Bonaparte, had called to the throne in 1801 the active though easily influenced Alexander I. In early life Alexander had acquired a pronounced taste for revolutionary philosophy and its liberal ideas, and likewise a more or less theoretical love of humanity. Now, Pitt persuaded him, with the assistance of English gold, that Napoleon was the enemy both of true liberty and of humanity. So the tsar joined his army with that of Austria, and in the autumn of 1805 the allies advanced through southern Germany toward the Rhine.
Pitt had done his best to bring Prussia into the coalition, but the Prussian king, Frederick William III (1797-1840), was timid and irresolute, and, despite the protests of his people, was cajoled by Napoleon’s offer of Hanover into a declaration of neutrality. Bavaria and Württemberg, from fear of Austria, became open allies of the French emperor.
[Sidenote: Napoleon vs. Austria]
Before the troops of the Third Coalition could threaten the eastern frontier of France, Napoleon abandoned his military projects against Great Britain, broke up his huge armaments along the Atlantic coast, and, with his usual rapidity of march, hurled his finely trained army upon the Austrians near the town of Ulm in Württemberg. There, on 20 October, 1805, the Austrian commander, with some 50,000 men, surrendered, and the road to Vienna was open to the French.
[Sidenote: Trafalgar (1805) and the Continued Sea Power of Great Britain]
This startling military success was followed on the very next day by a naval defeat quite as sensational and even more decisive. On 21 October, the allied French and Spanish fleets, issuing from the harbor of Cadiz, encountered the British fleet under Lord Nelson, and in a terrific battle off Cape Trafalgar were completely worsted. Lord Nelson lost his life in the conflict, but from that day to the close of the Napoleonic Era British supremacy on the high seas was not seriously challenged.
[Sidenote: Austerlitz, 1805]
Wasting no tears or time on the decisive loss of sea-power, Napoleon hastened to follow up his land advantages. Occupying Vienna, he turned northward into Moravia where 1805 Francis II and Alexander I had gathered a large army of Austrians and Russians. On 2 December, 1805, the anniversary of his coronation as emperor,–his “lucky” day, as he termed it,–Napoleon overwhelmed the allies at Austerlitz in one of the greatest battles in history.
[Sidenote: Defeat of Austria: Treaty of Pressburg, 1805]
The immediate result of the campaign of Ulm and Austerlitz was the enforced withdrawal of Austria from the Third Coalition. Late in December, 1805, the emperors Francis II and Napoleon signed the treaty of Pressburg, whereby the former ceded Venetia to the kingdom of Italy and recognized Napoleon as its king, and resigned the Tyrol to Bavaria, and outlying provinces in western Germany to Württemberg. Both Bavaria and Württemberg were converted into kingdoms. By the humiliating treaty of Pressburg, Austria thus lost 3,000,000 subjects and large revenues; was cut off from Italy, Switzerland, and the Rhine; and was reduced to the rank of a second-rate power.
[Sidenote: Napoleon vs. Prussia]
[Sidenote: Jena (1806) and the Humiliation of Prussia]
For a time it seemed as if the withdrawal of Austria from the Third Coalition would be fully compensated for by the adhesion of Prussia. Stung by the refusal of Napoleon to withdraw his troops from southern Germany and by the bootless haggling over the transference of Hanover, and goaded on by his patriotic and high-spirited wife, the beautiful Queen Louise, timid Frederick William III at length ventured in 1806 to declare war against France. Then, with a ridiculously misplaced confidence in the old-time reputation of Frederick the Great, without waiting for assistance from the Russians who were coming up, the Prussian army–some 110,000 strong, under the old-fashioned duke of Brunswick–advanced against the 150,000 veterans of Napoleon. The resulting battle of Jena, on 14 October, 1806, proved the absolute superiority of Napoleon’s strategy and of the enthusiastic French soldiers over the older tactics and military organization of the Prussians. Jena was not merely a defeat for the Prussians; it was at once a rout and a total collapse of that Prussian military prestige which in the course of the eighteenth century had been gained by the utmost sacrifice. Napoleon entered Berlin in triumph and took possession of the greater part of the kingdom of Prussia.
[Sidenote: Napoleon vs. Russia, Friedland] [Sidenote: Treaty of Tilsit (1807): Dissolution of the Third Coalition]
The Russians still remained to be dealt with. Winter was a bad season for campaigning in East Prussia, and it was not until June, 1807, at Friedland, that Napoleon was able to administer the same kind of a defeat to the Russians that he had administered to the Austrians at Austerlitz and to the Prussians at Jena. The Tsar Alexander at once sued for peace. At Tilsit, on a raft moored in the middle of the River Niemen, Napoleon and Alexander met and arranged the terms of peace for France, Russia, and Prussia. The impressionable tsar was dazzled by the striking personality and the unexpected magnanimity of the emperor of the French. Hardly an inch of Russian soil was exacted, only a promise to coöperate in excluding British trade from the Continent. Alexander was accorded full permission to deal as he would with Finland and Turkey. “What is Europe?” exclaimed the emotional tsar: “Where is it, if it is not you and I?” But Prussia had to pay the price of the alliance between French and Russian emperors. From Prussia was torn the portion of Poland which was erected into the grand-duchy of Warsaw, under Napoleon’s obsequious ally, the elector of Saxony. Despoiled altogether of half of her territories, compelled to reduce her army to 42,000 men, and forced to maintain French troops on her remaining lands until a large war indemnity was paid, Prussia was reduced to the rank of a third-rate power. Tilsit destroyed the Third Coalition and made Napoleon master of the Continent. Only Great Britain and Sweden remained under arms, and against the latter country Napoleon was now able to employ both Denmark and Russia.
[Sidenote: Humiliation of Sweden]
Early in 1808 a Russian army crossed the Finnish border without any previous declaration of war, and simultaneously a Danish force prepared to invade Sweden from the Norwegian frontier. The ill-starred Swedish king, Gustavus IV (1792-1809), found it was all he could do, even with British assistance, to fight off the Danes. The little Finnish army, left altogether unsupported, succumbed after an heroic struggle against overwhelming odds, and in 1809 the whole of Finland and the Åland Islands were formally ceded to Russia. Finland, however, did not enter Russia as a conquered province, but, thanks to the bravery of her people and not less to the wisdom and generosity of the Tsar Alexander, she long maintained her free constitution and was recognized as a semi- independent grand-duchy with the Russian tsar as grand-duke. Thus Sweden lost her ancient duchy of Finland, and she was permitted to retain a small part of Pomerania only at the humiliating price of making peace with Napoleon and excluding British goods from all her ports, In the same year, Gustavus IV was compelled to abdicate in favor of his uncle, Charles XIII (1809-1818), an infirm and childless old man, who was prevailed upon to designate as his successor one of Napoleon’s own marshals, General Bernadotte. Surely, Napoleon might hope henceforth to dominate Sweden as he then dominated every other Continental state. Of course, Great Britain, triumphant on the seas, remained unconquered, but the British army, the laughingstock of Europe, could expect to achieve little where Austria, Prussia, Russia, and Sweden had failed.
[Sidenote: Height of Napoleon’s Power, 1808]
The year that followed Tilsit may be taken as marking the height of Napoleon’s career. The Corsican adventurer was emperor of a France that extended from the Po to the North Sea, from the Pyrenees and the Papal States to the Rhine, a France united, patriotic, and in enjoyment of many of the fruits of the Revolution. He was king of an Italy that embraced the fertile valley of the Po and the ancient possessions of Venice, and that was administered by a viceroy, his stepson and heir- apparent, Eugène Beauharnais. The pope was his friend and ally. His brother Joseph governed the kingdom of Naples. His brother Louis and his stepdaughter Hortense were king and queen of Holland. His sister Elise was princess of the diminutive state of Lucca. The kings of Spain and Denmark were his admirers and the tsar of Russia now called him friend and brother. A restored Poland was a recruiting station for his army. Prussia and Austria had become second- or third-rate powers, and French influence once more predominated in the Germanies.
[Sidenote: Profound Changes in the Germanies]
It was in the Germanies, in fact, that Napoleon’s achievements were particularly striking. Before his magic touch many of the antique political and social institutions of that country crumbled away. As early as 1801 the diminution of the number of German states had begun. The treaty of Lunéville had made imperative some action on the part of the Diet of the Holy Roman Empire in order to indemnify the rulers whose lands on the left bank of the Rhine had been incorporated into France, and to grant “compensations” to the south German states. After laborious negotiations, lasting from 1801 to 1803, the Diet authorized [Footnote: By a decree, called the
_Reichsdeputationshauptschluss_.] the wholesale confiscation throughout southern Germany of ecclesiastical lands and of free cities, with the result that 112 formerly independent states lying east of the Rhine were wiped out of existence and nearly one hundred others on the west bank were added to France. Thus the number of the Germanies was suddenly reduced from more than three hundred to less than one hundred, and the German states which mainly benefited, along with Prussia, were the southern states of Bavaria, Württemberg, and Baden, which Napoleon desired to use as an equipoise against both Austria and Prussia. In this ambition he was not disappointed, for in the War of the Third Coalition (1805) he received important assistance from these three states, all of which were in turn liberally rewarded for their services, the rulers of Bavaria and Württemberg being proclaimed kings.
[Sidenote: Extinction of the Holy Roman Empire (1806), and its Replacement by the Empire of Austria and the Confederation of the Rhine]
The year 1806 was epochal in German history. On 19 July, the Confederation of the Rhine was formally established with Napoleon as Protector. The kings of Bavaria and Württemberg, the grand-dukes of Baden, Hesse-Darmstadt, and Berg, the archbishop of Mainz, and nine minor princes virtually seceded from the Holy Roman Empire and accepted the protection of Napoleon, whom they pledged themselves to support with an army of 63,000 men. On 1 August, Napoleon declared that he no longer recognized the Holy Roman Empire, and on 6 August the Habsburg emperor, Francis II, resigned the crown which his ancestors for centuries had worn. The work of a long line of French kings and statesmen,–Francis I, Henry IV, Richelieu, Mazarin, Louis XIV,–was thus consummated by Napoleon Bonaparte. The Holy Roman Empire had at last come to the inglorious end which it had long deserved. And its last emperor had to content himself with his newly appropriated title of Francis I, Hereditary Emperor of Austria. The dignity and might of the proud Habsburgs had declined before a mere upstart of the people as never before a royal Bourbon. And this same year, 1806, witnessed, as we have seen, not only the humiliation of Austria but the deepest degradation of Prussia.
By 1808 all the Germanies were at the mercy of Napoleon. Prussia was shorn of half her possessions and forced to obey the behests of her conqueror. The Confederation of the Rhine was enlarged and solidified. A kingdom of Westphalia was carved out of northern and western Germany at the expense of Prussia, Hanover, Brunswick, and Hesse, and bestowed upon Jerome, brother of Napoleon. The grand-duchy of Berg was governed by the Protector’s plebeian brother-in-law, Joachim Murat. And, greatest fact of all, wherever the French emperor’s rule extended, there followed the abolition of feudalism and serfdom, the recognition of equality of all citizens before the law, the principles and precepts of the Code Napoléon.
