligny, and promised his assistance to Bluecher, whose troops were already drawn up and awaiting the attack of the French.

[Ligny, June 16.]

But the march of the invader was too rapid for the English to reach the field of battle. Already, on returning to Quatre Bras in the afternoon, Wellington found his own troops hotly engaged. Napoleon had sent Ney along the road to Brussels to hold the English in check and, if possible, to enter the capital, while he himself, with seventy thousand men, attacked Bluecher. The Prussian general had succeeded in bringing up a force superior in number to his assailants; but the French army, which consisted in a great part of veterans recalled to the ranks, was of finer quality than any that Napoleon had led since the campaign of Moscow, and it was in vain that Bluecher and his soldiers met them with all the gallantry and even more than the fury of 1813. There was murderous hand-to-hand fighting in the villages where the Prussians had taken up their position: now the defenders, now the assailants gave way: but at last the Prussians, with a loss of thirteen thousand men, withdrew from the combat, and left the battlefield in possession of the enemy. If the conquerors had followed up the pursuit that night, the cause of the Allies would have been ruined. The effort of battle had, however, been too great, or the estimate which Napoleon made of his adversary's rallying power was too low. He seems to have assumed that Bluecher must necessarily retreat eastwards towards Namur; while in reality the Prussian was straining every nerve to escape northwards, and to restore his severed communication with his ally.

[Quatre Bras, June 16.]

At Quatre Bras the issue of the day was unfavourable to the French. Ney missed his opportunity of seizing this important point before it was occupied by the British in any force; and when the battle began the British infantry-squares unflinchingly bore the attack of Ney's cavalry, and drove them back again and again with their volleys, until successive reinforcements had made the numbers on both sides even. At the close of the day the French marshal, baffled and disheartened, drew back his troops to their original position. The army-corps of General d'Erlon, which Napoleon had placed between himself and Ney in order that it might act wherever there was the greatest need, was first withdrawn from Ney to assist at Ligny, and then, as it was entering into action at Ligny, recalled to Quatre Bras, where it arrived only after the battle was over. Its presence in either field would probably have altered the issue of the campaign.

[Prussian movement.]

Bluecher, on the night of the 16th, lay disabled and almost senseless; his lieutenant, Gneisenau, not only saved the army, but repaired, and more than repaired, all its losses by a memorable movement northwards that brought the Prussians again into communication with the British. Napoleon, after an unexplained inaction during the night of the 16th and the morning of the 17th, committed the pursuit of the Prussians to Marshal Grouchy, ordering him never to let the enemy out of his sight; but Bluecher and Gneisenau had already made their escape, and had concentrated so large a body in the neighbourhood of Wavre, that Grouchy could not now have prevented a force superior to his own from uniting with the English, even if he had known the exact movements of each of the three armies, and, with a true presentiment of his master's danger, had attempted to rejoin him on the morrow.

Wellington, who had both anticipated that Bluecher would be beaten at Ligny, and assured himself that the Prussian would make good his retreat northwards, moved on the 17th from Quatre Bras to Waterloo, now followed by Napoleon and the mass of the French army. At Waterloo he drew up for battle, trusting to the promise of the gallant Prussian that he would advance in that direction on the following day. Bluecher, in so doing, exposed himself to the risk of having his communications severed and half his army captured, if Napoleon should either change the direction of his main attack and bend eastwards, or should crush Wellington before the arrival of the Prussians, and seize the road from Brussels to Louvain with a victorious force. Such considerations would have driven a commander like Schwarzenberg back to Liege, but they were thrown to the winds by Bluecher and Gneisenau. In just reliance on his colleague's energy, Wellington, with thirty thousand English and forty thousand Dutch, Germans, and Belgians, awaited the attack of Napoleon, at the head of seventy-four thousand veteran soldiers. The English position extended two miles along the brow of a gentle slope of cornfields, and crossed at right angles the great road from Charleroi to Brussels; the chateau of Hugomont, some way down the slope on the right, and the farmhouse of La Haye Sainte, on the high-road in front of the left centre, served as fortified outposts. The French formed on the opposite and corresponding slope; the country was so open that, but for the heavy rain on the evening of the 17th, artillery could have moved over almost any part of the field with perfect freedom.

[Waterloo, June 18.]

At eleven o'clock on Sunday, the 18th of June, the battle began. Napoleon, unconscious of the gathering of the Prussians on his right, and unacquainted with the obstinacy of English troops, believed the victory already thrown into his hands by Wellington's hardihood. His plan was to burst through the left of the English line near La Haye Sainte, and thus to drive Wellington westwards and place the whole French army between its two defeated enemies. The first movement was an assault on the buildings of Hugomont, made for the purpose of diverting Wellington from the true point of attack. The English commander sent detachments to this outpost sufficient to defend it, but no more. After two hours' indecisive fighting and a heavy cannonade, Ney ordered D'Erlon's corps forward to the great onslaught on the centre and left. As the French column pressed up the slope, General Picton charged at the head of a brigade. The English leader was among the first to fall, but his men drove the enemy back, and at the same time the Scots Greys, sweeping down from the left, cut right through both the French infantry and their cavalry supports, and, charging far up the opposite slope, reached and disabled forty of Ney's guns, before they were in their turn overpowered and driven back by the French dragoons. The English lost heavily, but the onslaught of the enemy had totally failed, and thousands of prisoners remained behind. There was a pause in the infantry combat; and again the artillery of Napoleon battered the English centre, while Ney marshalled fresh troops for a new and greater effort. About two o'clock the attack was renewed on the left. La Haye Sainte was carried, and vast masses of cavalry pressed up the English slope, and rode over the plateau to the very front of the English line. Wellington sent no cavalry to meet them, but trusted, and trusted justly, to the patience and endurance of the infantry themselves, who, hour after hour, held their ground, unmoved by the rush of the enemy's horse and the terrible spectacle of havoc and death in their own ranks; for all through the afternoon the artillery of Napoleon poured its fire wherever the line was left open, or the assault of the French cavalry rolled back.

