[Congress of Rastadt, Nov. 1797.]

The public articles of the Treaty of Campo Formio contained only the terms which had been agreed upon by France and Austria in relation to Italy and the Netherlands: the conditions of peace between France and the Germanic Body, which had been secretly arranged between France and the two leading Powers, were referred by a diplomatic fiction to a Congress that was to assemble at Rastadt. Accordingly, after Prussia and Austria had each signed an agreement abandoning the Rhenish Provinces, the Congress was duly summoned. As if in mockery of his helpless countrymen, the Emperor informed the members of the Diet that "in unshaken fidelity to the great principle of the unity and indivisibility of the German Empire, they were to maintain the common interests of the Fatherland with noble conscientiousness and German steadfastness; and so, united with their imperial head, to promote a just and lasting peace, founded upon the basis of the integrity of the Empire and of its Constitution." [62] Thus the Congress was convoked upon the pretence of preserving what the two greater States had determined to sacrifice; while its real object, the suppression of the ecclesiastical principalities and the curtailment of Bavaria, was studiously put out of sight.

[Rivalry of the Germans.]

The Congress was composed of two French envoys, of the representatives of Prussia and Austria, and of a committee, numbering with their secretaries seventy-four persons, appointed by the Diet of Ratisbon. But the recognised negotiators formed only a small part of the diplomatists who flocked to Rastadt in the hope of picking up something from the wreck of the Empire. Every petty German sovereign, even communities which possessed no political rights at all, thought it necessary to have an agent on the spot, in order to filch, if possible, some trifling advantage from a neighbour, or to catch the first rumour of a proposed annexation. It was the saturnalia of the whole tribe of busybodies and intriguers who passed in Germany for men of state. They spied upon one another; they bribed the secretaries and doorkeepers, they bribed the very cooks and coachmen, of the two omnipotent French envoys. Of the national humiliation of Germany, of the dishonour attaching to the loss of entire provinces and the reorganisation of what remained at the bidding of the stranger, there seems to have been no sense in the political circles of the day. The collapse of the Empire was viewed rather as a subject of merriment. A gaiety of life and language prevailed, impossible among men who did not consider themselves as the spectators of a comedy. Cobenzl, the chief Austrian plenipotentiary, took his travels in a fly, because his mistress, the citoyenne Hyacinthe, had decamped with all his carriages and horses. A witty but profane pamphlet was circulated, in which the impending sacrifice of the Empire was described in language borrowed from the Gospel narrative, Prussia taking the part of Judas Iscariot, Austria that of Pontius Pilate, the Congress itself being the chief priests and Pharisees assembling that they may take the Holy Roman Empire by craft, while the army of the Empire figures as the "multitude who smote upon their breasts and departed." In the utter absence of any German pride or patriotism the French envoys not only obtained the territory that they required, but successfully embroiled the two leading Powers with one another, and accustomed the minor States to look to France for their own promotion at the cost of their neighbours. The contradictory pledges which the French Government had given to Austria and to Prussia caused it no embarrassment. To deceive one of the two powers was to win the gratitude of the other; and the Directory determined to fulfil its engagement to Prussia at the expense of the bishoprics, and to ignore what it had promised to Austria at the expense of Bavaria.

[Rhenish Provinces.]

[Ecclesiastical States suppressed.]

A momentary difficulty arose upon the opening of the Congress, when it appeared that, misled by the Emperor's protestations, the Diet had only empowered its Committee to treat upon the basis of the integrity of the Empire (Dec. 9). The French declined to negotiate until the Committee had procured full powers: and the prospects of the integrity of the Empire were made clear enough a few days later by the entry of the French into Mainz, and the formal organisation of the Rhenish Provinces as four French Departments. In due course a decree of the Diet arrived, empowering the Committee to negotiate at their discretion: and for some weeks after the inhabitants of the Rhenish Provinces had been subjected to the laws, the magistracy, and the taxation of France, the Committee deliberated upon the proposal for their cession with as much minuteness and as much impartiality as if it had been a point of speculative philosophy. At length the French put an end to the tedious trifling, and proceeded to the question of compensation for the dispossessed lay Princes. This they proposed to effect by means of the disestablishment, or secularisation, of ecclesiastical States in the interior of Germany. Prussia eagerly supported the French proposal, both with a view to the annexation of the great Bishopric of Muenster, and from ancient hostility to the ecclesiastical States as instruments and allies of Catholic Austria. The Emperor opposed the destruction of his faithful dependents; the ecclesiastical princes themselves raised a bitter outcry, and demonstrated that the fall of their order would unloose the keystone of the political system of Europe; but they found few friends. If Prussia coveted the great spoils of Muenster, the minor sovereigns, as a rule, wore just as eager for the convents and abbeys that broke the continuity of their own territories: only the feeblest of all the members of the Empire, the counts, the knights, and the cities, felt a respectful sympathy for their ecclesiastical neighbours, and foresaw that in a system of annexation their own turn would come next. The principle of secularisation was accepted by the Congress without much difficulty, all the energy of debate being reserved for the discussion of details: arrangements which were to transfer a few miles of ground and half a dozen custom-houses from some bankrupt ecclesiastic to some French-bought duke excited more interest in Germany than the loss of the Rhenish Provinces, and the subjection of a tenth part of the German nation to a foreign rule.

[Austria determines on war, 1798.]

One more question was unexpectedly presented to the Congress. After proclaiming for six years that the Rhine was the natural boundary of France, the French Government discovered that a river cannot be a military frontier at all. Of what service, urged the French plenipotentiaries, were Strasburg and Mainz, so long as they were commanded by the guns on the opposite bank? If the Rhine was to be of any use to France, France must be put in possession of the fortresses of Kehl and Castel upon the German side. Outrageous as such a demand appears, it found supporters among the venal politicians of the smaller Courts, and furnished the Committee with material for arguments that extended over four months. But the policy of Austria was now taking a direction that rendered the resolutions of the Congress of very little importance. It had become clear that France was inclining to an alliance with Prussia, and that the Bavarian annexations promised to Austria by the secret articles of Campo Formio were to be withheld. Once convinced, by the failure of a private negotiation in Alsace, that the French would neither be content with their gains of 1797, nor permit Austria to extend its territory in Italy, Thugut determined upon a renewal of the war. [63] In spite of a powerful opposition at Court, Thugut's stubborn will still controlled the fortune of Austria: and the aggressions of the French Republic in Switzerland and the Papal States, at the moment when it was dictating terms of peace to the Empire, gave only too much cause for the formation of a new European league.

[French intervention in Switzerland.]

At the close of the last century there was no country where the spirit of Republican freedom was so strong, or where the conditions of life were so level, as in Switzerland; its inhabitants, however, were far from enjoying complete political equality. There were districts which stood in the relation of subject dependencies to one or other of the ruling cantons: the Pays de Vaud was governed by an officer from Berne; the valley of the Ticino belonged to Uri; and in most of the sovereign cantons themselves authority was vested in a close circle of patrician families. Thus, although Switzerland was free from the more oppressive distinctions of caste, and the Governments, even where not democratic, were usually just and temperate, a sufficiently large class was excluded from political rights to give scope to an agitation which received its impulse from Paris. It was indeed among communities advanced in comfort and intelligence, and divided from those who governed them by no great barrier of wealth and prestige, that the doctrines of the Revolution found a circulation which they could never gain among the hereditary serfs of Prussia or the priest-ridden peasantry of the Roman States. As early as the year 1792 a French army had entered the territory of Geneva, in order to co-operate with the democratic party in the city. The movement was, however, checked by the resolute action of the Bernese Senate; and the relations of France to the Federal Government had subsequently been kept upon a friendly footing by the good sense of Barthelemy, the French ambassador at Berne, and the discretion with which the Swiss Government avoided every occasion of offence. On the conquest of Northern Italy, Bonaparte was brought into direct connection with Swiss affairs by a reference of certain points in dispute to his authority as arbitrator. Bonaparte solved the difficulty by annexing the district of the Valteline to the Cisalpine Republic; and from that time he continued in communication with the Swiss democratic leaders on the subject of a French intervention in Switzerland, the real purpose of which was to secure the treasure of Berne, and to organise a government, like that of Holland and the Cisalpine Republic, in immediate dependence upon France.

[Helvetic Republic, April 12.]

[War between France and Swiss Federation, June, 1798.]