[Sidenote: Napoleon “the Son of the Revolution”]
This was the true apogee of Napoleon’s power. From the November day in 1799 when the successful general had overthrown the corrupt and despicable Directory down to 1808, his story is a magnificent succession of the triumphs of peace and of war. Whatever be the judgment of his contemporaries or of posterity upon his motives, there can be little question that throughout these nine years he appeared to France and to Europe what he proclaimed himself–“the son of the Revolution.” He it was who in the lull between the combats of the Second Coalition and those of the Third had consolidated the work of the democratic patriots from Mirabeau to Carnot and had assured to France the permanent fruits of the Revolution in the domains of property, law, religion, education, administration, and finance. He it was who, if narrowing the concept of liberty, had broadened the significance of equality by the very lesson of his own rise to power and had deepened the meaning of fraternity by lavishing affection and devotion upon that machine of democracy–the national army–the “nation in arms.” And he it was who, true to the revolutionary tradition of striking terror into the hearts of the divine-right monarchs of Europe, had with a mighty noise shaken the whole Continent and brought down the political and social institutions of the “old régime” tumbling in ruins throughout central and southern Europe. He had made revolutionary reform too solid and too widespread to admit of its total extinction by the allied despots of Europe. The dream which a Leopold and a Frederick William had cherished in 1791 of turning back the hands on the clock of human progress and of restoring conditions in France as they had been prior to 1789, was happily dispelled. But in the meantime the despots were to have their innings.
DESTRUCTION OF THE FRENCH EMPIRE
[Sidenote: Weaknesses in the French Empire of Napoleon] [Sidenote: 1. Napoleon Himself]
From 1808 to 1814–six dreadful years–Napoleon’s power was constantly on the wane. Nor are the reasons for his ultimate failure difficult to perceive. Some of the very elements which had contributed most to the upbuilding of his great empire with its dependent kingdoms and duchies were in the long run elements of weakness and instability–vital causes of its eventual downfall. In the first place, there was the factor of individual genius. Altogether too much depended upon the physical and mental strength of one man. Napoleon was undoubtedly a genius, but still he was human. He was growing older, more corpulent, less able to withstand exertion and fatigue, fonder of affluence and ease. On the other hand, every fresh success had confirmed his belief in his own ability and had further whetted his appetite for power until his ambition was growing into madness and his egotism was becoming mania. His aversion from taking the advice of others increased so that even the subtle intriguers, Talleyrand and Fouché, were less and less admitted to his confidence. The emperor would brook the appearance of no actor on the French stage other than himself, although on that stage during those crowded years there was too much for a single emperor, albeit a master emperor, to do.
[Sidenote: 2. Defects of Militarism]
The second serious defect in the Napoleonic system was the fact that its very foundation was military. What had enabled the National Convention in the days of the Revolution’s darkest peril to roll back the tide of foreign invasion was the heroism and devotion of an enthusiastic citizen soldiery, actuated by a solemn consciousness that in a very literal sense they were fighting for their fields and firesides, for the rights of men and of Frenchmen. They constituted compact and homogeneous armies, inspired by the principles and words of Rouget de Lisle’s rousing battle hymn, and they smote the hired troopers of the banded despots hip and thigh. It was this kind of an army which Napoleon Bonaparte took over and which had earned for him his first spectacular successes. He certainly tried to preserve its Revolutionary enthusiasm throughout his career. He talked much of its “mission” and its “destiny,” of liberty, equality, and fraternity, and he kept alive its traditions of heroism and duty. He even improved its discipline, its material well-being, and its honor. But gradually, almost imperceptibly, the altruistic ideals of the Revolution gave way in the French army to the more selfish and more Napoleonic ideal of glamour and glory. And as years passed by and the deadly campaigns repeated themselves and the number of patriotic volunteers lessened, Napoleon resorted more and more to conscription–forcibly taking away thousands of young Frenchmen from peaceful and productive pursuits at home and strewing their bones throughout the length and breadth of the Continent.
[Sidenote: 3. Reaction of Nationalism]
Nor did Napoleon’s army remain homogeneous. To the last its kernel was French, but, as the empire expanded and other peoples were brought into a dependent or allied position, it came to include regiments or companies of Poles, Germans, Italians, Dutch, Spaniards, and Danes. In its newer heterogeneous condition it tended the more to lose its original character and to assume that of an enormous machine-like conglomeration of mercenaries who followed the fortunes of a despot more tyrannical and more dangerous than any of the despots against whom it had at first been pitted. It is true that many of the Frenchmen who composed the kernel of the Grand Army still entertained the notion that they were fighting for liberty, equality, and fraternity, and that their contact with their fellow-soldiers and likewise with their enemies was a most effective means of communicating the revolutionary doctrines to Europe, but it is also true that Napoleon’s policy of quartering his troops upon the lands of his enemies or of his allies, and thereby conserving the resources of his own country, operated to develop the utmost hatred for the French, for the Revolution, and for Napoleon. This hatred produced, particularly in Germany and in Spain, a real patriotic feeling among the masses of the exploited nations, so that those very peoples to whom the notions of liberty and equality had first come as a blessed promise of deliverance from the oppression of their own divine-right rulers now used the same notions to justify them in rising as nations against the despotism of a foreign military oppressor. Liberty, equality, and fraternity–the gospel of the Revolution–was the boomerang which Napoleon by means of his army hurled against the European tyrants and which returned with redoubled force against him.
[Sidenote: 4. “The Continental System”]
It was thus the character of the emperor himself and his military exigencies that, taken in conjunction with the so-called “Continental System” and the national revolts, made Napoleon’s empire but an episode in the story of modern times. It is now time to explain the Continental System and then to see how it reacted throughout Europe upon the feeling of national patriotism to bring about the downfall of the Corsican adventurer.
[Sidenote: The Economic War between Great Britain and France]
“Continental System” is the term commonly applied to the curious character which the warfare between Napoleon and Great Britain gradually assumed. By 1806 the interesting situation had developed that Great Britain was indisputable mistress of the seas while Napoleon was no less indisputable master of the Continent. The battles of the Nile, of Copenhagen, and of Trafalgar had been to the British what those of Marengo, Austerlitz, and Jena had been to the French. On one hand the destruction of the French fleet, together with the Danish, Dutch, and Spanish squadrons, had effectually prevented Napoleon from carrying into practice his long-cherished dream of invading England. On the other hand, the British army was not strong enough to cope successfully with Napoleon on land, and the European Powers which all along had been subsidized by English gold had been cowed into submission by the French emperor. Apparently neither France nor Great Britain could strike each other by ordinary military means, and yet neither would sue for peace. William Pitt died in January, 1806, heart-broken by the news of Austerlitz, the ruin of all his hopes. Charles James Fox, the gifted Whig, who thereupon became British foreign secretary, was foiled in a sincere attempt to negotiate peace with Napoleon, and died in September of the same year, despairing of any amicable settlement.
The brilliant French victory at Jena in October, 1806, seemed to fill the British as well as the Prussian cup to overflowing. The very next month Napoleon followed up his successes by inaugurating a thoroughgoing campaign against his arch-enemy, Great Britain herself; but the campaign was to be conducted in the field of economics rather than in the purview of military science. England, it must be remembered, had become, thanks to the long series of dynastic and colonial wars that filled the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the chief commercial nation of the world: she had a larger number of citizens who made their living as ship-owners, sailors, and traders than any other country in the world. Then, too, as we shall see in a subsequent chapter, it was in the England of the eighteenth century that the Industrial Revolution began,–a marvelous improvement in manufacturing, which fostered the growth of a powerful industrial class and enabled the English to make goods more cheaply and in greater profusion and to sell them more readily, at lower prices, both at home and abroad, than any other people in the world. Industry was fast becoming the basis of Great Britain’s wealth, and the commercial classes were acquiring new strength and influence. It was, therefore, against “a nation of shopkeepers,” as Napoleon contemptuously dubbed the English, that he must direct his new campaign.
To Napoleon’s clear and logical mind, the nature of the problem was plain. Deprived of a navy and unable to utilize his splendid army, he must attack Great Britain in what appeared to be her one vulnerable spot–in her commerce and industry. If he could prevent the importation of British goods into the Continent, he would deprive his rivals of the chief markets for their products, ruin British manufacturers, throw thousands of British workingmen out of employment, create such hard times in the British Islands that the mass of the people would rise against their government and compel it to make peace with him on his own terms: in a word, he would ruin British commerce and industry and then secure an advantageous peace. It was a gigantic gamble, for Napoleon must have perceived that the Continental peoples might themselves oppose the closure of their ports to the cheaper and better manufactured articles of Great Britain and might respond to a common economic impulse and rise in force to compel him to make peace on British terms, but the stakes were high and the emperor of the French was a good gambler. From 1806 to 1812 the struggle between Napoleon and Great Britain was an economic endurance-test. On the one hand, the question was whether the British government could retain the support of the British people. On the other hand, the question was whether Napoleon could rely upon the cooperation of the whole Continent.
[Sidenote: The Berlin and Milan Decrees]
The Continental System had been foreshadowed under the Directory and in the early years of the Consulate, but it was not until the Berlin Decree (November, 1806) that the first great attempt was made to define and enforce it. In this decree, Napoleon proclaimed a state of blockade against the British Isles and closed French and allied ports to ships coming from Great Britain or her colonies. The Berlin Decree was subsequently strengthened and extended by decrees at Warsaw (January, 1807), Milan (December, 1807), and Fontainebleau (October, 1810). The Milan Decree provided that even neutral vessels sailing from any British port or from countries occupied by British troops might be seized by French warships or privateers. The Fontainebleau Decree went so far as to order the confiscation and public burning of all British manufactured goods found in the Napoleonic States.
[Sidenote: The Orders in Council]
To these imperial decrees the British government, now largely dominated by such statesmen as Lord Castlereagh and George Canning, replied with celebrated Orders in Council (January-November, 1807), which declared all vessels trading with France or her allies liable to capture and provided further that in certain instances neutral vessels must touch at a British port. Thus the issue was squarely joined. Napoleon would suffer no importation of British goods whether by combatants or by neutrals. The British would allow none but themselves to trade with France and her allies. In both cases the neutrals would be the worst sufferers. The effects of the conflict were destined to be far- reaching.
[Sidenote: Difficulties in Maintaining the Continental System]
The British by virtue of their sea-power could come nearer to enforcing their Orders in Council than could Napoleon to giving full effect to his imperial decrees. Of course they had their troubles with neutrals. The stubborn effort of Denmark to preserve its independence of action in politics and trade was frustrated in 1807 when a British expedition bombarded Copenhagen and seized the remnant of the Danish navy. From that time until 1814 Denmark was naturally a stanch ally of Napoleon. Against the Americans, too, who took advantage of the Continental System to draw into their own hands a liberal portion of the carrying trade, the British vigorously applied the Orders in Council, and the consequent ill-feeling culminated in the War of 1812 between Great Britain and the United States. But on the whole, the British had less trouble with neutrals than did Napoleon. And compared with the prodigious hardships which the System imposed upon the Continental peoples and the consequent storms of popular opposition to its author, the contemporaneous distress in England was never acute; and the British nation at large never seriously wavered in affording moral and material support to their hard-pressed government.