At last the approach of the Prussians visibly told. Napoleon had seen their vanguard early in the day, and had detached Count Lobau with seven thousand men to hold them in check; but the little Prussian corps gradually swelled to an army, and as the day wore on it was found necessary to reinforce Count Lobau with some of the finest divisions of the French infantry. Still reports came in of new Prussian columns approaching. At six o'clock Napoleon prepared to throw his utmost strength into one grand final attack upon the British, and to sweep them away before the battle became general with their allies. Two columns of the Imperial Guard, supported by every available regiment, moved from the right and left towards the English centre. The column on the right, unchecked by the storm of Wellington's cannon-shot from front and flank, pushed to the very ridge of the British slope, and came within forty yards of the cross-road where the English Guard lay hidden. Then Wellington gave the order to fire. The French recoiled; the English advanced at the charge, and drove the enemy down the hill, returning themselves for a while to their own position. The left column of the French Guard attacked with equal bravery, and met with the same fate. Then, while the French were seeking to re-form at the bottom of the hill, Wellington commanded a general advance. The whole line of the British infantry and cavalry swept down into the valley; before them the baffled and sorely-stricken host of the enemy broke into a confused mass; only the battalions of the old Guard, which had halted in the rear of the attacking columns, remained firm together. Bluecher, from the east, dealt the death-blow, and, pressing on to the road by which the French were escaping, turned the defeat into utter ruin and dispersion. The pursuit, which Wellington's troops were too exhausted to attempt, was carried on throughout the night by the Prussian cavalry with memorable ardour and terrible success. Before the morning the French army was no more than a rabble of fugitives.

[Napoleon at Paris.]

[Allies enter Paris, July 7.]

Napoleon fled to Philippeville, and made some ineffectual attempts both there and at Laon to fix a rallying point for his vanished forces. From Laon he hastened to Paris, which he reached at sunrise on the 21st. His bulletin describing the defeat of Waterloo was read to the Chambers on the same morning. The Lower House immediately declared against the Emperor, and demanded his abdication. Unless Napoleon seized the dictatorship his cause was lost. Carnot and Lucien Bonaparte urged him to dismiss the Chambers and to stake all on his own strong will; but they found no support among the Emperor's counsellors. On the next day Napoleon abdicated in favour of his son. But it was in vain that he attempted to impose an absent successor upon France, and to maintain his own Ministers in power. It was equally in vain that Carnot, filled with the memories of 1793, called upon the Assembly to continue the war and to provide for the defence of Paris. A Provisional Government entered upon office. Days were spent in inaction and debate while the Allies advanced through France. On the 28th of June, the Prussians appeared on the north of the capital; and, as the English followed, they moved to the south of the Seine, out of the range of the fortifications with which Napoleon had covered the side of St. Denis and Montmartre. Davoust, with almost all the generals in Paris, declared defence to be impossible. On the 3rd of July, a capitulation was signed. The remnants of the French army were required to withdraw beyond the Loire. The Provisional Government dissolved itself; the Allied troops entered the capital and on the following day the Members of the Chamber of Deputies, on arriving at their Hall of Assembly, found the gates closed, and a detachment of soldiers in possession. France was not, even as a matter of form, consulted as to its future government. Louis XVIII. was summarily restored to his throne. Napoleon, who had gone to Rochefort with the intention of sailing to the United States, lingered at Rochefort until escape was no longer possible, and then embarked on the British ship Bellerophon, commending himself, as a second Themistocles, to the generosity of the Prince Regent of England. He who had declared that the lives of a million men were nothing to him [238] trusted to the folly or the impotence of the English nation to provide him with some agreeable asylum until he could again break loose and deluge Europe with blood. But the lesson of 1814 had been learnt. Some island in the ocean far beyond the equator formed the only prison for a man whom no European sovereign could venture to guard, and whom no fortress-walls could have withdrawn from the attention of mankind. Napoleon was conveyed to St. Helena. There, until at the end of six years death removed him, he experienced some trifling share of the human misery that he had despised.

[Wellington and Fouche.]