At length the moment for armed interference arrived. On the 15th December, 1797, a French force entered the Bishopric of Basle, and gave the signal for insurrection in the Pays de Vaud. The Senate of Berne summoned the Diet of the Confederacy to provide for the common defence: the oath of federation was renewed, and a decree was passed calling out the Federal army. It was now announced by the French that they would support the Vaudois revolutionary party, if attacked. The Bernese troops, however, advanced; and the bearer of a flag of truce having been accidentally killed, war was declared between the French Republic and the Government of Berne. Democratic movements immediately followed in the northern and western cantons; the Bernese Government attempted to negotiate with the French invaders, but discovered that no terms would be accepted short of the entire destruction of the existing Federal Constitution. Hostilities commenced; and the Bernese troops, supported by contingents from most of the other cantons, offered a brave but ineffectual resistance to the advance of the French, who entered the Federal capital on the 6th of March, 1798. The treasure of Berne, amounting to about L800,000, accumulated by ages of thrift and good management, was seized in order to provide for Bonaparte's next campaign, and for a host of voracious soldiers and contractors. A system of robbery and extortion, more shameless even than that practised in Italy, was put in force against the cantonal governments, against the monasteries, and against private individuals. In compensation for the material losses inflicted upon the country, the new Helvetic Republic, one and indivisible, was proclaimed at Aarau. It conferred an equality of political rights upon all natives of Switzerland, and substituted for the ancient varieties of cantonal sovereignty a single national government, composed, like that of France, of a Directory and two Councils of Legislature.

The towns and districts which had been hitherto excluded from a share in government welcomed a change which seemed to place them on a level with their former superiors: the mountain-cantons fought with traditional heroism in defence of the liberties which they had inherited from their fathers; but they were compelled, one after another, to submit to the overwhelming force of France, and to accept the new constitution. Yet, even now, when peace seemed to have been restored, and the whole purpose of France attained, the tyranny and violence of the invaders exhausted the endurance of a spirited people. The magistrates of the Republic were expelled from office at the word of a French Commission; hostages were seized; at length an oath of allegiance to the new order was required as a condition for the evacuation of Switzerland by the French army. Revolt broke out in Unterwalden, and a handful of peasants met the French army at the village of Stanz, near the eastern shore of the Lake of Lucerne (Sept. 8). There for three days they fought with unyielding courage. Their resistance inflamed the French to a cruel vengeance; slaughtered families and burning villages renewed, in this so-called crusade of liberty, the savagery of ancient war.

[French intrigues in Rome.]

Intrigues at Rome paved the way for a French intervention in the affairs of the Papal States, coincident in time with the invasion of Switzerland. The residence of the French ambassador at Rome, Joseph Bonaparte, was the centre of a democratic agitation. The men who moved about him were in great part strangers from the north of Italy, but they found adherents in the middle and professional classes in Rome itself, although the mass of the poor people, as well as the numerous body whose salaries or profits depended upon ecclesiastical expenditure, were devoted to the priests and the Papacy. In anticipation of disturbances, the Government ordered companies of soldiers to patrol the city. A collision occurred on the 28th December, 1797, between the patrols and a band of revolutionists, who, being roughly handled by the populace as well as by the soldiers, made their way for protection to the courtyard of the Palazzo Corsini, where Joseph Bonaparte resided. Here, in the midst of a confused struggle, General Duphot, a member of the Embassy, was shot by a Papal soldier. [64]

[Berthier enters Rome, Feb. 10, 1798.]

[Roman Republic, Feb. 15, 1798.]

The French had now the pretext against the Papal Government which they desired. Joseph Bonaparte instantly left the city, and orders were sent to Berthier, chief of the staff in northern Italy, to march upon Rome. Berthier advanced amid the acclamations of the towns and the curses of the peasantry, and entered Rome on the 10th of February, 1798. Events had produced in the capital a much stronger inclination towards change than existed on the approach of Bonaparte a year before. The treaty of Tolentino had shaken the prestige of Papal authority; the loss of so many well-known works of art, the imposition of new and unpopular taxes, had excited as much hatred against the defeated government as against the extortionate conquerors; even among the clergy and their retainers the sale of a portion of the Church-lands and the curtailment of the old Papal splendours had produced alienation and discontent. There existed too within the Italian Church itself a reforming party, lately headed by Ricci, bishop of Pistoia, which claimed a higher degree of independence for the clergy, and condemned the assumption of universal authority by the Roman See. The ill-judged exercise of the Pope's temporal power during the last six years had gained many converts to the opinion that the head of the Church would best perform his office if emancipated from a worldly sovereignty, and restored to his original position of the first among the bishops. Thus, on its approach to Rome, the Republican army found the city ripe for revolution. On the 15th of February an excited multitude assembled in the Forum, and, after planting the tree of liberty in front of the Capitol, renounced the authority of the Pope, and declared that the Roman people constituted itself a free Republic. The resolution was conveyed to Berthier, who recognised the Roman Commonwealth, and made a procession through the city with the solemnity of an ancient triumph. The Pope shut himself up in the Vatican. His Swiss guard was removed, and replaced by one composed of French soldiers, at whose hands the Pontiff, now in his eighty-first year, suffered unworthy insults. He was then required to renounce his temporal power, and, upon his refusal, was removed to Tuscany, and afterwards beyond the Alps to Valence, where in 1799 he died, attended by a solitary ecclesiastic.

In the liberated capital a course of spoliation began, more thorough and systematic than any that the French had yet effected. The riches of Rome brought all the brokers and contractors of Paris to the spot. The museums, the Papal residence, and the palaces of many of the nobility were robbed of every article that could be moved; the very fixtures were cut away, when worth the carriage. On the first meeting of the National Institute in the Vatican it was found that the doors had lost their locks; and when, by order of the French, masses were celebrated in the churches in expiation of the death of Duphot, the patrols who were placed at the gates to preserve order rushed in and seized the sacred vessels. Yet the general robbery was far less the work of the army than of the agents and contractors sent by the Government. In the midst of endless peculation the soldiers were in want of their pay and their food. A sense of the dishonour done to France arose at length in the subordinate ranks of the army; and General Massena, who succeeded Berthier, was forced to quit his command in consequence of the protests of the soldiery against a system to which Massena had conspicuously given his personal sanction. It remained to embody the recovered liberties of Rome in a Republican Constitution, which was, as a matter of course, a reproduction of the French Directory and Councils of Legislature, under the practical control of the French general in command. What Rome had given to the Revolution in the fashion of classical expressions was now more than repaid. The Directors were styled Consuls; the divisions of the Legislature were known as the Senate and the Tribunate; the Praetorship and the Quaestorship were recalled to life in the Courts of Justice. That the new era might not want its classical memorial, a medal was struck, with the image and superscription of Roman heroism, to "Berthier, the restorer of the city," and to "Gaul, the salvation of the human race."

[Expedition to Egypt, May, 1798.]

It was in the midst of these enterprises in Switzerland and Central Italy that the Directory assembled the forces which Bonaparte was to lead to the East. The port of Expedition to embarkation was Toulon; and there, on the 9th of May, 1798, Bonaparte took the command of the most formidable armament that had ever left the French shores. Great Britain was still but feebly represented in the Mediterranean, a detachment from St. Vincent's fleet at Cadiz, placed under the command of Nelson, being the sole British force in these waters. Heavy reinforcements were at hand; but in the meantime Nelson had been driven by stress of weather from his watch upon Toulon. On the 19th of May the French armament put out to sea, its destination being still kept secret from the soldiers themselves. It appeared before Malta on the 16th of June. By the treachery of the knights Bonaparte was put in possession of this stronghold, which he could not even have attempted to besiege. After a short delay the voyage was resumed, and the fleet reached Alexandria without having fallen in with the English, who had now received their reinforcements. The landing was safely effected, and Alexandria fell at the first assault. After five days the army advanced upon Cairo. At the foot of the Pyramids the Mameluke cavalry vainly threw themselves upon Bonaparte's soldiers. They were repulsed with enormous loss on their own side and scarcely any on that of the French. Their camp was stormed; Cairo was occupied; and there no longer existed a force in Egypt capable of offering any serious resistance to the invaders.

[Battle of the Nile, Aug. 1.]

But the fortune which had brought Bonaparte's army safe into the Egyptian capital was destined to be purchased by the utter destruction of his fleet. Nelson had passed the French in the night, when, after much perplexity, he decided on sailing in the direction of Egypt. Arriving at Alexandria before his prey, he had hurried off in an imaginary pursuit to Rhodes and Crete. At length he received information which led him to visit Alexandria a second time. He found the French fleet, numbering thirteen ships of the line and four frigates, at anchor in Aboukir Bay. [65] His own fleet was slightly inferior in men and guns, but he entered battle with a presentiment of the completeness of his victory. Other naval battles have been fought with larger forces; no destruction was ever so complete as that of the Battle of the Nile (August 1). Two ships of the line and two frigates, out of the seventeen sail that met Nelson, alone escaped from his hands. Of eleven thousand officers and men, nine thousand were taken prisoners, or perished in the engagement. The army of Bonaparte was cut off from all hope of support or return; the Republic was deprived of communication with its best troops and its greatest general.