Here was the failure of Napoleon. It proved physically impossible for him to extend the Continental System widely and thoroughly enough to gain his point. In many cases, to stave off opposition, he authorized exceptions to his own decrees. If he could have prevailed upon every Continental state to close its ports to British goods simultaneously and for several successive years, he would still have been confronted with a difficult task to prevent smuggling and the bribery of customs officials, which reached large proportions even in France and in the surrounding states that he had under fairly effective control. But to bring all Continental states into line with his economic campaign against Great Britain was a colossal task, to the performance of which he subordinated all his subsequent policies.
[Sidenote: Subordination of Napoleon’s Foreign Policies to the Enforcement of the Continental System]
We have seen how by the treaty of Tilsit (1807) Napoleon extorted promises from the tsar of Russia and the king of Prussia to exclude British goods from their respective countries. He himself saw to the enforcement of the decrees in the French Empire, in the kingdom of Italy, in the Confederation of the Rhine, and in the grand-duchy of Warsaw. Brother Joseph did his will in Naples, Brother Jerome in Westphalia, Sister Elise in Tuscany, and Brother Louis was expected to do his will in Holland. The outcome of the war with Sweden in 1808 was the completion of the closure of all Scandinavian ports to the British. Napoleon’s determination to have his decrees executed in the Papal States, as well as his high-handed treatment of matters affecting the Catholic Church in France, brought him into conflict with Pope Pius VII, a gentle but courageous man, who in daring to excommunicate the European taskmaster was summarily deprived of his temporal rule and carried off a prisoner, first to Grenoble, then to Savona, and finally to Fontainebleau, where he resided, heaped with disgrace and insults, until 1814. In 1809 Napoleon formally incorporated the Papal States into the French Empire. And when in the next year Louis Bonaparte gave clear signs of an intention to promote the best interests of his Dutch subjects, even to his brother’s detriment, by admitting British goods, he was peremptorily deposed, and Holland, too, was incorporated into the ever-enlarging French Empire. Henceforth, the Dutch had to bear the burdens of conscription and of crushing taxation.
[Sidenote: Napoleon’s Interference in Portugal]
Meanwhile Napoleon was devoting special attention to closing Portugal and Spain to British goods, and political conditions in these countries seemed to favor his designs. For over a hundred years Portugal had been linked in close trade relations with England, ever since the Methuen Treaty of 1703, which, in return for the admission of English woolens into Portugal, had granted differential duties favoring the importation of Portuguese wines into England and had thus provided a good market for an important Portuguese product to the exclusion largely of the French. Napoleon, early in his public career, had tried, for a time successfully, [Footnote: In 1801, as First Consul, Napoleon had prevailed upon Spain to attack Portugal in order to secure the repudiation of the Methuen Treaty and the promise of hostility to Great Britain. This step had proved fatal to Portuguese trade, and in 1804 the Portuguese government had purchased from Napoleon a solemn recognition of neutrality.] to break these commercial relations between Great Britain and Portugal, but it was not until after Tilsit that he entered seriously upon the work. He then formally demanded the adherence of Portugal to the Continental System and the seizure of all British subjects and property within the kingdom. Prince John, the regent of the small country, protested, besought Great Britain for aid, hesitated, and finally refused. Already a Franco-Spanish army was on its way to force compliance with the emperor’s demands.
[Sidenote: and in Spain]
In the court of the Spanish Bourbons was a situation that Napoleon could readily utilize in order to have his way both in Portugal and in Spain. On the throne of Spain was seated the aging Charles IV (1788- 1808), boorish, foolish, easily duped. By his side sat his queen, a coarse sensuous woman “with a tongue like a fishwife’s.” Their heir was Prince Ferdinand, a conceited irresponsible young braggart in his early twenties. And their favorite, the true ruler of Spain, if Spain at this time could be said to have a ruler, was Godoy, a vain flashy adventurer, who was loved by the queen, shielded by the king, and envied by the heir. Under such a combination it is not strange that Spain from 1795 to 1808 was but a vassal state to France. Nor is it strange that Napoleon was able in 1807 to secure the approval of the Spanish king to the partition of Portugal, a liberal share having been allotted to the precious Godoy.
Thus French troops were suffered to pour across Spain, and, in October, 1807, to invade Portugal. On 1 December, Lisbon was occupied and the Continental System proclaimed in force, but on the preceding day the Portuguese royal family escaped and, under convoy of a British fleet, set sail for their distant colony of Brazil. Then it was that Napoleon’s true intentions in regard to Spain as well as to Portugal became evident.
[Sidenote: Joseph Bonaparte, King of Spain, 1808]
French troops continued to cross the Pyrenees and to possess themselves of the whole Iberian peninsula. In Spain public opinion blamed the feeble king and the detested favorite for this profanation of the country’s soil, and in the recriminations that ensued at court Prince Ferdinand warmly espoused the popular side. Riots followed. Charles IV, to save Godoy, abdicated and proclaimed Ferdinand VII (17 March, 1808). On the pretext of mediating between the rival factions in the Bourbon court, Napoleon lured Charles and Ferdinand and Godoy to Bayonne on the French frontier and there by threats and cajolery compelled both king and prince to resign all claims upon their throne. Charles retired to Rome on a pension from Napoleon; Ferdinand was kept for six years under strict military guard at Talleyrand’s château; the Bourbons had ceased to reign. Brother Joseph Bonaparte was at once promoted to the throne of Spain, and Brother-in-law Joachim Murat supplanted him as king of Naples.
In July, 1808, under protection of French troops, Joseph Bonaparte was crowned at Madrid. Forthwith he proceeded to confer upon his new subjects the favors of the Napoleonic régime: he decreed equality before the law, individual liberties, abolition of feudalism and serfdom, educational reforms, suppression of the Inquisition, diminution of monasteries, confiscation of church property, public improvements, and, last but not least, the vigorous enforcement of the Continental System.
[Sidenote: Resistance in Spain]
The comparative ease with which Napoleon had thus been able to supplant the Spanish Bourbons was equaled only by the difficulty which he and his brother now experienced with the Spanish people. Until 1808 the Corsican adventurer had had to deal primarily with divine-right monarchs and their old-fashioned mercenary armies; henceforth he was confronted with real nations, inspired by the same solid patriotism which had inspirited the French and dominated by much the same revolutionary fervor. The Spanish people despised their late king as weak and traitorous; they hated their new king as a foreigner and an upstart. For Spain they were patriotic to the core: priests and nobles made common cause with commoners and peasants, and all agreed that they would not brook foreign interference with their domestic concerns. All Spain blazed forth in angry insurrection. Revolutionary committees, or _juntas_, were speedily organized in the provinces; troops were enrolled; and a nationalist reaction was in full swing. By 1 August, 1808, Joseph was obliged to flee from Madrid and the French troops were in retreat toward the Pyrenees,
[Sidenote: Interrelation of the Continental System and Spanish Nationalism]
[Sidenote: The Peninsular War, 1808-1813]
To add to the discomfiture of the French, George Canning, the British foreign minister, promptly promised his country’s active assistance to a movement whose real significance he already clearly perceived. In ringing words he laid down the British policy which would obtain until Napoleon had been overthrown: “We shall proceed upon the principle that any nation of Europe which starts up to oppose a Power which, whether professing insidious peace or declaring open war, is the common enemy of all nations, becomes instantly our ally.” On 1 August, 1808, true to this declaration, a British army under the command of Sir Arthur Wellesley, subsequently duke of Wellington, landed in Portugal and proceeded to cooperate with Portuguese and Spanish against the French. It was the beginning of the so-called Peninsular War, which, with little interruption, was to last until 1813 and to spell the first disasters for Napoleon.
Within three weeks after their landing the British were in possession of Portugal. Roused by this unexpected reverse, Napoleon assumed personal command of the French forces in the Peninsula. And such was his vigor and resourcefulness that in December, 1808, he reinstated Joseph in Madrid and drove the main British army out of Spain. The success of Napoleon, however, was but temporary and illusory. Early in 1809 grave developments in another part of Europe called him away from Spain, and the marshals, whom he left behind, quarreled with one another and at the same time experienced to the full the difficulties which Napoleon himself would have encountered had he remained.
The difficulties which impeded French military operations in the Iberian peninsula were well-nigh insurmountable. The nature of the country furnished several unusual obstacles. In the first place, the poverty of the farms and the paucity of settlements created a scarcity of provisions and rendered it difficult for the French armies to resort to their customary practice of living upon the land. Secondly, the sudden alternations of heat and cold, to which the northern part of Spain is liable, coupled with the insanitary condition of many of the towns, spread disease among the French soldiery. Finally, the succession of fairly high and steep mountain ranges, which cross the Peninsula generally in a direction of northwest to southeast, prevented any campaigning on the large scale to which Napoleonic tactics were accustomed, and put a premium upon loose, irregular guerrilla fighting, in which the Spaniards were adepts. In connection with these obstacles arising from the nature of the country must be remembered the fierce patriotic determination of the native people and the arms and disciplined commanders furnished by the British.
[Sidenote: Nationalism in Austria]
[Sidenote: Premature Efforts of Austria] [Sidenote: Wagram (1809) and the Failure of Austria]
The era of national revolts had dawned, and it was not long before Austria learned the lesson from Spain. Ever since 1792 the Austrian ruler had borne the brunt of the Continental warfare against revolutionary France. And stung by the disasters and humiliations of 1805 and 1806, the Emperor Francis intrusted preparations for a war of revenge to the Archduke Charles and to Count Stadion, an able statesman and diplomat. The immediate results were: first, a far-reaching scheme of military reform, which abolished the obsolete methods of the eighteenth century, the chief characteristics of the new order being the adoption of the principle of the “nation in arms” and of the war organization and tactics in use among the French; and secondly, the awakening of a lively and enthusiastic feeling of patriotism among the Austrian people, especially among the Tyrolese, whom the arbitrary act of the French despot had handed over to Bavaria. The opportunity for an effective stroke appeared to be afforded by the Spanish situation, and the general result was a desperate attempt, premature as the event proved, to overthrow Napoleon. On 9 April, 1809, Austria declared war, and the next day Archduke Charles with a splendid army advanced into Bavaria. Napoleon, who temporarily put the Spanish danger out of his mind, struck the archduke with his usual lightning rapidity, and within a week’s time had forced him back upon Vienna. Before the middle of May the French emperor was once more in the Austrian capital. But the Archduke Charles remained resolute, and on 21-22 May inflicted such a reverse on Napoleon at Aspern on the Danube below Vienna, that, had there been prompt cooperation on the part of other Austrian commanders and speedy assistance from other states, the Corsican might then have been overthrown and Europe saved from a vaster deluge of blood. As it was, Napoleon was allowed a fateful breathing spell, and on 5-6 July he fought and won the hard battle of Wagram. Wagram was not a rout like Austerlitz, but it was sufficiently decisive to induce the Austrian emperor to accept an armistice, and, after the failure of a coöperating British expedition, to conclude the treaty of Vienna or Schönbrunn (14 October, 1809), by the terms of which he had to surrender western Galicia to the grand-duchy of Warsaw and eastern Galicia to Russia; to cede the Illyrian provinces to the French Empire; and to restore the Tyrol, together with a strip of Upper Austria, to Bavaria. This treaty cost Austria four and one-half million subjects, a heavy war indemnity, and promises not to maintain an army in excess of 150,000 men, nor to have commercial dealings with Great Britain. As a further pledge of Austria’s good behavior, and in order to assure a direct heir to his greatness, Napoleon shortly afterwards secured an annulment of his marriage with Josephine on the ground that it had not been solemnized in the presence of a parish priest, and early in 1810 he married a young Austrian archduchess, Maria Louisa, the daughter of the Emperor Francis II. Even this venture at first seemed successful, for in the following year a son was born who received the high-sounding appellation of king of Rome. But Austria remained at heart thoroughly hostile; Maria Louisa later grew faithless; and the young prince, half- Habsburg and half-Bonaparte, was destined to drag out a weary and futile existence among enemies and spies.