Victory had come so swiftly that the Allied Governments were unprepared with terms of peace. The Czar and the Emperor of Austria were still at Heidelberg when the battle of Waterloo was fought; they had advanced no further than Nancy when the news reached them that Paris had surrendered. Both now hastened to the capital, where Wellington was already exercising the authority to which his extraordinary successes as well as his great political superiority over all the representatives of the Allies then present, entitled him. Before the entry of the English and Prussian troops into Paris he had persuaded Louis XVIII. to sever himself from the party of reaction by calling to office the regicide Fouche, head of the existing Provisional Government. Fouche had been guilty of the most atrocious crimes at Lyons in 1793; he had done some of the worst work of each succeeding government in France; and, after returning to his old place as Napoleon's Minister of Police during the Hundred Days, he had intrigued as early as possible for the restoration of Louis XVIII., if indeed he had not held treasonable communication with the enemy during the campaign. His sole claim to power was that every gendarme and every informer in France had at some time acted as his agent, and that, as a regicide in office, he might possibly reconcile Jacobins and Bonapartists to the second return of the Bourbon family. Such was the man whom, in association with Talleyrand, the Duke of Wellington found himself compelled to propose as Minister to Louis XVIII. The appointment, it was said, was humiliating, but it was necessary; and with the approval of the Count of Artois the King invited this blood-stained eavesdropper to an interview and placed him in office. Need subdued the scruples of the courtiers: it could not subdue the resentment of that grief-hardened daughter of Louis XVI. whom Napoleon termed the only man of her family. The Duchess of Angouleme might have forgiven the Jacobin Fouche the massacres at Lyons: she refused to speak to a Minister whom she termed one of the murderers of her father.

[Disagreement on terms of peace.]

Fouche had entered into a private negotiation with Wellington while the English were on the outskirts of Paris, and while the authorised envoys of the Assembly were engaged elsewhere. Wellington's motive for recommending him to the King was the indifference or hostility felt by some of the Allies to Louis XVIII. personally, which led the Duke to believe that if Louis did not regain his throne before the arrival of the sovereigns he might never regain it at all. [239] Fouche was the one man who could at that moment throw open the road to the Tuileries. If his overtures were rejected, he might either permit Carnot to offer some desperate resistance outside Paris, or might retire himself with the army and the Assembly beyond the Loire, and there set up a Republican Government. With Fouche and Talleyrand united in office under Louis XVIII., there was no fear either of a continuance of the war or of the suggestion of a change of dynasty on the part of any of the Allies. By means of the Duke's independent action Louis XVIII. was already in possession when the Czar arrived at Paris, and nothing now prevented the definite conclusion of peace but the disagreement of the Allies themselves as to the terms to be exacted. Prussia, which had suffered so bitterly from Napoleon, demanded that Europe should not a second time deceive itself with the hollow guarantee of a Bourbon restoration, but should gain a real security for peace by detaching Alsace and Lorraine, as well as a line of northern fortresses, from the French monarchy. Lord Liverpool, Prime Minister of England, stated it to be the prevailing opinion in this country that France might fairly be stripped of the principal conquests made by Louis XIV.; but he added that if Napoleon, who was then at large, should become a prisoner, England would waive a permanent cession of territory, on condition that France should be occupied by foreign armies until it had, at its own cost, restored the barrier-fortresses of the Netherlands. [240] Metternich for a while held much the same language as the Prussian Minister: Alexander alone declared from the first against any reduction of the territory of France, and appealed to the declarations of the Powers that the sole object of the war was the destruction of Napoleon and the maintenance of the order established by the Peace of Paris.

[Arguments for and against cessions.]

[Prussia isolated.]

[Second Treaty of Paris, Nov. 20.]

The arguments for and against the severance of the border-provinces from France were drawn at great length by diplomatists, but all that was essential in them was capable of being very briefly put. On the one side, it was urged by Stein and Hardenberg that the restoration of the Bourbons in 1814 with an undiminished territory had not prevented France from placing itself at the end of a few months under the rule of the military despot whose life was one series of attacks on his neighbours: that the expectation of long-continued peace, under whatever dynasty, was a vain one so long as the French possessed a chain of fortresses enabling them at any moment to throw large armies into Germany or the Netherlands: and finally, that inasmuch as Germany, and not England or Russia, was exposed to these irruptions, Germany had the first right to have its interests consulted in providing for the public security. On the other side, it was argued by the Emperor Alexander, and with far greater force by the Duke of Wellington, [241] that the position of the Bourbons would be absolutely hopeless if their restoration, besides being the work of foreign armies, was accompanied by the loss of French provinces: that the French nation, although it had submitted to Napoleon, had not as a matter of fact offered the resistance to the Allies which it was perfectly capable of offering: and that the danger of any new aggressive or revolutionary movement might be effectually averted by keeping part of France occupied by the Allied forces until the nation had settled down into tranquillity under an efficient government. Notes embodying these arguments were exchanged between the Ministers of the great Powers during the months of July and August. The British Cabinet, which had at first inclined to the Prussian view, accepted the calm judgment of Wellington, and transferred itself to the side of the Czar. Metternich went with the majority. Hardenberg, thus left alone, abandoned point after point in his demands, and consented at last that France should cede little more than the border-strips which had been added by the Peace of 1814 to its frontier of 1791. Chambery and the rest of French Savoy, Landau and Saarlouis on the German side, Philippeville and some other posts on the Belgian frontier, were fixed upon as the territory to be surrendered. The resolution of the Allied Governments was made known to Louis XVIII. towards the end of September. Negotiation on details dragged on for two months more, while France itself underwent a change of Ministry; and the definitive Treaty of Peace, known as the second Treaty of Paris, was not signed until November the 20th. France escaped without substantial loss of territory; it was, however, compelled to pay indemnities amounting in all to about L40,000,000; to consent to the occupation of its northern provinces by an Allied force of 150,000 men for a period not exceeding five years; and to defray the cost of this occupation out of its own revenues. The works of art taken from other nations, which the Allies had allowed France to retain in 1814, had already been restored to their rightful owners. No act of the conquerors in 1815 excited more bitter or more unreasonable complaint.