[Coalition of 1798.]

A coalition was now gathering against France superior to that of 1793 in the support of Russia and the Ottoman Empire, although Spain was now on the side of the Republic, and Prussia, in spite of the warnings of the last two years, refused to stir from its neutrality. The death of the Empress Catherine, and the accession of Paul, had caused a most serious change in the prospects of Europe. Hitherto the policy of the Russian Court had been to embroil the Western Powers with one another, and to confine its efforts against the French Republic to promises and assurances; with Paul, after an interval of total reaction, the professions became realities. [66] No monarch entered so cordially into Pitt's schemes for a renewal of the European league; no ally had joined the English minister with a sincerity so like his own. On the part of the Ottoman Government, the pretences of friendship with which Bonaparte disguised the occupation of Egypt were taken at their real worth. War was declared by the Porte; and a series of negotiations, carried on during the autumn of 1798, united Russia, England, Turkey, and Naples in engagements of mutual support against the French Republic.

[Nelson at Naples, Sept., 1798.]

A Russian army set out on its long march towards the Adriatic: the levies of Austria prepared for a campaign in the spring of 1799; but to the English Government every moment that elapsed before actual hostilities was so much time given to uncertainties; and the man who had won the Battle of the Nile ridiculed the precaution which had hitherto suffered the French to spread their intrigues through Italy, and closed the ports of Sicily and Naples to his own most urgent needs. Towards the end of September, Nelson appeared in the Bay of Naples, and was received with a delirium that recalled the most effusive scenes in the French Revolution. [67] In the city of Naples, as in the kingdom generally, the poorest classes were the fiercest enemies of reform, and the steady allies of the Queen and the priesthood against that section of the better-educated classes which had begun to hope for liberty. The system of espionage and persecution with which the sister of Marie Antoinette avenged upon her own subjects the sufferings of her kindred had grown more oppressive with every new victory of the Revolution. In the summer of 1798 there were men languishing for the fifth year in prison, whose offences had never been investigated, and whose relatives were not allowed to know whether they were dead or alive. A mode of expression, a fashion of dress, the word of an informer, consigned innocent persons to the dungeon, with the possibility of torture. In the midst of this tyranny of suspicion, in the midst of a corruption which made the naval and military forces of the kingdom worse than useless, King Ferdinand and his satellites were unwearied in their theatrical invocations of the Virgin and St. Januarius against the assailants of divine right and the conquerors of Rome. A Court cowardly almost beyond the example of Courts, a police that had trained every Neapolitan to look upon his neighbour as a traitor, an administration that had turned one of the hardiest races in Europe into soldiers of notorious and disgraceful cowardice—such were the allies whom Nelson, ill-fitted for politics by his sailor-like inexperience and facile vanity, heroic in his tenderness and fidelity, in an evil hour encouraged to believe themselves invincible because they possessed his own support. On the 14th of November, 1798, King Ferdinand published a proclamation, which, without declaring war on the French, announced that the King intended to occupy the Papal States and restore the Papal government. The manifesto disclaimed all intention of conquest, and offered a free pardon to all compromised persons. Ten days later the Neapolitan army crossed the frontier, led by the Austrian general, Mack, who passed among his admirers for the greatest soldier in Europe. [68]

[Ferdinand enters Rome, Nov. 29.]

The mass of the French troops, about twelve thousand in number, lay in the neighbourhood of Ancona; Rome and the intermediate stations were held by small detachments. Had Mack pushed forward towards the Upper Tiber, his inroad, even if it failed to crush the separated wings of the French army, must have forced them to retreat; but, instead of moving with all his strength through Central Italy, Mack led the bulk of his army upon Rome, where there was no French force capable of making a stand, and sent weak isolated columns towards the east of the peninsula, where the French were strong enough to make a good defence. On the approach of the Neapolitans to Rome, Championnet, the French commander, evacuated the city, leaving a garrison in the Castle of St. Angelo, and fell back on Civita Castellana, thirty miles north of the capital. The King of Naples entered Rome on the 29th November. The restoration of religion was celebrated by the erection of an immense cross in the place of the tree of liberty, by the immersion of several Jews in the Tiber, by the execution of a number of compromised persons whose pardon the King had promised, and by a threat to shoot one of the sick French soldiers in the hospital for every shot fired by the guns of St. Angelo. [69] Intelligence was despatched to the exiled Pontiff of the discomfiture of his enemies. "By help of the divine grace," wrote King Ferdinand, "and of the most miraculous St. Januarius, we have to-day with our army entered the sacred city of Rome, so lately profaned by the impious, who now fly terror-stricken at the sight of the Cross and of my arms. Leave then, your Holiness, your too modest abode, and on the wings of cherubim, like the virgin of Loreto, come and descend upon the Vatican, to purify it by your sacred presence." A letter to the King of Piedmont, who had already been exhorted by Ferdinand to encourage his peasants to assassinate French soldiers, informed him that "the Neapolitans, guided by General Mack, had sounded the hour of death to the French, and proclaimed to Europe, from the summit of the Capitol, that the time of the Kings had come."

[Mack defeated by Championnet, Dec. 6-13.]

The despatches to Piedmont fell into the hands of the enemy, and the usual modes of locomotion would scarcely have brought Pope Pius to Rome in time to witness the exit of his deliverer. Ferdinand's rhapsodies were cut short by the news that his columns advancing into the centre and east of the Papal States had all been beaten or captured. Mack, at the head of the main army, now advanced to avenge the defeat upon the French at Civita Castellana and Terni. But his dispositions were as unskilful as ever: wherever his troops encountered the enemy they were put to the rout; and, as he had neglected to fortify or secure a single position upon his line of march, his defeat by a handful of French soldiers on the north of Rome involved the loss of the country almost up to the gates of Naples. On the first rumour of Mack's reverses the Republican party at Rome declared for France. King Ferdinand fled; Championnet re-entered Rome, and, after a few days' delay, advanced into Neapolitan territory. Here, however, he found himself attacked by an enemy more formidable than the army which had been organised to expel the French from Italy. The Neapolitan peasantry, who, in soldiers' uniform and under the orders of Mack, could scarcely be brought within sight of the French, fought with courage when an appeal to their religious passions collected them in brigand-like bands under leaders of their own. Divisions of Championnet's army sustained severe losses; they succeeded, however, in effecting their junction upon the Volturno; and the stronghold of Gaeta, being defended by regular soldiers and not by brigands, surrendered to the French at the first summons.

[French enter Naples, Jan. 23, 1799.]

Mack was now concentrating his troops in an entrenched camp before Capua. The whole country was rising against the invaders; and, in spite of lost battles and abandoned fortresses, the Neapolitan Government if it had possessed a spark of courage, might still have overthrown the French army, which numbered only 18,000 men. But the panic and suspicion which the Government had fostered among its subjects were now avenged upon itself. The cry of treachery was raised on every side. The Court dreaded a Republican rising; the priests and the populace accused the Court of conspiracy with the French; Mack protested that the soldiers were resolved to be beaten; the soldiers swore that they were betrayed by Mack. On the night of the 21st of December, the Royal Family secretly went on board Nelson's ship the Vanguard, and after a short interval they set sail for Palermo, leaving the capital in charge of Prince Pignatelli, a courtier whom no one was willing to obey. [70] Order was, however, maintained by a civic guard enrolled by the Municipality, until it became known that Mack and Pignatelli had concluded an armistice with the French, and surrendered Capua and the neighbouring towns. Then the populace broke into wild uproar. The prisons were thrown open; and with the arms taken from the arsenal the lazzaroni formed themselves into a tumultuous army, along with thousands of desperate men let loose from the gaols and the galleys. The priests, hearing that negotiations for peace were opened, raised the cry of treason anew; and, with the watchword of the Queen, "All the gentlemen are Jacobins; only the people are faithful," they hounded on the mob to riot and murder. On the morning of January 15th hordes of lazzaroni issued from the gates to throw themselves upon the French, who were now about nine miles from the city; others dragged the guns down from the forts to defend the streets. The Republican party, however, and that considerable body among the upper class which was made Republican by the chaos into which the Court, with its allies, the priests, and the populace, had thrown Naples, kept up communication with Championnet, and looked forward to the entrance of the French as the only means of averting destruction and massacre. By a stratagem carried out on the night of the 20th they gained possession of the fort of St. Elmo, while the French were already engaged in a bloody assault upon the suburbs. On the 23rd Championnet ordered the attack to be renewed. The conspirators within St. Elmo hoisted the French flag and turned their guns upon the populace; the fortress of the Carmine was stormed by the French; and, before the last struggle for life and death commenced in the centre of the city, the leaders of the lazzaroni listened to words of friendship which Championnet addressed to them in their own language, and, with the incoherence of a half-savage race, escorted his soldiers with cries of joy to the Church of St. Januarius, which Championnet promised to respect and protect.