[Sidenote: Influence of the French Revolution upon Prussia]
Meanwhile, the national reaction against Napoleon grew apace. It was in Prussia that it reached more portentous dimensions than even in Austria or in Spain. Following so closely upon the invigorating victories of Frederick the Great, the disaster of Jena and the humiliation of Tilsit had been a doubly bitter cup for the Prussian people. Prussian statesmen were not lacking who put the blame for their country’s degradation upon many of the social and political conditions which had characterized the “old régime” in all European monarchies, and, as these statesmen were called in counsel by the well-intentioned King Frederick William III (1797-1840), the years from 1807 to 1813 were marked by a series of internal reforms almost as significant in the history of Prussia as were those from 1789 to 1795 in the history of France.
[Sidenote: The Regeneration of Prussia]
The credit of the Prussian regeneration belongs mainly to the great minister, the Baron vom Stein (1757-1831), and in the second place to the Chancellor Hardenberg (1750-1822), both of whom felt the influence of English ideas and of the French philosophy of the eighteenth century. On 9 October, 1807, Stein issued at Memel the famous Edict of Emancipation, which abolished the institution of serfdom throughout Prussia. Free trade in land was established, and land was left free to pass from hand to hand and class to class. Thus the Prussian peasants became personally free, although they were still bound to make fixed payments to their lords as rent. Moreover, all occupations and professions were thrown open to noble, commoner, and peasant alike. Stein’s second important step was to strengthen the cabinet and to introduce sweeping changes in the conduct of public business, reforms too complicated and too technical to receive detailed explanation in this place. His third great measure was the grant (19 November, 1808) of local self-government, on liberal yet practical lines, to all Prussian towns and villages with a population in excess of 800. Stein undoubtedly intended the last law to be a corner-stone in the edifice of national constitutional government which he longed to erect in his country, but in this respect his plans were thwarted and Prussia remained another two generations without a written constitution. In 1811 Hardenberg continued the reform of the condition of the peasants by making them absolute owners of part of their holdings, the landlords obtaining the rest as partial compensation for their lost feudal and servile dues. During the same period, the army was likewise reorganized by Scharnhorst and Gneisenau; compulsory universal service was introduced, while the condition imposed by Napoleon that the army should not exceed 42,000 men was practically evaded by replacing each body of 42,000 men by another of the same size as soon as the first was fairly versed in military affairs. In this way every able-bodied male Prussian was in preparation for an expected War of Liberation.
Of course Napoleon had some idea of what was happening in Prussia: he protested, he threatened, he actually succeeded late in 1808 in securing the dismissal of Stein. But the redoubtable Prussian reformer spent the next three years in trying to fan the popular flame in Austria and thence betook himself to Russia to poison the ear and mind of the Tsar Alexander against the emperor of the French. In the meantime Napoleon was far too busy with other matters to give thorough attention to the continued development of the popular reforms in Prussia. There the national spirit burned ever brighter through the exertions of patriotic societies, such as the _Tugendbund_, or “League of Virtue,” through the writings of men like Fichte and Arndt, and, perhaps most permanently of all, through the wonderful educational reforms, which, associated indissolubly with the name of Wilhelm von Humboldt (1767-1835), gave to Prussia the basis of her present common- school system and to the world the great University of Berlin (1809).
It was no longer true that the French had a monopoly of the blessed principles of liberty, equality, and fraternity, for which to fight. It was no longer a fact that they were the only nation defending their homes, their lands, and their rights. By 1810 the despotism of Napoleon was more selfish and more directly galling to the Prussian people than had been the threatened tyranny of Austrian and Prussian monarchs to an emancipated French nation in the dark days of 1792. Prussia was bankrupt, shorn of half her provinces, enduring the quartering of foreign soldiers, and suffering the ruin of her crops and the paralysis of her trade. Thanks to the Continental System, which had been none of their doing, the Prussian people witnessed the decay of their seaports, the rotting of their ships in their harbors, paid exorbitant prices for tobacco, and denied themselves sugar, coffee, and spices. They were grumbling and getting into a temper that boded ill to the author of their injuries.
[Sidenote: Liberalism in Spain]
[Sidenote: The Spanish Constitution of 1812]
Meanwhile the warfare in Spain dragged on. In 1812 Wellington with his allied British and Spanish troops won the great victory of Salamanca, captured Madrid, and drove Joseph and the French north to Valencia. In the same year radical groups of Spaniards, who had learned revolutionary doctrines from the French, assembled at Cadiz and drafted a constitution for what they hoped would be their regenerated country. This written constitution, next in age to the American and the French, was more radical than either and long served as a model for liberal constitutions throughout southern Europe. After a preamble in honor of the “old fundamental laws of this monarchy,” the constitution laid down the very principle of the Revolution: “Sovereignty is vested essentially in the nation, and accordingly it is to the nation exclusively that the right of making its fundamental laws belongs.” The legislative power was intrusted to the Cortes, a single-chamber parliament elected for two years by indirect universal suffrage. The executive power was given to the king to be exercised by his ministers. The king could affix a suspensive veto to the acts of the Cortes. The constitution further proclaimed the principles of individual liberty and legal equality and sought to abolish the old régime root and branch: provision was made for a thorough reorganization of courts, local administration, taxation, the army, and public education. While the framers of the constitution affirmed that “the religion of the Spanish nation is and always will be the Apostolic Church of Rome, the only true Church,” they persisted in decreeing the suppression of the Inquisition and the secularization of ecclesiastical property. That such a radical constitution would be understood and championed forthwith by the whole Spanish people, only the most confirmed and fanatical optimist could believe, but, on the other hand, it was certain that the Spaniards as a nation were resolved that the Continental System and the Bonaparte family must go. They might sacrifice equality but not national liberty.
At last the four fateful defects in the Napoleonic Empire,–the character of Napoleon himself, the nature of his army, the Continental System, and the rise of nationalism,–were painfully in evidence. The drama thenceforth led irresistibly through two terrible acts–the Russian campaign and the Battle of the Nations–to the _dénouement_ in the emperor’s abdication and to a sorry epilogue in Waterloo.
[Sidenote: Strained Relations between Napoleon and Tsar Alexander]
It was the rupture between Napoleon and the Tsar Alexander that precipitated the disasters. A number of events which transpired between the celebrated meeting at Tilsit in 1807 and the memorable year of 1812 made a rupture inevitable. Tilsit had purported to divide the world between the two emperors, but Alexander, as junior partner in the firm, soon found that his chief function was to assist Napoleon in bringing all western and central Europe under the domination of the French Empire while he himself was allowed by no means a free rein in dealing with his own country’s hereditary enemies–Sweden, Poland, and Turkey. To be sure, Alexander had wrested Finland from Sweden (1809), but Napoleon’s forcing of Sweden into a war with Great Britain (1810-1812), presumably as an ally of Russia as well as of France, had prevented him from extending his territory further in that direction. Then, too, the revival of a Polish state under the name of the grand-duchy of Warsaw and under French protection was a thorn in his flesh, which became all the more painful, more irritating, when it was enlarged after the Austrian War of 1809. Finally, Alexander’s warfare against Turkey was constantly handicapped by French diplomacy, so that when the treaty of Bucharest was at length concluded (28 May, 1812) it was due to British rather than to French assistance that Russia extended her southern boundary to the River Pruth. Alexander was particularly piqued when Napoleon dethroned one of the tsar’s relatives in Oldenburg and arbitrarily annexed that duchy to the French Empire, and he was deeply chagrined when the marriage of his ally with a Habsburg archduchess seemed to cement the bonds between France and Austria.
All these political differences might conceivably have been adjusted, had it not been for the economic breach which the Continental System ever widened. Russia, at that time almost exclusively an agricultural country, had special need of British imports, and the tsar, a sympathetic, kind-hearted man, could not endure the suffering and protests of his people. The result was a gradual suspension of the rigors of the Continental System in Russia and the eventual return to normal trade relations as they had existed prior to Tilsit. This simple fact Napoleon could not and would not recognize. “Russia’s partial abandonment of the Continental System was not merely a pretext but the real ground of the war. Napoleon had no alternative between fighting for his system and abandoning the only method open to him of carrying on war against England.”
[Sidenote: Preparations for War between France and Russia]
By the opening of the year 1812 Napoleon was actively preparing for war on a large scale against his recent ally. From the Austrian court, thanks to his wife, he secured assurances of sympathy and the promise of a guard of 30,000 men to protect the right wing of his Russian invasion. From the trembling Prussian king he wrung, by threats, permission to lead his invaders across Prussian soil and the support of 20,000 troopers for the left of his lines. A huge expedition was then gathered together: some 250,000 French veterans, 150,000 Germans from the Confederation of the Rhine; 80,000 Italians; 60,000 Poles; and detachments of Dutch, Swiss, Danes, and Serbo-Croats; in all, a mighty motley host of more than 600,000 men.
As the year advanced, the Tsar Alexander made counter preparations. He came to a formal understanding with Great Britain. Through British mediation he made peace with the Turks and thus removed an enemy from his flank. And a series of treaties between himself, Great Britain, and Marshal Bernadotte, who was crown-prince of Sweden and tired of Napoleonic domination, guaranteed him in possession of Finland, assured him of a supporting Swedish army, and in return promised Norway as compensation to Sweden. A well-trained Russian army of 400,000 men, under the stubborn, taciturn veteran, General Kutusov, was put in the field.
[Sidenote: Napoleon’s Russian Campaign, 1812]
War seemed imminent by April, 1812. After leisurely completing his preparations, Napoleon crossed the Niemen on 24 June, and the invasion of Russia had begun. It was the plan of the French emperor either to smash his enemy in a single great battle and to force an early advantageous treaty, or, advancing slowly, to spend the winter in Lithuania, inciting the people to insurrection, and then in the following summer to march on to Moscow and there in the ancient capital of the tsars to dictate terms of peace. The Russian plan of campaign was quite different. The tsar knew his people, that they were deeply religious and patriotic, that they hated Napoleon bitterly, and that they could be trusted not to revolt. He likewise knew well the character of the 800 miles of comparatively barren steppes that intervened between the Niemen and Moscow, whereon small armies could be beaten and large ones starved. Against the _Grande Armée_ therefore, Alexander directed that no decisive battle be risked, but that the Russian forces, always retreating, should draw their opponents on as far as possible into the interior of the country, where the rigors and privations of a Russian winter could be expected to work greater havoc among them than could powder and bullets.