[Treaty of Holy Alliance, Sept. 26.]

It was in the interval between the entry of the Allies into Paris and the definitive conclusion of peace that a treaty was signed which has gained a celebrity in singular contrast with its real insignificance, the Treaty of Holy Alliance. Since the terrible events of 1812 the Czar's mind had taken a strongly religious tinge. His private life continued loose as before; his devotion was both very well satisfied with itself and a prey to mysticism and imposture in others; but, if alloyed with many weaknesses, it was at least sincere, and, like Alexander's other feelings, it naturally sought expression in forms which seemed theatrical to stronger natures. Alexander had rendered many public acts of homage to religion in the intervals of diplomatic and military success in the year 1814; and after the second capture of Paris he drew up a profession of religious and political faith, embodying, as he thought, those high principles by which the Sovereigns of Europe, delivered from the iniquities of Napoleon, were henceforth to maintain the reign of peace and righteousness on earth. [242] This document, which resembled the pledge of a religious brotherhood, formed the draft of the Treaty of the Holy Alliance. The engagement, as one binding on the conscience, was for the consideration of the Sovereigns alone, not of their Ministers; and in presenting it to the Emperor Francis and King Frederick William, the Czar is said to have acted with an air of great mystery. The King of Prussia, a pious man, signed the treaty in seriousness; the Emperor of Austria, who possessed a matter-of-fact humour, said that if the paper related to doctrines of religion, he must refer it to his confessor, if to secrets of State, to Prince Metternich. What the confessor may have thought of the Czar's political evangel is not known: the opinion delivered by the Minister was not a sympathetic one. "It is verbiage," said Metternich; and his master, though unwillingly, signed the treaty. With England the case was still worse. As the Prince Regent was not in Paris, Alexander had to confide the articles of the Holy Alliance to Lord Castlereagh. Of all things in the world the most incomprehensible to Castlereagh was religious enthusiasm. "The fact is," he wrote home to the English Premier, "that the Emperor's mind is not completely sound." [243] Apart, however, from the Czar's sanity or insanity, it was impossible for the Prince Regent, or for any person except the responsible Minister, to sign a treaty, whether it meant anything or nothing, in the name of Great Britain. Castlereagh was in great perplexity. On the one hand, he feared to wound a powerful ally; on the other, he dared not violate the forms of the Constitution. A compromise was invented. The Treaty of the Holy Alliance was not graced with the name of the Prince Regent, but the Czar received a letter declaring that his principles had the personal approval of this great authority on religion and morality. The Kings of Naples and Sardinia were the next to subscribe, and in due time the names of the witty glutton, Louis XVIII., and of the abject Ferdinand of Spain were added. Two potentates alone received no invitation from the Czar to enter the League: the Pope, because he possessed too much authority within the Christian Church, and the Sultan, because he possessed none at all.

[Treaty between the Four Powers, Nov. 20.]

Such was the history of the Treaty of Holy Alliance, of which, it may be safely said, no single person connected with it, except the Czar and the King of Prussia, thought without a smile. The common belief that this Treaty formed the basis of a great monarchical combination against Liberal principles is erroneous; for, in the first place, no such combination existed before the year 1818; and, in the second place, the Czar, who was the author of the Treaty, was at this time the zealous friend of Liberalism both in his own and in other countries. The concert of the Powers was indeed provided for by articles signed on the same day as the Peace of Paris; but this concert, which, unlike the Holy Alliance, included England, was directed towards the perpetual exclusion of Napoleon from power, and the maintenance of the established Government in France. The Allies pledged themselves to act in union if revolution or usurpation should again convulse France and endanger the repose of other States, and undertook to resist with their whole force any attack that might be made upon the army of occupation. The federative unity which for a moment Europe seemed to have gained from the struggle against Napoleon, and the belief existing in some quarters in its long continuance, were strikingly shown in the last article of this Quadruple Treaty, which provided that, after the holding of a Congress at the end of three or more years, the Sovereigns or Ministers of all the four great Powers should renew their meetings at fixed intervals, for the purpose of consulting upon their common interests, and considering the measures best fitted to secure the repose and prosperity of nations, and the continuance of the peace of Europe. [244]

[German Federation.]