[Parthenopean Republic.]

Championnet used his victory with a discretion and forbearance rare amongst French conquerors. He humoured the superstition of the populace; he encouraged the political hopes of the enlightened. A vehement revulsion of feeling against the fugitive Court and in favour of Republican government followed the creation of a National Council by the French general, and his ironical homage to the patron saint. The Kingdom of Naples was converted into the Parthenopean Republic. New laws, new institutions, discussed in a representative assembly, excited hopes and interests unknown in Naples before. But the inevitable incidents of a French occupation, extortion and impoverishment, with all their bitter effects on the mind of the people, were not long delayed. In every country district the priests were exciting insurrection. The agents of the new Government, men with no experience in public affairs, carried confusion wherever they went. Civil war broke out in fifty different places; and the barbarity of native leaders of insurrection, like Fra Diavolo, was only too well requited by the French columns which traversed the districts in revolt.

[War with Austria and Russia, March, 1799.]

The time was ill chosen by the French Government for an extension of the area of combat to southern Italy. Already the first division of the Russian army, led by Suvaroff, had reached Moravia, and the Court of Vienna was only awaiting its own moment for declaring war. So far were the newly-established Governments in Rome and Naples from being able to assist the French upon the Adige, that the French had to send troops to Rome and Naples to support the new Governments. The force which the French could place upon the frontier was inferior to that which two years of preparation had given to Austria: the Russians, who were expected to arrive in Lombardy in April, approached with the confidence of men who had given to the French none of their recent triumphs. Nor among the leaders was personal superiority any longer markedly on the side of the French, as in the war of the First Coalition. Suvaroff and the Archduke Charles were a fair match for any of the Republican generals, except Bonaparte, who was absent in Egypt. The executive of France had deeply declined. Carnot was in exile; the work of organisation which he had pursued with such energy and disinterestedness flagged under his mediocre and corrupt successors. Skilful generals and brave soldiers were never wanting to the Republic; but no single controlling will, no storm of national passion, inspired the Government with the force which it had possessed under the Convention, and which returned to it under Napoleon.

A new character was given to the war now breaking out by the inclusion of Switzerland in the area of combat. In the war of the First Coalition, Switzerland had been neutral territory; but the events of 1798 had left the French in possession of all Switzerland west of the Rhine, and an Austrian force subsequently occupied the Grisons. The line separating the combatants now ran without a break from Mainz to the Adriatic. The French armies were in continuous communication with one another, and the movements of each could be modified according to the requirements of the rest. On the other hand, a disaster sustained at any one point of the line endangered every other point; for no neutral territory intervened, as in 1796, to check a lateral movement of the enemy, and to protect the communications of a French army in Lombardy from a victorious Austrian force in southern Germany. The importance of the Swiss passes in this relation was understood and even overrated by the French Government; and an energy was thrown into their mountain warfare which might have produced greater results upon the plains.

[The Archduke Charles defeats Jourdan at Stockach, March, 25.]

Three armies formed the order of battle on either side. Jourdan held the French command upon the Rhine; Massena in Switzerland; Scherer, the least capable of the Republican generals, on the Adige. On the side of the Allies, the Archduke Charles commanded in southern Germany; in Lombardy the Austrians were led by Kray, pending the arrival of Suvaroff and his corps; in Switzerland the command was given to Hotze, a Swiss officer who had gained some distinction in foreign service. It was the design of the French to push their centre under Massena through the mountains into the Tyrol, and by a combined attack of the central and the southern army to destroy the Austrians upon the upper Adige, while Jourdan, also in communication with the centre, drove the Archduke down the Danube upon Vienna. Early in March the campaign opened. Massena assailed the Austrian positions east of the head-waters of the Rhine, and forced back the enemy into the heart of the Orisons. Jourdan crossed the Rhine at Strasburg, and passed the Black Forest with 40,000 men. His orders were to attack the Archduke Charles, whatever the Archduke's superiority of force. The French and the Austrian armies met at Stockach, near the head of the Lake of Constance (March 25). Overwhelming numbers gave the Archduke a complete victory. Jourdan was not only stopped in his advance, but forced to retreat beyond the Rhine. Whatever might be the fortune of the armies of Switzerland and Italy, all hope of an advance upon Vienna by the Danube was at an end.

[Murder of the French envoys at Rastadt, April 28.]

Freed from the invader's presence, the Austrians now spread themselves over Baden, up to the gates of Rastadt, where, in spite of the war between France and Austria, the envoys of the minor German States still continued their conferences with the French agents. On the 28th of April the French envoys, now three in number, were required by the Austrians to depart within twenty-four hours. An escort, for which they applied, was refused. Scarcely had their carriages passed through the city gates when they were attacked by a squadron of Austrian hussars. Two of French envoys the French envoys were murdered; the third left for dead. Whether this frightful violation of international law was the mere outrage of a drunken soldiery, as it was represented to be by the Austrian Government; whether it was to any extent occasioned by superior civil orders, or connected with French emigrants living in the neighbourhood, remains unknown. Investigations begun by the Archduke Charles were stopped by the Cabinet, in order that a more public inquiry might be held by the Diet. This inquiry, however, never took place. In the year 1804 all papers relating to the Archduke's investigation were removed by the Government from the military archives. They have never since been discovered. [71]

[Battle of Magnano, April 5.]

The outburst of wrath with which the French people learnt the fate of their envoys would have cost Austria dear if Austria had now been the losing party in the war; but, for the present, everything seemed to turn against the Republic. Jourdan had scarcely been overthrown in Germany before a ruinous defeat at Magnano, on the Adige, drove back the army of Italy to within a few miles of Milan; while Massena, deprived of the fruit of his own victories by the disasters of his colleagues, had to abandon the eastern half of Switzerland, and to retire upon the line of the river Limnat, Lucerne, and the Gothard. Charles now moved from Germany into Switzerland. Massena fixed his centre at Zuerich, and awaited the Archduke's assault. For five weeks Charles remained inactive: at length, on the 4th of June, he gave battle. After two days' struggle against greatly superior forces, Massena was compelled to evacuate Zuerich. He retreated, however, no farther than to the ridge of the Uetliberg, a few miles west of the city; and here, fortifying his new position, he held obstinately on, while the Austrians established themselves in the central passes of Switzerland, and disaster after disaster seemed to be annihilating the French arms in Italy.

[Suvaroff's Campaign in Lombardy, April-June.]

Suvaroff, at the head of 17,000 Russians, had arrived in Lombardy in the middle of April. His first battle was fought, and his first victory won, at the passage of the Adda on the 25th of April. It was followed by the surrender of Milan and the dissolution of the Cisalpine Republic. Moreau, who now held the French command, fell back upon Alessandria, intending to cover both Genoa and Turin; but a sudden movement of Suvaroff brought the Russians into the Sardinian capital before it was even known to be in jeopardy. The French general, cut off from the roads over the Alps, threw himself upon the Apennines above Genoa, and waited for the army which had occupied Naples, and which, under the command of Macdonald, was now hurrying to his support, gathering with it on its march the troops that lay scattered on the south of the Po. Macdonald moved swiftly through central Italy, and crossed the Apennines above Pistoia in the beginning of June. His arrival at Modena with 20,000 men threatened to turn the balance in favour of the French. Suvaroff, aware of his danger, collected all the troops within reach with the utmost despatch, and pushed eastwards to meet Macdonald on the Trebbia. Moreau descended from the Apennines in the same direction; but he had underrated the swiftness of the Russian general; and, before he had advanced over half the distance, Macdonald was attacked by Suvaroff on the Trebbia, and overthrown in three days of the most desperate fighting that had been seen in the war (June 18). [72]

[Naples.]