To his surprise and uneasiness, therefore, Napoleon after crossing the Niemen found the Russians always retreating before his advance. No decisive victory could be won against the elusive foe. Nor was the temper of the Lithuanians such as to encourage him to remain all winter among them. Pushing on into Russia, he captured the great fortress of Smolensk but still failed to crush the main Russian army. Then it was that he made the momentous decision to press on at once to Moscow. On 7 September, General Kutusov turned against him at Borodino and inflicted serious injury upon his army, but a week later he was in possession of Moscow. The battle of Borodino, together with the perpetual harassing of his outposts by the retreating Russians, had already inflicted very severe losses upon Napoleon, but he still had an army of about 100,000 to quarter in Moscow.
The very night of his triumphal entry, the city was set on fire through the carelessness of its own inhabitants,–the bazaar, with its stock of wine, spirits, and chemicals, becoming the prey of the flames. Barracks and foodstuffs were alike destroyed; the inhabitants fled; what was left of the city was pillaged by the French troops as well as by the Russians themselves; and the burning of Moscow became the signal for a general rising of the peasants against the foreigners who had brought such evils in their train. The lack of supplies and the impossibility of wintering in a ruined city, attacked in turn by an enraged peasantry and by detachments of General Kutusov’s army, now comfortably ensconced a short distance to the south, compelled Napoleon on 22 October, after an unsuccessful attempt to blow up the Kremlin, or citadel, to evacuate Moscow and to retrace his steps toward the Niemen.
[Sidenote: The Disastrous Retreat from Moscow]
The retreat from Moscow is one of the most horrible episodes in all history. To the exasperating and deadly attacks of the victoriously pursuing Russians on the rear were added the severity of the weather and the barrenness of the country. Steady downpours of rain changed to blinding storms of sleet and snow. Swollen streams, heaps of abandoned baggage, and huge snow-drifts repeatedly blocked the line of march. The gaunt and desolate country, which the army had ravaged and pillaged during the summer’s invasion, now grimly mocked the retreating host. It was a land truly inhospitable and dreary beyond description. Exhaustion overcame thousands of troopers, who dropped by the wayside and beneath the snows gave their bodies to enrich the Russian ground. The retreat became a rout and all would have been lost had it not been for the almost superhuman efforts of the valiant rear-guard under Marshal Ney. As it was, a mere remnant of the _Grande Armée_ certainly fewer than 50,000 men–recrossed the Niemen on 13 December, and, in pitiable plight, half-starved and with torn uniforms, took refuge in Germany. Fully half a million lives had been sacrificed upon the fields of Russia to the ambition of one man. Yet in the face of these distressing facts, this one man had the unblushing effrontery and overweening egotism to announce to the afflicted French people that “the emperor has never been in better health!”
[Sidenote: Final Coalition against Napoleon]
For a moment the Tsar Alexander hesitated. Russia at least was freed from the Napoleonic peril. To make peace in this hour of triumph might be of great advantage to his country and would involve no further risks on his part. But his own dreamy longing to pose as the chief figure on the European stage, the deliverer of oppressed nationalities, coupled with the insistent promptings of Baron vom Stein, who was always at his elbow, eventually decided him to complete the overthrow of his rival. Late in December he signed a convention with the Prussian commander, General Yorck, whereby the Prussian army was to cooperate with the Russian, British, and Swedish forces, and, in return, Prussia was to be restored to the position it had enjoyed prior to Jena. On 13 January, 1813, Alexander at the head of the Russian troops crossed the Niemen and proclaimed the liberty of the European peoples. King Frederick William III, amidst the enthusiastic rejoicing of his people, soon confirmed the convention of his general, and in March declared war against Napoleon. The War of Liberation had commenced.
[Sidenote: The War of Liberation]
The events of the year 1813 were as glorious in the history of Germany as they were disastrous for the fortunes of Napoleon. Prussia led in the movement to free all the German-speaking people from French domination. From Prussia the national enthusiasm spread to the other states. Mecklenburg, which had been the last addition to the Confederation of the Rhine, was the first to secede from it. All northern and central Germany was speedily in popular revolt, and the Prussian army, swelled by many patriotic enlistments, marched southward into Saxony. Austria, divided between fear of Napoleon and jealousy of the growing power of Russia, mobilized her army and waited for events to shape her conduct. In these trying circumstances Napoleon acted with his accustomed promptness and vigor. Since his arrival in France late in 1812, he had been frantically engaged in recruiting a new army, which, with the wreck of the _Grande Armée_ and the assistance that was still forthcoming from Naples and southern Germany, now numbered 200,000 men, and with which he was ready to take the offensive in Saxony. On 2 May, 1813, he fell on the allied Russians and Prussians at Lützen and defeated them, but was unable to follow up his advantage for want of cavalry. On 20-21 May, he gained another fruitless victory at Bautzen. It became increasingly obvious that he was being outnumbered and outmaneuvered.
[Sidenote: The Coalition Joined by Austria]
At this point an armistice was arranged through the friendly mediation of Austria. The government of that country proposed a general European peace on the basis of the reconstruction of Prussia, the re-partition of the grand-duchy of Warsaw by Russia, Prussia, and Austria, the re- cession of the Illyrian provinces to Austria, the dissolution of the Confederation of the Rhine, and the freedom of the German ports of Hamburg and Lübeck. But it was a decisive victory, not peace, that Napoleon most wanted, and the only reason which had induced him to accept the armistice was to gain time in order that reënforcements from Italy and France might arrive. The delay, however, was fatal to the French emperor, for his reënforcements were greatly outnumbered by the patriots who were continually flocking to the standards of the allies, and by 12 August, 1813, when a state of war was resumed, Austria, whose peace proposals had been rudely rejected, had formally joined the coalition against him.
[Sidenote: Leipzig, the “Battle of the Nations,” October 1813]
Napoleon was now at Dresden in supreme command of armies aggregating about 400,000 men, opposed by 250,000 Austrians in Bohemia under Schwarzenberg; 100,000 Prussians and Russians in Silesia under Blücher; 100,000 Swedes, Prussians, and Russians near Berlin under the Crown Prince Bernadotte of Sweden; and at least 300,000 reserves. At Dresden, in August, he won his last great victory, against the Austrian army of General Schwarzenberg. As his marshals suffered repeated reverses, he was unable to follow up his own successes and found himself gradually hemmed in by the allies, until at Leipzig he turned at bay. There, on 16-19 October, was fought the great three-day “Battle of the Nations.” Against the 300,000 troops of the allies, Napoleon could use only 170,000, and of these the Saxon contingent deserted in the heat of the fray. It was by military prowess that the French Empire had been reared; its doom was sealed by the battle of Leipzig. Napoleon sacrificed on that field another 40,000 lives, besides 30,000 prisoners and a large quantity of artillery and supplies. A fortnight later, with the remnant of his army, he recrossed the Rhine. Germany was freed.
[Sidenote: Collapse of Napoleon’s Power outside of France]
The “Battle of the Nations” following within a year the disasters of the retreat from Moscow, marked the collapse of Napoleon’s power outside of France. His empire and vassal states tumbled like a house of cards. The Confederation of the Rhine dissolved, and its princes hastened, with a single exception, to throw in their lot with the victorious allies. King Jerome Bonaparte was chased out of Westphalia. Holland was liberated, and William of Orange returned to his country as king. Denmark submitted and by the treaty of Kiel (January, 1814) engaged to cede Norway to Sweden in return for a monetary payment and Swedish Pomerania. Austria readily recovered the Tyrol and the Illyrian provinces and occupied Venetia and Switzerland. Even Joachim Murat deserted his brother-in-law, and, in order to retain Naples, came to terms with Austria. Only Polish Warsaw and the king of Saxony remained loyal to the Napoleonic alliance: the territories of both were in full possession of the allies.
[Sidenote: The Campaign of 1814 in France]
With the remnant of his defeated army and what young boys and old men he was able to recruit, Napoleon needlessly prolonged the struggle on French soil. At the close of 1813 Austria prevailed upon her more or less willing allies to offer him wonderfully favorable terms: France might retain her “natural boundaries”–the Rhine, the Alps, and the Pyrenees; and Napoleon might continue to rule over a region which would have gladdened the heart of a Richelieu or of a Louis XIV. But it was still victory and not peace upon which the supreme egotist had bet his mind. He still dreamed of overwhelming Prussia and Russia.
Early in 1814 three large foreign armies, totaling 400,000 men, and accompanied by the emperors of Russia and Austria and the king of Prussia, invaded northern France and converged on Paris. Blücher with his German troops was advancing up the Moselle to Nancy; Schwarzenberg with the Austrians crossed the Rhine to the south at Basel and Neu Breisach; Bernadotte in the Netherlands was welding Swedes, Dutch, and Prussians into a northern army. Meanwhile, the great defeat which Wellington with his allied army of British, Spaniards, and Portuguese, had inflicted upon the French at Vittoria (21 June, 1813) had for the last time driven King Joseph from Madrid and in effect cleared the whole Iberian peninsula of Napoleon’s soldiers. The British general had then gradually fought his way through the Pyrenees so that in the spring of 1814 a fourth victorious allied army in the neighborhood of Toulouse threatened Napoleon from the south. An Austrian army, which was then operating in Venetia and Lombardy, menaced France from yet a fifth direction.
Against such overwhelming odds, Napoleon displayed throughout the desperate months of February and March, 1814, the same remarkable genius, the same indomitable will, as had characterized his earliest campaigns. If anything, his resourcefulness and his rapidity of attack were even greater. Inflicting a setback on one invader, he would turn quickly and dash against a second. Such apprehension did his tiger-like assaults excite among his opponents that as late as February he might have retained the French frontiers of 1792 if he had chosen to make peace. He would play the game to the bitter end. On 1 March, the four Great Powers–Great Britain, Russia, Austria, and Prussia–concluded the treaty of Chaumont, definitely cementing their alliance for a period of twenty years and mutually agreeing not to make terms without each other’s consent nor to desist from war until their arch-enemy had been overthrown: each contracting party undertook to furnish 150,000 men, and Great Britain further promised a subsidy of five million pounds. The fate of Napoleon was at last settled.
[Sidenote: Surrender of Paris and Abdication of Napoleon]
To describe in any detail the brilliant campaign of 1814 lies outside our province. Suffice it to state that, after the most stubborn fighting, resistance was broken. Paris surrendered to the allies on 31 March, and thirteen days later Napoleon signed with the allied sovereigns the personal treaty of Fontainebleau, by which he abdicated his throne and renounced all rights to France for himself and his family, and, in return, was guaranteed full sovereignty of the island of Elba and an annual pension of two million francs for himself; the Italian duchy of Parma was conferred upon the Empress Maria Louisa, and pensions of two and a half million francs were promised for members of his family. Another seven days and Napoleon bade his Old Guard an affecting farewell and departed for Elba. In his diminutive island empire, hard by the shore of Tuscany and within sight of his native Corsica, Napoleon Bonaparte lived ten months, introducing such vigor into the administration as the island had never experienced and all the while pondering many things.