Thus terminated, certainly without any undue severity, yet not without some loss to the conquered nation, the work of 1815 in France. In the meantime the Congress of Vienna, though interrupted by the renewal of war, had resumed and completed its labours. One subject of the first importance remained unsettled when Napoleon returned, the federal organisation of Germany. This work had been referred by the Powers in the autumn of 1814 to a purely German committee, composed of the representatives of Austria and Prussia and of three of the Minor States; but the first meetings of the committee only showed how difficult was the problem, and how little the inclination in most quarters to solve it. The objects with which statesmen like Stein demanded an effective federation were thoroughly plain and practical. They sought, in the first place, that Germany should be rendered capable of defending itself against the foreigner; and in the second place, that the subjects of the minor princes, who had been made absolute rulers by Napoleon, should now be guaranteed against despotic oppression. To secure Germany from being again conquered by France, it was necessary that the members of the League, great and small, should abandon something of their separate sovereignty, and create a central authority with the sole right of making war and alliances. To protect the subjects of the minor princes from the abuse of power, it was necessary that certain definite civil rights and a measure of representative government should be assured by Federal Law to the inhabitants of every German State, and enforced by the central authority on the appeal of subjects against their Sovereigns. There was a moment when some such form of German union had seemed to be close at hand, the moment when Prussia began its final struggle with Napoleon, and the commander of the Czar's army threatened the German vassals of France with the loss of their thrones (Feb., 1813). But even then no statesman had satisfied himself how Prussia and Austria were to unite in submission to a Federal Government; and from the time when Austria made terms with the vassal princes little hope of establishing a really effective authority at the centre of Germany remained. Stein, at the Congress of Vienna, once more proposed to restore the title and the long-vanished powers of the Emperor; but he found no inclination on the part of Metternich to promote his schemes for German unity, while some of the minor princes flatly refused to abandon any fraction of their sovereignty over their own subjects. The difficulties in the way of establishing a Federal State were great, perhaps insuperable; the statesmen anxious for it few in number; the interests opposed to it all but universal. Stein saw that the work was intended to be unsubstantial, and withdrew himself from it before its completion. The Act of Federation, [245] which was signed on the 8th of June, created a Federal Diet, forbade the members of the League to enter into alliances against the common interest, and declared that in each State, Constitutions should be established. But it left the various Sovereigns virtually independent of the League; it gave the nomination of members of the Diet to the Governments absolutely, without a vestige of popular election; and it contained no provision for enforcing in any individual State, whose ruler might choose to disregard it, the principle of constitutional rule. Whether the Federation would in any degree have protected Germany in case of attack by France or Russia is matter for conjecture, since a long period of peace followed the year 1815; but so far was it from securing liberty to the Minor States, that in the hands of Metternich the Diet, impotent for every other purpose, became an instrument for the persecution of liberal opinion and for the suppression of the freedom of the press.

[Final Act of the Congress, June 10.]

German affairs, as usual, were the last to be settled at the Congress; when these were at length disposed of, the Congress embodied the entire mass of its resolutions in one great Final Act [246] of a hundred and twenty-one articles, which was signed a few days before the battle of Waterloo was fought. This Act, together with the second Treaty of Paris, formed the public law with which Europe emerged from the warfare of a quarter of a century, and entered upon a period which proved, even more than it was expected to prove, one of long-lasting peace. Standing on the boundary-line between two ages, the legislation of Vienna forms a landmark in history. The provisions of the Congress have sometimes been criticised as if that body had been an assemblage of philosophers, bent only on advancing the course of human progress, and endowed with the power of subduing the selfish impulses of every Government in Europe. As a matter of fact the Congress was an arena where national and dynastic interests struggled for satisfaction by every means short of actual war. To inquire whether the Congress accomplished all that it was possible to accomplish for Europe is to inquire whether Governments at that moment forgot all their own ambitions and opportunities, and thought only of the welfare of mankind. Russia would not have given up Poland without war; Austria would not have given up Lombardy and Venice without war. The only measures of 1814-15 in which the common interest was really the dominant motive were those adopted either with the view of strengthening the States immediately exposed to attack by France, or in the hope of sparing France itself the occasion for new conflicts. The union of Holland and Belgium, and the annexation of the Genoese Republic to Sardinia, were the means adopted for the former end; for the latter, the relinquishment of all claims to Alsace and Lorraine. These were the measures in which the statesmen of 1814-15 acted with their hands free, and by these their foresight may fairly be judged. Of the union of Belgium to Holland it is not too much to say that, although planned by Pitt, and treasured by every succeeding Ministry as one of his wisest schemes, it was wholly useless and inexpedient. The tranquillity of Western Europe was preserved during fifteen years, not by yoking together discordant nationalities, but by the general desire to avoid war; and as soon as France seriously demanded the liberation of Belgium from Holland, it had to be granted. Nor can it be believed that the addition of the hostile and discontented population of Genoa to the kingdom of Piedmont would have saved that monarchy from invasion if war had again arisen. The annexation of Genoa was indeed fruitful of results, but not of results which Pitt and his successors had anticipated. It was intended to strengthen the House of Savoy for the purpose of resistance to France: [247] it did strengthen the House of Savoy, but as the champion of Italy against Austria. It was intended to withdraw the busy trading city Genoa from the influences of French democracy: in reality it brought a strong element of innovation into the Piedmontese State itself, giving, on the one hand, a bolder and more national spirit to its Government, and, on the other hand, elevating to the ideal of a united Italy those who, like the Genoese Mazzini, were now no longer born to be the citizens of a free Republic. In sacrificing the ancient liberty of Genoa, the Congress itself unwittingly began the series of changes which was to refute the famous saying of Metternich, that Italy was but a geographical expression.

[Alsace and Lorraine.]