All southern Italy now rose against the Governments established by the French. Cardinal Ruffo, with a band of fanatical peasants, known as the Army of the Faith, made himself master of Apulia and Calabria amid scenes of savage cruelty, and appeared before Naples, where the lazzaroni were ready to unite with the hordes of the Faithful in murder and pillage. Confident of support within the city, and assisted by some English and Russian vessels in the harbour, Ruffo attacked the suburbs of Naples on the morning of the 13th of June. Massacre and outrage continued within and without the city for five days. On the morning of the 19th, the Cardinal proposed a suspension of arms. It was accepted by the Republicans, who were in possession of the forts. Negotiations followed. On the 23rd conditions of peace were signed by Ruffo on behalf of the King of Naples, and by the representatives of Great Britain and of Russia in guarantee for their faithful execution. It was agreed that the Republican garrison should march out with the honours of war; that their persons and property should be respected; that those who might prefer to leave the country should be conveyed to Toulon on neutral vessels; and that all who remained at home should be free from molestation.

[Reign of Terror.]

The garrison did not leave the forts that night. On the following morning, while they were embarking on board the polaccas which were to take them to Toulon, Nelson's fleet appeared in the Bay of Naples. Nelson declared that in treating with rebels Cardinal Ruffo had disobeyed the King's orders, and he pronounced the capitulation null and void. The polaccas, with the Republicans crowded on board, were attached to the sterns of the English ships, pending the arrival of King Ferdinand. On the 29th of June, Admiral Caracciolo, who had taken office under the new Government, and on its fall had attempted to escape in disguise, was brought a captive before Nelson. Nelson ordered him to be tried by a Neapolitan court-martial, and, in spite of his old age, his rank, and his long service to the State, caused him to be hanged from a Neapolitan ship's yard-arm, and his body to be thrown into the sea. Some days later, King Ferdinand arrived from Palermo, and Nelson now handed over all his prisoners to the Bourbon authorities. A reign of terror followed. Innumerable persons were thrown into prison. Courts-martial, or commissions administering any law that pleased themselves, sent the flower of the Neapolitan nation to the scaffold. Above a hundred sentences of death were carried out in Naples itself: confiscation, exile, and imprisonment struck down thousands of families. It was peculiar to the Neapolitan proscriptions that a Government with the names of religion and right incessantly upon its lips selected for extermination both among men and women those who were most distinguished in character, in science, and in letters, whilst it chose for promotion and enrichment those who were known for deeds of savage violence. The part borne by Nelson in this work of death has left a stain on his glory which time cannot efface. [73]

[Austrian designs in Italy.]

[New plan of the War.]

It was on the advance of the Army of Naples under Macdonald that the French rested their last hope of recovering Lombardy. The battle of the Trebbia scattered this hope to the winds, and left it only too doubtful whether France could be saved from invasion. Suvaroff himself was eager to fall upon Moreau before Macdonald could rally from his defeat, and to drive him westwards along the coast-road into France. It was a moment when the fortune of the Republic hung in the scales. Had Suvaroff been permitted to follow his own counsels, France would probably have seen the remnant of her Italian armies totally destroyed, and the Russians advancing upon Lyons or Marseilles. The Republic was saved, as it had been in 1793, by the dissensions of its enemies. It was not only for the purpose of resisting French aggression that Austria had renewed the war, but for the purpose of extending its own dominion in Italy. These designs were concealed from Russia; they were partially made known by Thugut to the British Ambassador, under the most stringent obligation to secrecy. On the 17th of August, 1799, Lord Minto acquainted his Government with the intentions of the Austrian Court. "The Emperor proposes to retain Piedmont, and to take all that part of Savoy which is important in a military view. I have no doubt of his intention to keep Nice also, if he gets it, which will make the Var his boundary with France. The whole territory of the Genoese Republic seems to be an object of serious speculation ... The Papal Legations will, I am persuaded, be retained by the Emperor ... I am not yet master of the designs on Tuscany." [74] This was the sense in which Austria understood the phrase of defending the rights of Europe against French aggression. It was not, however, for this that the Czar had sent his army from beyond the Carpathians. Since the opening of the campaign Suvaroff had been in perpetual conflict with the military Council of Vienna. [75] Suvaroff was bent upon a ceaseless pursuit of the enemy; the Austrian Council insisted upon the reduction of fortresses. What at first appeared as a mere difference of military opinion appeared in its true political character when the allied troops entered Piedmont. The Czar desired with his whole soul to crush the men of the Revolution, and to restore the governments which France had overthrown. As soon as his troops entered Turin, Suvaroff proclaimed the restoration of the House of Savoy, and summoned all Sardinian officers to fight for their King. He was interrupted by a letter from Vienna requiring him to leave political affairs in the hands of the Viennese Ministry. [76] The Russians had already done as much in Italy as the Austrian Cabinet desired them to do, and the first wish of Thugut was now to free himself from his troublesome ally. Suvaroff raged against the Austrian Government in every despatch, and tendered his resignation. His complaints inclined the Czar to accept a new military scheme, which was supported by the English Government in the hope of terminating the contention between Suvaroff and the Austrian Council. It was agreed at St. Petersburg that, as soon as the French armies were destroyed, the reduction of the Italian fortresses should be left exclusively to the Austrians; and that Suvaroff, uniting with a new Russian army now not far distant, should complete the conquest of Switzerland, and then invade France by the Jura, supported on his right by the Archduke Charles. An attack was to be made at the same time upon Holland by a combined British and Russian force.

If executed in its original form, this design would have thrown a formidable army upon France at the side of Franche Comte, where it is least protected by fortresses. But at the last moment an alteration in the plan was made at Vienna. The prospect of an Anglo-Russian victory in Holland again fixed the thoughts of the Austrian Minister upon Belgium, which had been so lightly abandoned five years before, and which Thugut now hoped to re-occupy and to barter for Bavaria or some other territory. "The Emperor," he wrote, "cannot turn a deaf ear to the appeal of his subjects. He cannot consent that the Netherlands shall be disposed of without his own concurrence." [77] The effect of this perverse and mischievous resolution was that the Archduke Charles received orders to send the greater part of his army from Switzerland to the Lower Rhine, and to leave only 25,000 men to support the new Russian division which, under General Korsakoff, was approaching from the north to meet Suvaroff. The Archduke, as soon as the new instructions reached him, was filled with the presentiment of disaster, and warned his Government that in the general displacement of forces an opportunity would be given to Massena, who was still above Zuerich, to strike a fatal blow. Every despatch that passed between Vienna and St. Petersburg now increased the Czar's suspicion of Austria. The Pope and the King of Naples were convinced that Thugut had the same design upon their own territories which had been shown in his treatment of Piedmont. [78] They appealed to the Czar for protection. The Czar proposed a European Congress, at which the Powers might learn one another's real intentions. The proposal was not accepted by Austria; but, while disclaiming all desire to despoil the King of Sardinia, the Pope, or the King of Naples, Thugut admitted that Austria claimed an improvement of its Italian frontier, in other words, the annexation of a portion of Piedmont, and of the northern part of the Roman States. The Czar replied that he had taken up arms in order to check one aggressive Government, and that he should not permit another to take its place.

[Battle of Novi, Aug. 15.]

For the moment, however, the allied forces continued to co-operate in Italy against the French army on the Apennines covering Genoa. This army had received reinforcements, and was now placed under the command of Joubert, one of the youngest and most spirited of the Republican generals. Joubert determined to attack the Russians before the fall of Mantua should add the besieging army to Suvaroff's forces in the field. But the information which he received from Lombardy misled him. In the second week of August he was still unaware that Mantua had fallen a fortnight before. He descended from the mountains to attack Suvaroff at Tortona, with a force about equal to Suvaroff's own. On reaching Novi he learnt that the army of Mantua was also before him (Aug. 15). It was too late to retreat; Joubert could only give to his men the example of Republican spirit and devotion. Suvaroff himself, with Kray, the conqueror of Mantua, began the attack: the onset of a second Austrian corps, at the moment when the strength of the Russians was failing, decided the day. Joubert did not live to witness the close of a defeat which cost France eleven thousand men. [79]

[Suvaroff goes into Switzerland.]

The allied Governments had so framed their plans that the most overwhelming victory could produce no result. Instead of entering France, Suvaroff was compelled to turn back into Switzerland, while the Austrians continued to besiege the fortresses of Piedmont. In Switzerland Suvaroff had to meet an enemy who was forewarned of his approach, and who had employed every resource of military skill and daring to prevent the union of the two Russian armies now advancing from the south and the north. Before Suvaroff could leave Italy, a series of admirably-planned attacks had given Massena the whole network of the central Alpine passes, and closed every avenue of communication between Suvaroff and the army with which he hoped to co-operate. The folly of the Austrian Cabinet seconded the French general's exertions. No sooner had Korsakoff and the new Russian division reached Schaffhausen than the Archduke Charles, forced by his orders from Vienna, turned northwards (Sept. 3), leaving the Russians with no support but Hotze's corps, which was scattered over six cantons. [80] Korsakoff advanced to Zuerich; Massena remained in his old position on the Uetliberg. It was now that Suvaroff began his march into the Alps, sorely harassed and delayed by the want of the mountain-teams which the Austrians had promised him, and filled with the apprehension that Korsakoff would suffer some irreparable disaster before his own arrival.