[Sidenote: Restoration of the Bourbons in France] [Sidenote: Compromise with the Revolutionary Ideas]
Meanwhile, in France order was emerging from chaos. In 1793 European sovereigns had banded together to invade France, to restore the divine- right monarchy of the Bourbons and the traditional rights of the privileged classes, and to stamp out the embryonic principles of liberty, equality, and fraternity. The most noteworthy significance of the Era of Napoleon was the simple fact that now in 1814 the monarchs of Europe, at last in possession of France, had no serious thought of restoring social or political conditions just as they had been prior to the Revolution. Their major quarrel was not with principles but with a man. The Tsar Alexander, to whom more than to any other one person, was due the triumph of the allies, was a benevolent prince, well-versed in the revolutionary philosophy, considerate of popular wishes, and anxious to promote a lasting peace. Talleyrand, the man of the hour among Frenchmen, who himself had played no mean rôle throughout the Revolution and under Napoleon, combined with a desire to preserve the frontiers of his country a firm conviction that the bulk of his countrymen would not revert to absolute monarchy. Between Talleyrand and Alexander it was arranged, with the approval of the Great Powers, that in the name of “legitimacy” the Bourbons should be restored to the throne of France, but with the understanding that they should fully recognize and confirm the chief social and political reforms of the Revolution. It was likewise arranged by the treaty of Paris (30 May, 1814), also in the name of “legitimacy,” that France should regain the limits of 1792, should recover practically all the colonies which Great Britain had seized during the course of the Napoleonic wars, [Footnote: Great Britain kept Tobago and St. Lucia in the West Indies, and Mauritius (Île de France) on the route to India.] and should pay no indemnity. “Legitimacy” was a brilliant discovery of Talleyrand: it justified the preservation of France in the face of crushing defeat, and, if it restored the Bourbons, it did so as limited, not as absolute, monarchs.
[Sidenote: Louis XVIII]
Louis XVI’s “legitimate” heir was his brother, the count of Provence, a cynical, prosaic, and very stout old gentleman who had been quietly residing in an English country-house, and who now made a solemn, if somewhat unimpressive, state entry into Paris. The new king kept what forms of the old régime he could: he assumed the title of Louis XVIII, “king of France by the grace of God”; he reckoned his reign from the death of the dauphin (“Louis XVII”) in the year 1795; he replaced the revolutionary tricolor by the white and lilies of his family; out of the fullness of his divinely bestowed royal authority he granted a charter to the French people. But Louis XVIII was neither so foolish nor so principled as to insist upon the substance of Bourbon autocracy: the very Constitutional Charter, which he so graciously promulgated, confirmed the Revolutionary liberties of the individual and established a fairly liberal form of government for France. It was obvious that the gouty old man had no desire to risk his head or to embark again upon his travels.
[Sidenote: Monarchical Restorations Elsewhere in Europe]
The same month that witnessed the unbecoming straddle of this French Bourbon between revolution and reaction, beheld the restoration of another Bourbon in the person of Ferdinand VII to the throne of Spain, and the return of Pope Pius VII, amid the enthusiastic shouts of the Romans, to the ancient see upon the Tiber. About the same time Piedmont and Savoy were restored to Victor Emmanuel I, king of Sardinia. Europe was rapidly assuming a more normal appearance. To settle the outstanding territorial questions which the overthrow of Napoleon had raised, a great congress of rulers and diplomats met at Vienna in the autumn of 1814.
[Sidenote: Napoleon at Elba, 1814-1815]
Within a few months the unusual calm was rudely broken by the sudden reappearance of Napoleon Bonaparte himself upon the European stage. It was hardly to be expected that he for whom the whole Continent had been too small would be contented in tiny Elba. He nursed grievances, too. He could get no payment of the revenue secured him by the treaty of Fontainebleau; his letters to his wife and little son were intercepted and unanswered; he was treated as an outcast. He became aware of a situation both in France and at Vienna highly favorable to his own ambition. As he foresaw, the shrinkage of the great empire into the realm of old France filled many patriotic Frenchmen with disgust, a feeling fed every day by stories of the presumption of returning émigrés and of the tactless way in which the Bourbon princes treated veterans of the _Grande Armée_. Napoleon in time felt certain that he could count once more upon the loyalty of the French nation. That he would not be obliged to encounter again the combined forces of the European Powers he inferred from his knowledge of the ever-recurring jealousies among them and from the fact that even then Russia and Prussia on one side were quarreling with Austria and Great Britain on the other over the fate of Saxony and Poland. If some fighting were necessary, the return of French prisoners from Russia, Germany, Great Britain, and Spain would supply him with an army far larger than that with which he had fought the brilliant campaign of 1814.
[Sidenote: The Episode of Napoleon’s Return to France: “The Hundred Days,” March-June, 1815]
On 26 February, 1815, Napoleon slipped away from Elba with some twelve hundred men, and, managing to elude the British guardships, disembarked at Cannes on 1 March and advanced northward. Troops sent out to arrest the arch-rebel were no proof against the familiar uniform and cocked hat: they threw their own hats in the air amid ringing shouts of _vive l’empereur_. Everywhere the adventurer received a hearty welcome, which attested at once the unpopularity of the Bourbons and the singular attractiveness of his own personality. The French people, being but human, put imagination in the place of reason. Without firing a shot in his defense, Napoleon’s bodyguard swelled until it became an army. Marshal Ney, the “bravest of the brave,” who had taken the oath of allegiance to the Bourbons and had promised Louis XVIII that he would bring Napoleon to Paris in an iron cage, deserted to him with 6000 men, and on 20 March the emperor jauntily entered the capital. Louis XVIII himself, who had assured his parliament that he would die in defense of his throne, was already in precipitate flight toward the Belgian frontier.
[Sidenote: Napoleon and France]
Napoleon clinched his hold upon the French people by means of an astute manifesto which he promptly published. “He had come,” he declared, “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 reëstablish 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. … He renounced war and conquest … he would govern henceforth as a constitutional sovereign and seek to bequeath a constitutional crown to his son.”
[Sidenote: Napoleon and Europe]
The emperor was as wrong in his judgment of what Europe would do as he was right concerning the attitude of France. The statesmen who had been haggling about treaty stipulations at Vienna speedily forgot all their differences in the face of common danger. The four Great Powers solemnly renewed their treaty of alliance, and with alacrity and unanimity all joined in signing a declaration. “In violating the convention which established him in the island of Elba, Bonaparte has destroyed the only legal title to his existence. By reappearing in France with projects of disorder and destruction, he has cut himself off from the protection of the law, and has shown in the face of all the world that there can be neither peace nor truce with him. Accordingly the Powers declare that Napoleon Bonaparte is excluded from civil and social relations, and as an enemy and disturber of the tranquillity of the world he has incurred public vengeance….”
In order to give force to their threats, the allies rushed troops toward France. Wellington assembled an army of more than 100,000 British, Dutch, and Germans, and planned to coöperate with 120,000 Prussians under Blücher near Brussels. The Austrian army under Schwarzenberg neared the Rhine. Russia and Germany were alive with marching columns. To oppose these forces Napoleon raised an army of 200,000 men, and on 12 June, 1815, quitted Paris for the Belgian frontier. His plan was to separate his opponents and to overcome them singly: it would be a repetition of the campaign of 1814, though on a larger scale.
[Sidenote: Waterloo]
How Napoleon passed the border and forced the outposts of the enemy back to Waterloo; how there, on 18 June, he fought the final great battle of his remarkable career; how his troops were mowed down by the fearful fire of his adversaries and how even his famous Old Guard rallied gloriously but ineffectually to their last charge; how the defeat administered by Wellington was turned at the close of the day into a mad rout through the arrival of Blücher’s forces: all these matters are commonplaces in the most elementary histories of military science. It has long been customary to cite the battle of Waterloo as one of the world’s decisive battles. In a sense this is just, but it should be borne in mind that, in view of the firm united determination of all Europe, there was no ultimate chance for Napoleon. If he had defeated Wellington, he would still have had to deal with Blücher. If he should then defeat the Prussians, he would have to turn suddenly against Schwarzenberg and the Austrians. By that time Wellington would have been sufficiently reënforced to resume the offensive, and the war would have gone on inevitably to but a single grim conclusion. The allies could put almost limitless numbers in the field; Napoleon was at the end of his resources. For the conservation of human life, it was fortunate that Napoleon was overwhelmed at Waterloo and that the first battle of the campaign of 1815 was also its last. Waterloo added military prestige to the naval preëminence which Great Britain already enjoyed, and finally established the reputation of Wellington as the greatest general of his age next only to Napoleon himself. It is small wonder that the English have magnified and glorified Waterloo. [Footnote: An interesting side issue of the Waterloo campaign was the fate of Joachim Murat. The wily king of Naples, distrustful of the allies’ guarantees, threw in his lot with his brother-in-law. His forces were speedily put to rout by the Austrians and he himself fled to France and later to Corsica, and was ultimately captured and shot. His action enabled still another Bourbon, the despicable Ferdinand I, to recover his throne.]
[Sidenote: Final Overthrow of Napoleon ]
On 21 June, Napoleon arrived in Paris, defeated and dejected. That very day the parliament, on the motion of Lafayette, declared itself in permanent session and took over all functions of government. The following day Napoleon abdicated the second time in favor of his son, and the provisional government of France, under the skillful trimming of the clever Fouché, reopened negotiations with the Bourbons. On 7 July the allies reoccupied Paris, bringing the flustered old Louis XVIII “in their baggage-train.” The Bourbons, thus unheroically restored, were destined for fifteen years to maintain in peace their compromise between revolution and reaction.
[Sidenote: Napoleon at St. Helena 1815-1821 ]
On 15 July, the day following the anniversary of the fall of the Bastille, Napoleon, who had gone to Rochefort on the French coast, with some vague idea of taking refuge in America, delivered himself over to the commander of a British warship which was lying in the harbor. For us who live a century after the stirring events whose narrative has filled this chapter, it is easy to perceive that the British government might safely have extended hospitality to their famous captive and might have granted him an asylum in England. He was finally discredited in the eyes not only of the European despots but also of the vast majority of the French people; no matter how much he might burn with the flame of his old ambition, he could never again be in a position to endanger the safety or prosperity of the United Kingdom. But in 1815 Englishmen felt differently, and naturally so. To them Napoleon had been for years a more troublesome and dangerous enemy than a Philip II or a Louis XIV. By them he was deemed the unregenerate child of darkness and of the evil spirit. And “General Bonaparte,” as the British authorities persisted in calling him, was not suffered to touch foot upon the sacred soil of England, but was dispatched on another British warship to the rocky island of St. Helena in the south Atlantic.