But if the policy of 1814-15 in the affairs of Belgium and Piedmont only proves how little an average collection of statesmen can see into the future, the policy which, in spite of Waterloo, left France in possession of an undiminished territory, does no discredit to the foresight, as it certainly does the highest honour to the justice and forbearance of Wellington, whose counsels then turned the scale. The wisdom of the resolution has indeed been frequently impugned. German statesmen held then, and have held ever since, that the opportunity of disarming France once for all of its weapons of attack was wantonly thrown away. Hardenberg, when his arguments for annexation of the frontier-fortresses were set aside, predicted that streams of blood would hereafter flow for the conquest of Alsace and Lorraine, [248] and his prediction has been fulfilled. Yet no one perhaps would have been more astonished than Hardenberg himself, could he have known that fifty-five years of peace between France and Prussia would precede the next great struggle. When the same period of peace shall have followed the acquisition of Metz and Strasburg by Prussia, it will be time to condemn the settlement of 1815 as containing the germ of future wars; till then, the effects of that settlement in maintaining peace are entitled to recognition. It is impossible to deny that the Allies, in leaving to France the whole of its territory in 1815, avoided inflicting the most galling of all tokens of defeat upon a spirited and still most powerful nation. The loss of Belgium and the frontier of the Rhine was keenly enough felt for thirty years to come, and made no insignificant part of the French people ready at any moment to rush into war; how much greater the power of the war-cry, how hopeless the task of restraint, if to the other motives for war there had been added the liberation of two of the most valued provinces of France. Without this the danger was great enough. Thrice at least in the next thirty years the balance seemed to be turning against the continuance of peace. An offensive alliance between France and Russia was within view when the Bourbon monarchy fell; the first years of Louis Philippe all but saw the revolutionary party plunge France into war for Belgium and for Italy; ten years later the dismissal of a Ministry alone prevented the outbreak of hostilities on the distant affairs of Syria. Had Alsace and Lorraine at this time been in the hands of disunited Germany, it is hard to believe that the Bourbon dynasty would not have averted, or sought to avert, its fall by a popular war, or that the victory of Louis Philippe over the war-party, difficult even when there was no French soil to reconquer, would have been possible. The time indeed came when a new Bonaparte turned to enterprises of aggression the resources which Europe had left unimpaired to his country; but to assume that the cessions proposed in 1815 would have made France unable to move, with or without allies, half a century afterwards, is to make a confident guess in a doubtful matter; and, with Germany in the condition in which it remained after 1815, it is at least as likely that the annexation of Alsace and Lorraine would have led to the early reconquest of the Rhenish provinces by France, or to a war between Austria and Prussia, as that it would have prolonged the period of European peace beyond that distant limit which it actually reached.

[English efforts at the Congress to abolish the slave-trade.]

Among the subjects which were pressed upon the Congress of Vienna there was one in which the pursuit of national interests and calculations of policy bore no part, the abolition of the African slave-trade. The British people, who, after twenty years of combat in the cause of Europe, had earned so good a right to ask something of their allies, probably attached a deeper importance to this question than to any in the whole range of European affairs, with the single exception of the personal overthrow of Napoleon. Since the triumph of Wiberforce's cause in the Parliament of 1807, and the extinction of English slave-traffic, the anger with which the nation viewed this detestable cruelty, too long tolerated by itself, had become more and more vehement and widespread. By the year 1814 the utterances of public opinion were so loud and urgent that the Government, though free from enthusiasm itself, was forced to place the international prohibition of the slave-trade in the front rank of its demands. There were politicians on the Continent credulous enough to believe that this outcry of the heart and the conscience of the nation was but a piece of commercial hypocrisy. Talleyrand, with far different insight, but not with more sympathy, spoke of the state of the English people as one of frenzy. [249] Something had already been effected at foreign courts. Sweden had been led to prohibit slave-traffic in 1813, Holland in the following year. Portugal had been restrained by treaty from trading north of the line. France had pledged itself in the first Treaty of Paris to abolish the commerce within five years. Spain alone remained unfettered, and it was indeed intolerable that the English slavers should have been forced to abandon their execrable gains only that they should fall into the hands of the subjects of King Ferdinand. It might be true that the Spanish colonies required a larger supply of slaves than they possessed; but Spain had at any rate not the excuse that it was asked to surrender an old and profitable branch of commerce. It was solely through the abolition of the English slave-trade that Spain possessed any slave-trade whatever. Before the year 1807 no Spanish ship had been seen on the coast of Africa for a century, except one in 1798 fitted out by Godoy. [250] As for the French trade, that had been extinguished by the capture of Senegal and Goree; and along the two thousand miles of coast from Cape Blanco to Cape Formosa a legitimate commerce with the natives was gradually springing up in place of the desolating traffic in flesh and blood. It was hoped by the English people that Castlereagh would succeed in obtaining a universal and immediate prohibition of the slave-trade by all the Powers assembled at Vienna. The Minister was not wanting in perseverance, but he failed to achieve this result. France, while claiming a short delay elsewhere, professed itself willing, like Portugal, to abolish at once the traffic north of the line; but the Government on which England had perhaps the greatest claim, that of Spain, absolutely refused to accept this restriction, or to bind itself to a final prohibition before the end of eight years. Castlereagh then proposed that a Council of Ambassadors at London and Paris should be charged with the international duty of expediting the close of the slave-trade; the measure which he had in view being the punishment of slave-dealing States by a general exclusion of their exports. Against this Spain and Portugal made a formal protest, treating the threat as almost equivalent to one of war. The project dropped, and the Minister of England had to content himself with obtaining from the Congress a solemn condemnation of the slave-trade, as contrary to the principles of civilisation and human right (Feb., 1815).