[Second Battle of Zuerich, Sept. 26.]

Two roads lead from the Italian lakes to central Switzerland; one, starting from the head of Lago Maggiore and crossing the Gothard, ends on the shore of Lake Lucerne; the other, crossing the Spluegen, runs from the Lake of Como to Reichenau, in the valley of the Rhine. The Gothard in 1799 was not practicable for cannon; it was chosen by Suvaroff, however, for his own advance, with the object of falling upon Massena's rear with the utmost possible speed. He left Bellinzona on the 21st of September, fought his way in a desperate fashion through the French outposts that guarded the defiles of the Gothard, and arrived at Altorf near the Lake of Lucerne. Here it was discovered that the westward road by which Suvaroff meant to strike upon the enemy's communications had no existence. Abandoning this design, Suvaroff made straight for the district where his colleague was encamped, by a shepherd's path leading north-eastwards across heights of 7,000 feet to the valley of the Muotta. Over this desolate region the Russians made their way; and the resolution which brought them as far as the Muotta would have brought them past every other obstacle to the spot where they were to meet their countrymen. But the hour was past. While Suvaroff was still struggling in the mountains, Massena advanced against Zuerich, put Korsakoff's army to total rout, and drove it, with the loss of all its baggage and of a great part of its artillery, outside the area of hostilities.

[Retreat of Suvaroff.]

The first rumours of the catastrophe reached Suvaroff on the Muotta; he still pushed on eastwards, and, though almost without ammunition, overthrew a corps commanded by Massena in person, and cleared the road over the Pragel at the point of the bayonet, arriving in Glarus on the 1st of October. Here the full extent of Korsakoff's disaster was made known to him. To advance or to fall back was ruin. It only remained for Suvaroff's army to make its escape across a wild and snow-covered mountain-tract into the valley of the Rhine, where the river flows below the northern heights of the Grisons. This exploit crowned a campaign which filled Europe with astonishment. The Alpine traveller of to-day turns with some distrust from narratives which characterise with every epithet of horror and dismay scenes which are the delight of our age; but the retreat of Suvaroff's army, a starving, footsore multitude, over what was then an untrodden wilderness of rock, and through fresh-fallen autumn snow two feet deep, had little in common with the boldest feats of Alpine hardihood. [81] It was achieved with loss and suffering; it brought the army from a position of the utmost danger into one of security; but it was followed by no renewed attack. Proposals for a combination between Suvaroff and the Archduke Charles resulted only in mutual taunts and menaces. The co-operation of Russia in the war was at an end. The French remained masters of the whole of the Swiss territory that they had lost since the beginning of the campaign.

[British and Russian expedition against Holland Aug. 1799.]

In the summer months of 1799 the Czar had relieved his irritation against Austria by framing in concert with the British Cabinet the plan for a joint expedition against Holland. It was agreed that 25,000 English and 17,000 Russian troops, brought from the Baltic in British ships, should attack the French in the Batavian Republic, and raise an insurrection on behalf of the exiled Stadtholder. Throughout July the Kentish coast-towns were alive with the bustle of war; and on the 13th of August the first English division, numbering 12,000 men, set sail from Deal under the command of Sir Ralph Abercromby. After tossing off the Dutch coast for a fortnight, the troops landed at the promontory of the Helder. A Dutch corps was defeated on the sand-hills, and the English captured the fort of the Helder, commanding the Texel anchorage. Immediately afterwards a movement in favour of the Stadtholder broke out among the officers of the Dutch fleet. The captains hoisted the Orange flag, and brought their ships over to the English.

This was the first and the last result of the expedition. The Russian contingent and a second English division reached Holland in the middle of September, and with them came the Duke of York, who now took the command out of the hands of Abercromby. On the other side reinforcements daily arrived from France, until the enemy's troops, led by General Brune, were equal in strength to the invaders. A battle fought at Alkmaar on the 19th of September gave the Allies some partial successes and no permanent advantage; and on the 3rd of October the Duke of York gained one of those so-called victories which result in the retreat of the conquerors. Never were there so many good reasons for a bad conclusion. The Russians moved too fast or too slow; the ditches set at nought the rules of strategy; it was discovered that the climate of Holland was unfavourable to health, and that the Dutch had not the slightest inclination to get back their Stadtholder. The result of a series of mischances, every one of which would have been foreseen by an average midshipman in Nelson's fleet, or an average sergeant in Massena's army, was that York had to purchase a retreat for the allied forces at a price equivalent to an unconditional surrender. He was allowed to re-embark on consideration that Great Britain restored to the French 8,000 French and Dutch prisoners, and handed over in perfect repair all the military works which our own soldiers had erected at the Helder. Bitter complaints were raised among the Russian officers against York's conduct of the expedition. He was accused of sacrificing the Russian regiments in battle, and of courting a general defeat in order not to expose his own men. The accusation was groundless. Where York was, treachery or bad faith was superfluous. York in command, the feeblest enemy became invincible. Incompetence among the hereditary chiefs of the English army had become part of the order of nature. The Ministry, when taxed with failure, obstinately shut their eyes to the true cause of the disaster. Parliament was reminded that defeat was the most probable conclusion of any military operations that we might undertake, and that England ought not to expect success when Prussia and Austria had so long met only with misfortune. Under the command of Nelson, English sailors were indeed manifesting that kind of superiority to the seamen of other nations which the hunter possesses over his prey; yet this gave no reason why foresight and daring should count for anything ashore. If the nation wished to see its soldiers undefeated, it must keep them at home to defend their country. Even among the Opposition no voice was raised to protest against the system which sacrificed English life and military honour to the dignity of the Royal Family. The collapse of the Anglo-Russian expedition was viewed with more equanimity in England than in Russia. The Czar dismissed his unfortunate generals. York returned home, to run horses at Newmarket, to job commissions with his mistress, and to earn his column at St. James's Park.

[Unpopularity of the Directory.]

[Plans of Sieyes 1799.]

It was at this moment, when the tide of military success was already turning in favour of the Republic, that the revolution took place which made Bonaparte absolute ruler of France. Since the attack of the Government upon the Royalists in Fructidor, 1797, the Directory and the factions had come no nearer to a system of mutual concession, or to a peaceful acquiescence in the will of a parliamentary majority. The Directory, assailed both by the extreme Jacobins and by the Constitutionalists, was still strong enough to crush each party in its turn. The elections of 1798, which strengthened the Jacobins, were annulled with as little scruple as the Royalist elections in the preceding year; it was only when defeat in Germany and Italy had brought the Government into universal discredit that the Constitutionalist party, fortified by the return of a large majority in the elections of 1799, dared to turn the attack upon the Directors themselves. The excitement of foreign conquest had hitherto shielded the abuses of Government from criticism; but when Italy was lost, when generals and soldiers found themselves without pay, without clothes, without reinforcements, one general outcry arose against the Directory, and the nation resolved to have done with a Government whose outrages and extortions had led to nothing but military ruin. The disasters of France in the spring of 1799, which resulted from the failure of the Government to raise the armies to their proper strength, were not in reality connected with the defects of the Constitution. They were caused in part by the shameless jobbery of individual members of the Administration, in part by the absence of any agency, like that of the Conventional Commissioners of 1793, to enforce the control of the central Government over the local authorities, left isolated and independent by the changes of 1789. Faults enough belonged, however, to the existing political order; and the Constitutionalists, who now for the second time found themselves with a majority in the Councils, were not disposed to prolong a system which from the first had turned their majorities into derision. A party grew up around the Abbe Sieyes intent upon some change which should give France a government really representing its best elements. What the change was to be few could say; but it was known that Sieyes, who had taken a leading part in 1789, and had condemned the Constitution of 1795 from the moment when it was sketched, had elaborated a scheme which he considered exempt from every error that had vitiated its predecessors. As the first step to reform, Sieyes himself was elected to a Directorship then falling vacant. Barras attached himself to Sieyes; the three remaining Directors, who were Jacobins and popular in Paris, were forced to surrender their seats. Sieyes now only needed a soldier to carry out his plans. His first thought had turned on Joubert, but Joubert was killed at Novi. Moreau scrupled to raise his hand against the law; Bernadotte, a general distinguished both in war and in administration, declined to play a secondary part. Nor in fact was the support of Sieyes indispensable to any popular and ambitious soldier who was prepared to attack the Government. Sieyes and his friends offered the alliance of a party weighty in character and antecedents; but there were other well-known names and powerful interests at the command of an enterprising leader, and all France awaited the downfall of a Government whose action had resulted only in disorder at home and defeat abroad.