On St. Helena Napoleon lived five and a half years. He was allowed considerable freedom of movement and the society of a group of close personal friends. He spent his time in walking on the lonely island or in quarreling with his suspicious strait-laced English jailer, Sir Hudson Lowe, or in writing treatises on history and war and dictating memoirs to his companions. These memoirs, which were subsequently published by the Marquis de Las Cases, were subtly compounded of truth and falsehood. They represented Napoleon Bonaparte in the light of a true son and heir of the Revolution, who had been raised by the will of the French people to great power in order that he might consolidate the glorious achievements of liberty, equality, and fraternity. According to the emperor himself, he had always been the friend of peace and of oppressed nationalities, the author of blessings which had flowed uninterruptedly upon his people until he had been thwarted by the machinations of the British and the sheer brute force of the European despots. Napoleon shrewdly foresaw the increase of popular discontent with the repressive measures which the reactionary sovereigns and statesmen of Europe were bound to inaugurate, and in the resulting upheaval he thought he could see an opportunity for his beloved son to build anew an empire of the French. It could hardly have been blind chance that caused him to insert in his will the pious request that he “be buried on the banks of the Seine in the midst of the French people whom he so dearly loved.” On 5 May, 1821, the greatest adventurer of modern times died on the island of St. Helena.
[Sidenote: The Napoleonic Legend]
Already the history of the emperor was becoming the Napoleonic Legend. The more his memory was revered as the noble martyr of St. Helena, the more truth withdrew into the background and fiction stepped into the limelight. His holocausts of human life were forgotten; only the glory, the unconquerable prowess of his arms, was remembered. French cottages were adorned with cheap likenesses of the little corporal’s features; quaint, endearing nicknames for their hero were on villagers’ lips; and around hearth and campfire were related apocryphal anecdotes of his exploits at Lodi, at Austerlitz, and at Wagram. From a selfish despot Napoleon was returning to his mightier, if humbler, position as a child of the people. Thus the last years at St. Helena were far from fruitless: they proved once more that the pen is mightier than the sword,–for one day, not by feats of arms, but by the power of the Napoleonic Legend, another Bonaparte was to be seated upon the throne of France.
SIGNIFICANCE OF THE ERA OF NAPOLEON
[Sidenote: A Continuation of the Revolutionary Era] [Sidenote: Liberty under Napoleon]
If we turn now from the story of Napoleon’s life to an attempt to appraise the significance of the whole era which fittingly bears his name, we are struck by its manifold achievements in politics and society, in commerce, and in war. In general it was a continuation of the French the Revolution. The principles of liberty, equality, and fraternity, which, from 1789 to 1799, had been laid down as the foundation exclusively of French political and social institutions, became, from 1799 to 1815, the building-blocks for all European nations. The least understood and used was undoubtedly liberty. To be sure, both the Consulate and the empire were concrete and substantial examples of the replacement of the old theory of divine-right monarchy by the new idea of popular sovereignty, of governments resting, in last analysis, upon the consent of the governed. But Napoleon did hardly more to vitalize individual liberties than did the benevolent despots of the eighteenth century, or those of his own day. To secure the interested support of the bourgeoisie and the peasantry, the sacred right of private property was eloquently reaffirmed, and, as a trusty weapon against possible clerical pretensions, the noble rights of liberty of conscience and liberty of worship were grandiloquently preached; but the less serviceable liberties of speech and of publication were confined within the narrowest limits of military and imperial toleration.
[Sidenote: “Equality” under Napoleon]
With equality it was quite different. In all the lands annexed to France or included within the radius of Napoleon’s direct influence, the forms and rights of feudalism and serfdom were abolished, and the social equalities embodied _Code Napoléon_ were guaranteed. Throughout southern Germany, the Netherlands, the Iberian peninsula, and a great part of Italy, as well as in France, the social aspects of the old régime underwent a thorough transformation; interior customs lines, private roadways, toll-bridges, and internal trade restrictions were swept away; in the place of large landed estates, with their old- time noble owners and their wretched peasants attached to the soil and suffering from burdensome tithes and dues and personal services, appeared a numerous class of peasant proprietors, owning and tilling their own fields, free to buy, sell, or exchange them, or to move away to the growing towns. Outside of Napoleon’s direct influence, the land reforms of Baron vom Stein in Prussia reflected the same spirit of the age. These social gains in the direction of equality were, in fact, the most permanent achievements of the Napoleonic Era: in spite of later reaction, it was beyond the reach of possibility to restore the inequalities of the outworn feudal system.
[Sidenote: “Fraternity” under Napoleon] [Sidenote: The Emphasis on Nationalism]
Fraternity, or national patriotism, received a marked impetus during the era. Communicated from France by the ardor of the revolutionary and Napoleonic soldiers, it evoked ready response not only in Poland, Holland, Portugal, Spain, England, and Russia, in which countries it was already existent, but also in the Germanies and in the Italian states, where centuries of petty strife and jealousy seemed to have blotted it out forever. The significance of the Napoleonic period in the history of Germany is incalculable. The diminution of the number of states, the abolition of the effete Holy Roman Empire, the regeneration of Prussia, the War of Liberation, the Battle of the Nations, the consciousness of common interests, and the wave of patriotism which swept over the whole German folk, presaged before the lapse of many decades the political unification of the Germanies and the erection of a powerful national state. Nor were the Italians devoid of a similar national feeling. The fame of Napoleon, a man of Italian blood, the temporary establishment of a “kingdom of Italy,” the title of “king of Rome” conferred upon the infant heir to Napoleon’s fortunes, the social reforms and the patriotic awakening throughout the peninsula,–all betokened a national destiny for the whole Italian people.
[Sidenote: Minor Political Happenings]
In minor political ways the Napoleonic Era was not without significance. The Tsar was enabled finally to acquire Finland, Poland, and Turkish land as far as the River Pruth, Minor thus completing the work of Peter the Great and Catherine the Great, and rounding out the European frontier of Russia to its present extent. Sweden secured Norway and a new dynasty, which, descended from Marshal Bernadotte, the interesting son of an obscure French lawyer, has reigned ever since. In the case of Portugal, the flight of the royal family to Brazil in 1807 had the curious effect of causing them for several years to hold their court in their principal colony and to govern the mother-country through regents.
[Sidenote: Remarkable Significance of the Era to Great Britain] [Sidenote: Colonies]
[Sidenote: Commerce]
Beyond continental Europe the period was of utmost importance. The maritime and commercial supremacy of Great Britain, which had been seriously shaken by the War of American Independence, was regained in the course of the Revolutionary and Napoleonic wars. Of course the United States continued independent. But the great victories of Lord Nelson over the French fleets rendered Great Britain the true mistress of the seas; and she proceeded to utilize her naval superiority to appropriate what remaining French colonies most suited her purpose. In this way she possessed herself of Malta (1800), St. Lucia, Tobago (1803), and Mauritius (1810). Then, too, the dependence of Holland upon France, involuntary though it was most of the time, afforded her an opportunity to seize such valuable Dutch colonies as Ceylon (1795), Guiana (1803), and South Africa (1806). The sorry subservience of the Spanish Bourbons to Napoleon gave Great Britain a similar chance to prey upon Spanish commerce, to occupy some Spanish colonies, and to open others to her own trade: at this time the British took possession of Trinidad (1797) and Honduras (1798) and sent raiding expeditions against Buenos Aires and Montevideo (1806-1807). The subsequent Peninsular War, in which, as we have seen, the British coöperated with the Spaniards in maintaining the latter’s freedom against Napoleon, put an end to the hostile British incursions into the Spanish colonies, but it worked in another way to Great Britain’s advantage. The Spanish colonies–Mexico, Central America, and the greater part of South America–were thrown into grave administrative perplexities by the conflict of authority between the two Bourbon kings, Charles IV and Ferdinand VII, and between King Joseph Bonaparte and the revolutionary _juntas_; the colonists gradually got into the habit of managing their own affairs and of opening their ports to British trade; and the result was that by 1814, when Ferdinand was at length firmly established upon the Spanish throne, he was confronted by colonists, the greater number of whom had all along professed allegiance to him, but who now, accustomed to the advantages of free trade and practical independence, were resolved to maintain them. The disruption of the Spanish colonial empire was a direct outcome of Napoleon’s career, and next to the colonists themselves the British were the chief beneficiaries. In general, the new colonies which Great Britain acquired were intended either, as in the case of Malta, Mauritius, Ceylon, and South Africa, to strengthen her hold upon India, or, as in the case of the others, to develop her trade with Spanish America.
[Sidenote: Industry]
This naval predominance of Great Britain and the expansion of her commerce and colonial empire synchronized with the rapid development of the Industrial Revolution within England. It was the ceaseless operation of spinning frames and power looms, of blast furnaces and steam engines, in a country on which the French emperor’s army had never trod, that most truly worked the downfall of Napoleon.
[Illustration: THE BONAPARTE FAMILY]
ADDITIONAL READING
TEXTBOOK NARRATIVES. H. E. Bourne, _The Revolutionary Period in Europe, 1763-1815_ (1914), ch. xvii-xxvii; J. H. Robinson and C. A. Beard, _The Development of Modern Europe_, Vol. I (1907), ch. xiv, xv; H. M. Stephens, _Revolutionary Europe, 1789-1815_ (1893), ch. vii-xi; J. H. Rose, _Revolutionary and Napoleonic Era, 1789-1815_ (1895), ch. vii-xi; J. A. R. Marriott, _The Remaking of Modern Europe, 1789-1878_ (1910), ch. vii-xi; H. T. Dyer, _A History of Modern Europe from the Fall of Constantinople_, 3d ed. rev. by Arthur Hassall (1901), ch. lxi-lxvii; C. A. Fyffe, _A History of Modern Europe, 1792-1878_ (1896), ch. v-xii.
STANDARD BIOGRAPHIES OF NAPOLEON. Two suggestive outlines, either one of which may serve as an admirable introduction to more careful study: Herbert Fisher, _Napoleon_ (1912), in the “Home University Library”; and R. M. Johnston, _Napoleon, a Short Biography_ (1910). August Fournier, _Napoleon I_, 3d rev. ed., 3 vols. (1914), perhaps the best biography, a German work, scholarly, well written, and impartial, trans. into English from the 2d German edition by A. E. Adams, 2 vols. (1912). J. H. Rose, _The Life of Napoleon I_, new ed., 2 vols. in i (1907), a highly prized work, mainly political, and thoroughly British in tone; and, by the same author, _The Personality of Napoleon_ (1912), a collection of interesting lectures. W. M. Sloane, _The Life of Napoleon Bonaparte_, rev. and enlarged ed., 4 vols. (1910), confined largely to the personal history of Napoleon, with special reference to his earlier years, based upon source-material, and profusely illustrated. J. C. Ropes, _The First Napoleon_ (1900), a military and political outline by an authority on several of the great campaigns of the emperor. Pierre Lanfrey, _The History of Napoleon the First_, Eng. trans., 2d ed., 4 vols. (1894), a severe arraignment of the character and policies of Napoleon by a celebrated French scholar, reaches only to the close of the year 1811. Adolphe Thiers, _Histoire du consulat et de l’empire_, 20 vols., highly laudatory of Napoleon, and should be read as an antidote to Lanfrey; the portion of the work down to 1807 has been translated into English by D. F. Campbell, 2 vols. in 1 (1845). H. A. Taine, _The Modern Regime_, Eng. trans. by John Durand, 2 vols. (1890-1894), a brilliant and fascinating analysis of Napoleon’s genius and a critical estimate of the importance of the institutions established by him. Frederic Masson, _Napoleon et sa famille_, 5th ed., 12 vols. (1897-1915), an encyclopedia of information concerning the emperor’s numerous relatives, and, by the same author, _Napoleon à Sainte-Hélène_ (1912). Three volumes of an elaborate history of Napoleon appeared in 1912-1914, the work of a well-known German specialist, F. M. Kircheisen, _Napoleon I: sein Leben und seine Zeit_. See also, on the early life of Bonaparte, Oscar Browning, _Napoleon: the First Phase, 1769-1793_ (1905); and, on his final years at St. Helena, Lord Rosebery, _Napoleon: the Last Phase_ (1900). An illuminating work is that of A. M. Broadley, _Napoleon in Caricature, 1795-1821_, with an introductory essay by J. H. Rose, 2 vols. (1911).