The work was carried a step further by Napoleon's return from Elba. Napoleon understood the impatience of the English people, and believed that he could make no higher bid for its friendship than by abandoning the reserves made by Talleyrand at the Congress, and abolishing the French slave-trade at once and for all. This was accomplished; and the Bourbon ally of England, on his second restoration could not undo what had been done by the usurper. Spain and Portugal alone continued to pursue—the former country without restriction, the latter on the south of the line—a commerce branded by the united voice of Europe as infamous. The Governments of these countries alleged in their justification that Great Britain itself had resisted the passing of the prohibitory law until its colonies were far better supplied with slaves than those of its rivals now were. This was true, but it was not the whole truth. The whole truth was not known, the sincerity of English feeling was not appreciated, until, twenty years later, the nation devoted a part of its wealth to release the slave from servitude, and the English race from the reproach of slave holding. Judged by the West Indian Emancipation of 1833, the Spanish appeal to English history sounds almost ludicrous. But the remembrance of the long years throughout which the advocates of justice encountered opposition in England should temper the severity of our condemnation of the countries which still defended a bad interest. The light broke late upon ourselves: the darkness that still lingered elsewhere had too long been our own.



CHAPTER XIII.

Concert of Europe after 1815—Spirit of the Foreign Policy of Alexander, of Metternich, and of the English Ministry—Metternich's action in Italy, England's in Sicily and Spain—The Reaction in France—Richelieu and the New Chamber—Execution of Ney—Imprisonments and persecutions—Conduct of the Ultra-Royalists in Parliament—Contests on the Electoral Bill and the Budget—The Chamber prorogued—Affair of Grenoble—Dissolution of the Chamber—Electoral Law and Financial Settlement of 1817—Character of the first years of peace in Europe generally—Promise of a Constitution in Prussia—Hardenberg opposed by the partisans of autocracy and privilege—Schmalz's Pamphlet—Delay of Constitutional Reform in Germany at large—The Wartburg Festival—Progress of Reaction—The Czar now inclines to repression—Congress of Aix la-Chapelle—Evacuation of France—Growing influence of Metternich in Europe—His action on Prussia—Murder of Kotzebue—The Carlsbad Conference and measures of repression in Germany—Richelieu and Decazes—Murder of the Duke of Berry—Progress of the reaction in France—General causes of the victory of reaction in Europe.

[Concert of Europe regarding France.]

For nearly twenty years the career of Bonaparte had given to European history the unity of interest which belongs to a single life. This unity does not immediately disappear on the disappearance of his mighty figure. The Powers of Europe had been too closely involved in the common struggle, their interests were too deeply concerned in the maintenance of the newly-established order, for the thoughts of Governments to be withdrawn from foreign affairs, and the currents of national policy to fall at once apart into separate channels. The Allied forces continued to occupy France with Wellington as commander-in-chief; the defence of the Bourbon monarchy had been declared the cause of Europe at large; the conditions under which the numbers of the army of occupation might be reduced, or the period of occupation shortened, remained to be fixed by the Allies themselves. France thus formed the object of a common European deliberation; nor was the concert of the Powers without its peculiar organ. An International Council was created at Paris, consisting of the Ambassadors of the four great Courts. The forms of a coalition were, for the first time, preserved after the conclusion of peace. Communications were addressed to the Government of Louis XVIII., in the name of all the Powers together. The Council of Ambassadors met at regular intervals, and not only transacted business relating to the army of occupation and the payment of indemnities, but discussed the domestic policy of the French Government, and the situation of parties or the signs of political opinion in the Assembly and the nation.

[Action of the Powers outside France.]

In thus watching over the restored Bourbon monarchy, the Courts of Europe were doing no more than they had bound themselves to do by treaty. Paris, however, was not the only field for a busy diplomacy. In most of the minor capitals of Europe each of the Great Powers had its own supposed interests to pursue, or its own principles of government to inculcate. An age of transition seemed to have begun. Constitutions had been promised in many States, and created in some; in Spain and in Sicily they had reached the third stage, that of suppression. It was not likely that the statesmen who had succeeded to Napoleon's power in Europe should hold themselves entirely aloof from the affairs of their weaker neighbours, least of all when a neighbouring agitation might endanger themselves. In one respect the intentions of the British, the Austrian, and the Russian Governments were identical, and continued to be so, namely, in the determination to countenance no revolutionary movement. Revolution, owing to the experience of 1793, had come to be regarded as synonymous with aggressive warfare. Jacobins, anarchists, disturbers of the public peace, were only different names for one and the same class of international criminals, who were indeed indigenous to France, but might equally endanger the peace of mankind in other countries. Against these fomenters of mischief all the Courts were at one.

[Alexander.]

Here, however, agreement ceased. It was admitted that between revolutionary disturbance and the enjoyment of constitutional liberty a wide interval existed, and the statesmen of the leading Powers held by no means the same views as to the true relation between nations and their rulers. The most liberal in theory among the Sovereigns of 1815 was the Emperor Alexander. Already, in the summer of 1815, he had declared the Duchy of Warsaw to be restored to independence and nationality, under the title of the Kingdom of Poland; and before the end of the year he had granted it a Constitution, which created certain representative assemblies, and provided the new kingdom with an army and an administration of its own, into which no person not a Pole could enter. The promised introduction of Parliamentary life into Poland was but the first of a series of reforms dimly planned by Alexander, which was to culminate in the bestowal of a Constitution upon Russia itself, and the emancipation of the serf. [251] Animated by hopes like these for his own people, hopes which, while they lasted, were not merely sincere but ardent, Alexander was also friendly to the cause of constitutional government in other countries. Ambition mingled with disinterested impulses in the foreign policy of the Czar. It was impossible that Alexander should forget the league into which England and Austria had so lately entered against him. He was anxious to keep France on his side; he was not inclined to forego the satisfaction of weakening Austria by supporting national hopes in Italy; [252] and he hoped to create some counterpoise to England's maritime power by allying Russia with a strengthened and better-administered Spain. Agents of the Czar abounded in Italy and in Germany, but in no capital was the Ambassador of Russia more active than in Madrid. General Tatistcheff, who was appointed to this post in 1814, became the terror of all his colleagues and of the Cabinet of London from his extraordinary activity in intrigue; but in relation to the internal affairs of Spain his influence was beneficial; and it was frequently directed towards the support of reforming Ministers, whom King Ferdinand, if free from foreign pressure, would speedily have sacrificed to the pleasure of his favourites and confessors.