[Bonaparte returns from Egypt, Oct., 1799.]

Such was the political situation when, in the summer of 1799, Bonaparte, baffled in an attack upon the Syrian fortress of St. Jean d'Acre, returned to Egypt, and received the first tidings from Europe which had reached him since the outbreak of the war. He saw that his opportunity had arrived. He determined to leave his army, whose ultimate failure was inevitable, and to offer to France in his own person that sovereignty of genius and strength for which the whole nation was longing. On the 7th of October a despatch from Bonaparte was read in the Council of Five Hundred, announcing a victory over the Turks at Aboukir. It brought the first news that had been received for many months from the army of Egypt; it excited an outburst of joyous enthusiasm for the general and the army whom a hated Government was believed to have sent into exile; it recalled that succession of victories which had been unchecked by a single defeat, and that Peace which had given France a dominion wider than any that her Kings had won. While every thought was turned upon Bonaparte, the French nation suddenly heard that Bonaparte himself had landed on the coast of Provence. "I was sitting that day," says Beranger in his autobiography, "in our reading-room with thirty or forty other persons. Suddenly the news was brought in that Bonaparte had returned from Egypt. At the words, every man in the room started to his feet and burst into one long shout of joy." The emotion portrayed by Beranger was that of the whole of France. Almost everything that now darkens the early fame of Bonaparte was then unknown. His falsities, his cold, unpitying heart were familiar only to accomplices and distant sufferers; even his most flagrant wrongs, such as the destruction of Venice, were excused by a political necessity, or disguised as acts of righteous chastisement. The hopes, the imagination of France saw in Bonaparte the young, unsullied, irresistible hero of the Republic. His fame had risen throughout a crisis which had destroyed all confidence in others. The stale placemen of the factions sank into insignificance by his side; even sincere Republicans, who feared the rule of a soldier, confessed that it is not always given to a nation to choose the mode of its own deliverance. From the moment that Bonaparte landed at Frejus, he was master of France.

[Conspiracy of Sieyes and Bonaparte.]

Sieyes saw that Bonaparte, and no one else, was the man through whom he could overthrow the existing Constitution. [82] So little sympathy existed, however, between Sieyes and the soldier to whom he now offered his support, that Bonaparte only accepted Sieyes' project after satisfying himself that neither Barras nor Bernadotte would help him to supreme power. Once convinced of this, Bonaparte closed with Sieyes' offers. It was agreed that Sieyes and his friend Ducos should resign their Directorships, and that the three remaining Directors should be driven from office. The Assemblies, or any part of them favourable to the plot, were to appoint a Triumvirate composed of Bonaparte, Sieyes, and Ducos, for the purpose of drawing up a new Constitution. In the new Constitution it was understood, though without any definite arrangement, that Bonaparte and Sieyes were to be the leading figures. The Council of Ancients was in great part in league with the conspirators: the only obstacle likely to hinder the success of the plot was a rising of the Parisian populace. As a precaution against attack, it was determined to transfer the meeting of the Councils to St. Cloud. Bonaparte had secured the support of almost all the generals and troops in Paris. His brother Lucien, now President of the Council of Five Hundred, hoped to paralyse the action of his own Assembly, in which the conspirators were in the minority.

[Coup d'etat, 18 Brumaire (Nov. 9), 1799.]

Early on the morning of the 9th of November (18 Brumaire), a crowd of generals and officers met before Bonaparte's house. At the same moment a portion of the Council of Ancients assembled, and passed a decree which adjourned the session to St. Cloud, and conferred on Bonaparte the command over all the troops in Paris. The decree was carried to Bonaparte's house and read to the military throng, who acknowledged it by brandishing their swords. Bonaparte then ordered the troops to their posts, received the resignation of Barras, and arrested the two remaining Directors in the Luxembourg. During the night there was great agitation in Paris. The arrest of the two Directors and the display of military force revealed the true nature of the conspiracy, and excited men to resistance who had hitherto seen no great cause for alarm. The Councils met at St. Cloud at two on the next day. The Ancients were ready for what was coming; the Five Hundred refused to listen to Bonaparte's accomplices, and took the oath of fidelity to the Constitution. Bonaparte himself entered the Council of Ancients, and in violent, confused language declared that he had come to save the Republic from unseen dangers. He then left the Assembly, and entered the Chamber of the Five Hundred, escorted by armed grenadiers. A roar of indignation greeted the appearance of the bayonets. The members rushed in a mass upon Bonaparte, and drove him out of the hall. His brother now left the President's chair and joined the soldiers outside, whom he harangued in the character of President of the Assembly. The soldiers, hitherto wavering, were assured by Lucien's civil authority and his treacherous eloquence. The drums beat; the word of command was given; and the last free representatives of France struggled through doorways and windows before the levelled and advancing bayonets.

[Sieyes' plan of Constitution.]

The Constitution which Sieyes hoped now to impose upon France had been elaborated by its author at the close of the Reign of Terror. Designed at that epoch, it bore the trace of all those apprehensions which gave shape to the Constitution of 1795. The statutory outrages of 1793, the Royalist reaction shown in the events of Vendemiaire, were the perils from which both Sieyes and the legislators of 1795 endeavoured to guard the future of France. It had become clear that a popular election might at any moment return a royalist majority to the Assembly: the Constitution of 1795 averted this danger by prolonging the power of the Conventionalists; Sieyes overcame it by extinguishing popular election altogether. He gave to the nation no right but that of selecting half a million persons who should be eligible to offices in the Communes, and who should themselves elect a smaller body of fifty thousand, eligible to offices in the Departments. The fifty thousand were in their turn to choose five thousand, who should be eligible to places in the Government and the Legislature. The actual appointments were to be made, however, not by the electors, but by the Executive. With the irrational multitude thus deprived of the power to bring back its old oppressors, priests, royalists, and nobles might safely do their worst. By way of still further precaution, Sieyes proposed that every Frenchman who had been elected to the Legislature since 1789 should be inscribed for ten years among the privileged five thousand.

Such were the safeguards provided against a Bourbonist reaction. To guard against a recurrence of those evils which France had suffered from the precipitate votes of a single Assembly, Sieyes broke up the legislature into as many chambers as there are stages in the passing of a law. The first chamber, or Council of State, was to give shape to measures suggested by the Executive; a second chamber, known as the Tribunate, was to discuss the measures so framed, and ascertain the objections to which they were liable; the third chamber, known as the Legislative Body, was to decide in silence for or against the measures, after hearing an argument between representatives of the Council and of the Tribunate. As a last impregnable bulwark against Jacobins and Bourbonists alike, Sieyes created a Senate whose members should hold office for life, and be empowered to annul every law in which the Chambers might infringe upon the Constitution.

It only remained to invent an Executive. In the other parts of his Constitution, Sieyes had borrowed from Rome, from Greece, and from Venice; in his Executive he improved upon the political theories of Great Britain. He proposed that the Government should consist of two Consuls and a Great Elector; the Elector, like an English king, appointing and dismissing the Consuls, but taking no active part in the administration himself. The Consuls were to be respectively restricted to the affairs of peace and of war. Grotesque under every aspect, the Constitution of Sieyes was really calculated to effect in all points but one the end which he had in view. His object was to terminate the convulsions of France by depriving every element in the State of the power to create sudden change. The members of his body politic, a Council that could only draft, a Tribunate that could only discuss, a Legislature that could only vote, Yes or No, were impotent for mischief; and the nation itself ceased to have a political existence as soon as it had selected its half-million notables.

[Sieyes and Bonaparte.]