ILLUSTRATIVE SOURCE MATERIAL. In addition to the indispensable _Readings in Modern European History_ by J. H. Robinson and C. A. Beard (1909), the following selections from the masses of source material are especially serviceable: D. A. Bingham, _A Selection from the Letters and Despatches of the First Napoleon_, 3 vols. (1884); _Memoirs of the History of France during the Reign of Napoleon, dictated by him at St. Helena to the generals who shared his captivity_, Eng. trans., 2d ed., 4 vols. (1823-1824); the correspondence of Napoleon I, published in French under the auspices of Napoleon III, 32 vols. (1858-1870), and Napoleon’s military correspondence published under the auspices of the Ministry of War of the Third French Republic; _Narrative of Captain Coignet_, new French ed. (1909), Eng. trans. by Mrs. Carey, the story of the life of a soldier in the ranks. Of the abundant memoirs of the period, the best are those of Mme. de Rémusat, covering the years 1802- 1808, hostile but informing, Eng. trans. by Mrs. Cashel Hoey and John Lillie (1891); Fauvalet de Bourrienne, Eng. trans. by J. S. Memes, 3 vols. (1892); Antoine de Marbot, 3 vols.; C. F. de Méneval, covering the years 1802-1815, 3 vols. (1894); A. F. Miot de Melito, Eng. trans. (1881); L. P. de Ségur, 3 vols; and C. M. de Talleyrand-Périgord, Eng. trans., 5 vols. (1891-1892). For further bibliographical suggestions, see F. M. Kircheisen, _Bibliography of Napoleon_ (1902). An extended bibliography is in course of publication by an Italian scholar, Alberto Lumbroso, 5 parts to date (1894-1914).
THE ERA OF NAPOLEON. A very brief summary: Charles Seignobos, _History of Contemporary Civilization_, trans. by J. A. James (1909), pp. 150- 185. Standard general works: _Cambridge Modern History_, Vol. IX (1906); _Histoire générale_, Vol. IX; _History of All Nations_, Vol. XVI, _The French Revolution and the Rise of Napoleon_, ch. viii, ix, and Vol. XVII, _The Napoleonic Empire_, by Theodor Flathe; Wilhelm Oncken, _Das Zeitalter der Revolution, des Kaiserreiches, und der Befreiungskriege_, 2 vols. (1884-1886); Émile Bourgeois, _Manuel historique de politique étrangère, 4th ed., Vol. II (1909), ch. viii- xviii. Standard works on special phases of the era: Armand Lefebvre, _Histoire des cabinets de l’Europe pendant le consulat et l’empire 1800-1815_, 2d ed., 5 vols. (1866-1869), an admirable diplomatic history; Albert Sorel, L’Europe et la révolution française, 8 vols. (1885-1904), a standard authoritative work, of which Vols. VI-VIII treat of the communication of revolutionary ideas to Europe during the Era of Napoleon; L. de Lanzac de Laborie, _Paris sous Napoléon_, 8 vols. (1905-1913), invaluable for a detailed study of French life under Napoleon; Émile Levasseur, _Histoire des classes ouvrières et de l’industrie en France de 1789 à 1870_, Vol. I (1903), Livre II, _Le consulat et l’empire_, for social history; Jean Jaurès, _Histoire socialiste, 1789-1900_, Vol. VI, by Paul Brousse and Henri Turot, _Le consulat et l’empire, 1799-1815_ (1905), likewise for social history; J. 0. B. de Cléron d’Haussonville, _L’eglise romaine et le premier empire, 1800-1814_, 5 vols. (1868-1869), for ecclesiastical affairs; Alphonse Aulard, _Napoléon I-er et la monopole universitaire_ (1911), for educational matters; Henri Welschinger, _La censure sous le premier empire_ (1882), for restrictions on personal liberty in France: and for French plots and attempts against Napoleon, the works of Ernest Daudet, particularly _La police et les chouans sous le consulat et l’empire, 1800-1815_ (1895), _Histoire de l’émigration_, 3 vols. (1886-1890), and _L’exil et la mort du Général Moreau_ (1909); and Sir John Hall, _General Pichegru’s Treason_ (1916). MILITARY CAMPAIGNS OF NAPOLEON. T. A. Dodge, _Napoleon: a History of the Art of War_, 4 vols. (1904- 1907), the work of an American army officer, not always accurate, but the best general account in English; A. T. Mahan, _The Influence of Sea Power upon the French Revolution and Empire, 1793-1812_, 10th ed., 2 vols. (1898), a justly famous book, especially valuable for the Continental System. Special campaigns: Albert Vandal, _Napoléon et Alexander Ier_, 3d ed., 3 vols. (1893-1896); R. G. Burton, _Napoléon’s Campaigns in Italy, 1796-1797 and 1800_ (1912), and, by the same author, _From Boulogne to Austerlitz: Napoleon’s Campaign of 1805_ (1912); the works of F. L. Petre, particularly _Napoleon’s Conquest of Prussia, 1806_ (1907), _Napoleon’s Campaign in Poland, 1806-1807_ (1906), _Napoleon and the Archduke Charles_ (1908), _Napoleon’s Last Campaign in Germany, 1813_ (1912), _Napoleon at Bay_ (1914); Henry Houssaye, _Jéna et la campagne de 1806_, with introduction by Louis Madelin (1912); Édouard Driault, _Austerlitz: la fin du Saint-Empire, 1804-1808_ (1912); Charles Oman, _History of the Peninsular War_, a monumental work extending to the year 1812, 5 vols. (1902-1914), and, by the same author, _Wellington’s Army, 1809-1814_ (1912); Hermann Baumgarten, _Geschichte Spaniens vom Ausbruch der französischen Revolution bis auf unsere Tage_, Vol. I (1865), a scholarly German treatment of the Peninsular campaign; R. G. Burton, _Napoleon’s Invasion of Russia_ (1914); F. W. O. Maycock, _The Invasion of France, 1814_ (1915); Oscar Browning, _The Fall of Napoleon_ (1907), useful for the years 1813-1815; E. F. Henderson, _Blucher and the Uprising of Prussia against Napoleon, 1806-1815_ (1911), in the “Heroes of the Nations” Series; D. P. Barton, _Bernadotte: the First Phase, 1763-1799_ (1914); A. F. Becke, _Napoleon and Waterloo_, 2 vols. (1914); J. C. Ropes, _The Campaign of Waterloo_, 2d ed. (1893).
THE GERMANIES IN THE ERA OF NAPOLEON. Brief accounts: G. M. Priest, _Germany since 1740_ (1915), ch. iv-vii; Ferdinand Schevill, _The Making of Modern Germany_ (1916), ch. iii; E. F. Henderson, _A Short History of Germany_, Vol. II (1902), ch. vi, vii, and, by the same author, the book on Blücher listed in the preceding paragraph; C. T. Atkinson, _A History of Germany, 1715-1815_ (1908), almost exclusively a military history; H. A. L. Fisher, _Studies in Napoleonic Statesmanship: Germany_ (1903), instructive and stimulating. The best and most thorough work in English is J. R. Seeley, _Life and Times of Stein, or Germany and Prussia in the Napoleonic Age_, 2 vols. (1879). Standard German works, all highly patriotic in tone: Ludwig Häusser, _Deutsche Geschichte vom Tode Friedrichs des Grossen bis zur Gründung des deutschen Bundes_, 4th ed., 4 vols. (1869); K. T. von Heigel, _Deutsche Geschichte vom Tode Friedrichs des Grossen bis zur Auflösung des alten Reiches_, 2 vols. (1899-1911); Hans von Zwiedineck- Südenhorst, _Deutsche Geschichte von der Auflösung des alten bis zur Errichtung des neuen Kaiserreiches_, _1806-1871_, 3 vols. (1897-1905), of which Vol. I deals with the years 1806-1815; Heinrich von Treitschke, _Deutsche Geschichte im neunzehnten Jahrhundert_, 5 vols. (1890-1896), of which Vol. I, in Eng. trans. (1915), covers the period down to 1814; Heinrich Ulmann, _Geschichte der Befreiungskriege, 1813 und 1814_, 2 vols. (1914-1915), not so much military as political and diplomatic; Hans Delbrück, _Das Leben des Feldmarschalls Grafen Neidhardt von Gneisenau_, 3d rev. ed. (1913). A reliable French view is that of Ernest Denis, _L’Allemagne, 1789-1810_ (1896).
GREAT BRITAIN IN THE ERA OF NAPOLEON. Sir Herbert Maxwell, _A Century of Empire_, Vol. I, _1801-1832_ (1909), political and conservative; G. C. Broderick and J. K. Fotheringham, _Political History of England, 1801-1837_ (1906), accurate but dry, containing valuable bibliographies; J. H. Rose, _William Pitt and the Great War_ (1911), a notable contribution, and, by the same author, though not so excellent, _Pitt and Napoleon: Essays and Letters_ (1912); W. C. Russell, Horatio Nelson (1890), a convenient little biography in the “Heroes of the Nations” Series; A. T. Mahan, _The Life of Nelson, the Embodiment of the Sea Power of Great Britain_, 2 vols. (1897), a standard work; J. S. Corbett, _Campaign of Trafalgar_ (1913), with reference to Pitt more than to Nelson; A. T. Mahan, _Sea Power in its Relation to the War of 1812_, 2 vols. (1905); J. W. Fortescue, _History of the British Army_, Vols. IV-VII (1906-1912), a monumental work on the British military campaigns from 1793 to 1810; Sir W. L. Clowes (editor), _The Royal Navy: a History_, Vol. IV (1899), ch. xxxiv-xxxvii, for the years 1792- 1802, and Vol. V (1900), for 1803-1815; J. W. Fortescue, _British Statesmen of the Great War, 1793-1814_ (1911), derogatory of Pitt and marked by zealous prejudice in favor of other Tory statesmen, especially Castlereagh and Liverpool; Sir Herbert Maxwell, _The Life of Wellington_, 2 vols. (1899); W. O’C. Morris, _Wellington, Soldier and Statesman_ (1904), in “Heroes of the Nations” Series; F. J. MacCunnan, _The Contemporary English View of Napoleon_ (1914), an interesting compilation.