[Metternich.]

[Metternich's policy in Germany.]

[In Italy.]

In the eyes of Prince Metternich, the all-powerful Minister of Austria, Alexander was little better than a Jacobin. The Austrian State, though its frontiers had been five times changed since 1792, had continued in a remarkable degree free from the impulse to internal change. The Emperor Francis was the personification of resistance to progress; the Minister owed his unrivalled position not more to his own skilful statesmanship in the great crisis of 1813 than to a genuine accord with the feelings of his master. If Francis was not a man of intellect, Metternich was certainly a man of character; and for a considerable period they succeeded in impressing the stamp of their own strongly-marked Austrian policy upon Europe. The force of their influence sprang from no remote source; it was due mainly to a steady intolerance of all principles not their own. Metternich described his system with equal simplicity and precision as an attempt neither to innovate nor to go back to the past, but to keep things as they were. In the old Austrian dominions this was not difficult to do, for things had no tendency to move and remained fixed of themselves; [253] but on the outside, both on the north and on the south, ideas were at work which, according to Metternich, ought never to have entered the world, but, having unfortunately gained admittance, made it the task of Governments to resist their influence by all available means. Stein and the leaders of the Prussian War of Liberation had agitated Germany with hopes of national unity, of Parliaments, and of the impulsion of the executive powers of State by public opinion. Against these northern innovators, Metternich had already won an important victory in the formation of the Federal Constitution. The weakness and timidity of the King of Prussia made it probable that, although he was now promising his subjects a Constitution, he might at no distant date be led to unite with other German Governments in a system of repression, and in placing Liberalism under the ban of the Diet. In Italy, according to the conservative statesman, the same dangers existed and the same remedies were required. Austria, through the acquisition of Venice, now possessed four times as large a territory beyond the Alps as it had possessed before 1792; but the population was no longer the quiescent and contented folk that it had been in the days of Maria Theresa. Napoleon's kingdom and army of Italy had taught the people warfare, and given them political aims and a more masculine spirit. Metternich's own generals had promised the Italians independence when they entered the country in 1814; Murat's raid a year later had actually been undertaken in the name of Italian unity. These were disagreeable incidents, and signs were not wanting of the existence of a revolutionary spirit in the Italian provinces of Austria, especially among the officers who had served under Napoleon. Metternich was perfectly clear as to the duties of his Government. The Italians might have a Viceroy to keep Court at Milan, a body of native officials to conduct their minor affairs, and a mock Congregation or Council, without any rights, powers, or functions whatever; if this did not satisfy them, they were a rebellious people, and government must be conducted by means of spies, police, and the dungeons of the Spielberg. [254]

[Scheme of an Austrian Protectorate over Italy.]

On this system, backed by great military force, there was nothing to fear from the malcontents of Lombardy and Venice: it remained for Metternich to extend the same security to the rest of the peninsula, and by a series of treaties to effect the double end of exterminating constitutional government and of establishing an Austrian Protectorate over the entire country, from the Alps to the Sicilian Straits. The design was so ambitious that Metternich had not dared to disclose it at the Congress of Vienna; it was in fact a direct violation of the Treaty of Paris, and of the resolution of the Congress, that Italy, outside the possessions of Austria, should consist of independent States. The first Sovereign over whom the net was cast was Ferdinand of Naples. On the 15th of June, 1815, immediately after the overthrow of Murat, King Ferdinand signed a Treaty of Alliance with Austria, which contained a secret clause, pledging the King to introduce no change into his recovered kingdom inconsistent with its own old monarchical principles, or with the principles which had been adopted by the Emperor of Austria for the government of his Italian provinces. [255] Ferdinand, two years before, had been compelled by Great Britain to grant Sicily a Constitution, and was at this very moment promising one to Naples. The Sicilian Constitution was now tacitly condemned; the Neapolitans were duped. By a further secret clause, the two contracting Sovereigns undertook to communicate to one another everything that should come to their knowledge affecting the security and tranquillity of the Italian peninsula; in other words, the spies and the police of Ferdinand were now added to Metternich's staff in Lombardy. Tuscany, Modena, and Parma entered into much the same condition of vassalage; but the scheme for a universal federation of Italy under Austria's leadership failed through the resistance of Piedmont and of the Pope. Pius VII. resented the attempts of Austria, begun in 1797 and repeated at the Congress of Vienna, to deprive the Holy See of Bologna and Ravenna. The King of Sardinia, though pressed by England to accept Metternich's offer of alliance, maintained with great decision the independence of his country, and found in the support of the Czar a more potent argument than any that he could have drawn from treaties. [256]