So far, nothing could have better suited the views of Bonaparte; and up to this point Bonaparte quietly accepted Sieyes' plan. But the general had his own scheme for what was to follow. Sieyes might apportion the act of deliberation among debating societies and dumb juries to the full extent of his own ingenuity; but the moment that he applied his disintegrating method to the Executive, Bonaparte swept away the flimsy reasoner, and set in the midst of his edifice of shadows the reality of an absolute personal rule. The phantom Elector, and the Consuls who were to be the Elector's tenants-at-will, corresponded very little to the power which France desired to see at its head. "Was there ever anything so ridiculous?" cried Bonaparte. "What man of spirit could accept such a post?" It was in vain that Sieyes had so nicely set the balance. His theories gave to France only the pageants which disguised the extinction of the nation beneath a single will: the frame of executive government which the country received in 1799 was that which Bonaparte deduced from the conception of an absolute central power. The First Consul summed up all executive authority in his own person. By his side there were set two colleagues whose only function was to advise. A Council of State placed the highest skill and experience in France at the disposal of the chief magistrate, without infringing upon his sovereignty. All offices, both in the Ministries of State and in the provinces, were filled by the nominees of the First Consul. No law could be proposed but at his desire.

[Contrast of the Institutions of 1791 and 1799.]

[Centralisation of 1799.]

The institutions given to France by the National Assembly of 1789 and those given to it in the Consulate exhibited a direct contrast seldom found outside the region of abstract terms. Local customs, survivals of earlier law, such as soften the difference between England and the various democracies of the United States, had no place in the sharp-cut types in which the political order of France was recast in 1791 and 1799. The Constituent Assembly had cleared the field before it began to reconstruct. Its reconstruction was based upon the Rights of Man, identified with the principle of local self-government by popular election. It deduced a system of communal administration so completely independent that France was described by foreign critics as partitioned into 40,000 republics; and the criticism was justified when, in 1793, it was found necessary to create a new central Government, and to send commissioners from the capital into the provinces. In the Constitution of 1791, judges, bishops, officers of the National Guard, were all alike subjected to popular election; the Minister of War could scarcely move a regiment from one village to another without the leave of the mayor of the commune. In the Constitution of 1799 all authority was derived from the head of the State. A system of centralisation came into force with which France under her kings had nothing to compare. All that had once served as a check upon monarchical power, the legal Parliaments, the Provincial Estates of Brittany and Languedoc, the rights of lay and ecclesiastical corporations, had vanished away. In the place of the motley of privileges that had tempered the Bourbon monarchy, in the place of the popular Assemblies of the Revolution, there sprang up a series of magistracies as regular and as absolute as the orders of military rank. [83] Where, under the Constitution of 1791, a body of local representatives had met to conduct the business of the Department, there was now a Prefet, appointed by the First Consul, absolute, like the First Consul himself, and assisted only by the advice of a nominated council, which met for one fortnight in the year. In subordination to the Prefet, an officer and similar council transacted the local business of the Arrondissement. Even the 40,000 Maires with their communal councils were all appointed directly or indirectly by the Chief of the State. There existed in France no authority that could repair a village bridge, or light the streets of a town, but such as owed its appointment to the central Government. Nor was the power of the First Consul limited to the administration. With the exception of the lowest and the highest members of the judicature, he nominated all judges, and transferred them at his pleasure to inferior or superior posts.

Such was the system which, based to a great extent upon the preferences of the French people, fixed even more deeply in the national character the willingness to depend upon an omnipresent, all-directing power. Through its rational order, its regularity, its command of the highest science and experience, this system of government could not fail to confer great and rapid benefits upon the country. It has usually been viewed by the French themselves as one of the finest creations of political wisdom. In comparison with the self-government which then and long afterwards existed in England, the centralisation of France had all the superiority of progress and intelligence over torpor and self-contradiction. Yet a heavy, an incalculable price is paid by every nation which for the sake of administrative efficiency abandons its local liberties, and all that is bound up with their enjoyment. No practice in the exercise of public right armed a later generation of Frenchmen against the audacity of a common usurper: no immortality of youth secured the institutions framed by Napoleon against the weakness and corruption which at some period undermine all despotisms. The historian who has exhausted every term of praise upon the political system of the Consulate lived to declare, as Chief of the State himself, that the first need of France was the decentralisation of power. [84]

[State policy of Bonaparte.]

After ten years of disquiet, it was impossible that any Government could be more welcome to the French nation than one which proclaimed itself the representative, not of party or of opinion, but of France itself. No section of the nation had won a triumph in the establishment of the Consulate; no section had suffered a defeat. In his own elevation Bonaparte announced the close of civil conflict. A Government had arisen which summoned all to its service which would employ all, reward all, reconcile all. The earliest measures of the First Consul exhibited the policy of reconciliation by which he hoped to rally the whole of France to his side. The law of hostages, under which hundreds of families were confined in retaliation for local Royalist disturbances, was repealed, and Bonaparte himself went to announce their liberty to the prisoners in the Temple. Great numbers of names were struck off the list of the emigrants, and the road to pardon was subsequently opened to all who had not actually served against their country. In the selection of his officers of State, Bonaparte showed the same desire to win men of all parties. Cambaceres, a regicide, was made Second Consul; Lebrun, an old official of Louis XVI., became his colleague. In the Ministries, in the Senate, and in the Council of State the nation saw men of proved ability chosen from all callings in life and from all political ranks. No Government of France had counted among its members so many names eminent for capacity and experience. One quality alone was indispensable, a readiness to serve and to obey. In that intellectual greatness which made the combination of all the forces of France a familiar thought in Bonaparte's mind, there was none of the moral generosity which could pardon opposition to himself, or tolerate energy acting under other auspices than his own. He desired to see authority in the best hands; he sought talent and promoted it, but on the understanding that it took its direction from himself. Outside this limit ability was his enemy, not his friend; and what could not be caressed or promoted was treated with tyrannical injustice. While Bonaparte boasted of the career that he had thrown open to talent, he suppressed the whole of the independent journalism of Paris, and banished Mme. de Stael, whose guests continued to converse, when they might not write, about liberty. Equally partial, equally calculated, was Bonaparte's indulgence towards the ancient enemies of the Revolution, the Royalists and the priests. He felt nothing of the old hatred of Paris towards the Vendean noble and the superstitious Breton; he offered his friendship to the stubborn Breton race, whose loyalty and piety he appreciated as good qualities in subjects; but failing their submission, he instructed his generals in the west of France to burn down their villages, and to set a price upon the heads of their chiefs. Justice, tolerance, good faith, were things which had no being for Bonaparte outside the circle of his instruments and allies.

[France ceases to excite democracy abroad, but promotes equality under monarchical systems.]

[Effect of Bonaparte's autocracy outside France.]

In the foreign relations of France it was not possible for the most unscrupulous will to carry aggression farther than it had been already carried; yet the elevation of Bonaparte deeply affected the fortunes of all those States whose lot depended upon France. It was not only that a mind accustomed to regard all human things as objects for its own disposal now directed an irresistible military force, but from the day when France submitted to Bonaparte, the political changes accompanying the advance of the French armies took a different character. Belgium and Holland, the Rhine Provinces, the Cisalpine, the Roman, and the Parthenopean Republics, had all received, under whatever circumstances of wrong, at least the forms of popular sovereignty. The reality of power may have belonged to French generals and commissioners; but, however insincerely uttered, the call to freedom excited hopes and aspirations which were not insincere themselves. The Italian festivals of emancipation, the trees of liberty, the rhetoric of patriotic assemblies, had betrayed little enough of the instinct for self-government; but they marked a separation from the past; and the period between the years 1796 and 1799 was in fact the birth-time of those hopes which have since been realised in the freedom and the unity of Italy. So long as France had her own tumultuous assemblies, her elections in the village and in the county-town, it was impossible for her to form republics beyond the Alps without introducing at least some germ of republican organisation and spirit. But when all power was concentrated in a single man, when the spoken and the written word became an offence against the State, when the commotion of the old municipalities was succeeded by the silence and the discipline of a body of clerks working round their chief, then the advance of French influence ceased to mean the support of popular forces against the Governments. The form which Bonaparte had given to France was the form which he intended for the clients of France. Hence in those communities which directly received the impress of the Consulate, as in Bavaria and the minor German States, authority, instead of being overthrown, was greatly strengthened. Bonaparte carried beyond the Rhine that portion of the spirit of the Revolution which he accepted at home, the suppression of privilege, the extinction of feudal rights, the reduction of all ranks to equality before the law, and the admission of all to the public service. But this levelling of the social order in the client-states of France, and the establishment of system and unity in the place of obsolete privilege, cleared the way not for the supremacy of the people, but for the supremacy of the Crown. The power which was taken away from corporations, from knights, and from ecclesiastics, was given, not to a popular Representative, but to Cabinet Ministers and officials ranged after the model of the official hierarchy of France. What the French had in the first epoch of their Revolution endeavoured to impart to Europe—the spirit of liberty and self-government—they had now renounced themselves. The belief in popular right, which made the difference between the changes of 1789 and those attempted by the Emperor Joseph, sank in the storms of the Revolution.