itself to neutrality, other acts of the Convention were certainly infringements of the rights of allies of England. A series of European treaties, oppressive according to our own ideas, but in keeping with the ideas of that age, prohibited the navigation of the River Schelde, on which Antwerp is situated, in order that the commerce of the North Sea might flow exclusively into Dutch ports. On the conquest of Belgium the French Government gave orders to Dumouriez to send a flotilla down the river, and to declare Antwerp an open port in right of the law of nature, which treaties cannot abrogate. Whatever the folly of commercial restraints, the navigation of the Schelde was a question between the Antwerpers and the Dutch, and one in which France had no direct concern. The incident, though trivial, was viewed in England as one among many proofs of the intention of the French to interfere with the affairs of neighbouring States at their pleasure. In ordinary times it would not have been easy to excite much interest in England on behalf of a Dutch monopoly; but the feeling of this country towards the French Revolution had been converted into a passionate hatred by the massacres of September, and by the open alliance between the Convention and the Revolutionary societies in England itself. Pitt indeed, whom the Parisians imagined to be their most malignant enemy, laboured against the swelling national passion, and hoped against all hope for peace. Not only was Pitt guiltless of the desire to add this country to the enemies of France, but he earnestly desired to reconcile France with Austria, in order that the Western States, whose embroilment left Eastern Europe at the mercy of Catherine of Russia, might unite to save both Poland and Turkey from falling into the hands of a Power whose steady aggression threatened Europe more seriously than all the noisy and outspoken excitement of the French Convention. Pitt, moreover, viewed with deep disapproval the secret designs of Austria and Prussia. [24] If the French executive would have given any assurance that the Netherlands should not be annexed, or if the French ambassador, Chauvelin, who was connected with English plotters, had been superseded by a trustworthy negotiator, it is probable that peace might have been preserved. But when, on the execution of King Louis (Jan. 21, 1793), Chauvelin was expelled from England as a suspected alien, war became a question of days. [25]
[Holland and Mediterranean States enter the war.]
[War with England, Feb. 1st, 1793.]
Points of technical right figured in the complaints of both sides; but the real ground of war was perfectly understood. France considered itself entitled to advance the Revolution and the Rights of Man wherever its own arms or popular insurrection gave it the command. England denied the right of any Power to annul the political system of Europe at its pleasure. No more serious, no more sufficient, ground of war ever existed between two nations; yet the event proved that, with the highest justification for war, the highest wisdom would yet have chosen peace. England’s entry into the war converted it from an affair of two or three campaigns into a struggle of twenty years, resulting in more violent convulsions, more widespread misery, and more atrocious crimes, than in all probability would have resulted even from the temporary triumph of the revolutionary cause in 1793. But in both nations political passion welcomed impending calamity; and the declaration of war by the Convention on February 1st only anticipated the desire of the English people. Great Britain once committed to the struggle, Pitt spared neither money nor intimidation in his efforts to unite all Europe against France. Holland was included with England in the French declaration of war. The Mediterranean States felt that the navy of England was nearer to them than the armies of Austria and Prussia; and before the end of the summer of 1793, Spain, Portugal, Naples, Tuscany, and the Papal States had joined the Coalition.
[French wrongly think England inclined to revolution.]
The Jacobins of Paris had formed a wrong estimate of the political condition of England. At the outbreak of the war they believed that England itself was on the verge of revolution. They mistook the undoubted discontent of a portion of the middle and lower classes, which showed itself in the cry for parliamentary reform, for a general sentiment of hatred towards existing institutions, like that which in France had swept away the old order at a single blow. The Convention received the addresses of English Radical societies, and imagined that the abuses of the parliamentary system under George III. had alienated the whole nation. What they had found in Belgium and in Savoy–a people thankful to receive the Rights of Man from the soldiers of the Revolution–they expected to find among the dissenting congregations of London and the factory-hands of Sheffield. The singular attraction exercised by each class in England upon the one below it, as well as the indifference of the nation generally to all ideals, was little understood in France, although the Revolutions of the two countries bore this contrast on their face. A month after the fall of the Bastille, the whole system of class-privilege and monopoly had vanished from French law; fifteen years of the English Commonwealth had left the structure of English society what it had been at the beginning. But political observation vanished in the delirium of 1793; and the French only discovered, when it was too late, that in Great Britain the Revolution had fallen upon an enemy of unparalleled stubbornness and inexhaustible strength.
[The Whigs not democratic.]
[Political condition of England.]
In the first Assembly of the Revolution it was usual to speak of the English as free men whom the French ought to imitate; in the Convention it was usual to speak of them as slaves whom the French ought to deliver. The institutions of England bore in fact a very different aspect when compared with the absolute monarchy of the Bourbons and when compared with the democracy of 1793. Frenchmen who had lived under the government of a Court which made laws by edict and possessed the right to imprison by letters-patent looked with respect upon the Parliament of England, its trial by jury, and its freedom of the press. The men who had sent a king to prison and confiscated the estates of a great part of the aristocracy could only feel compassion for a land where three-fourths of the national representatives were nominees of the Crown or of wealthy peers. Nor, in spite of the personal sympathy of Fox with the French revolutionary movement, was there any real affinity between the English Whig party and that which now ruled in the Convention. The event which fixed the character of English liberty during the eighteenth century, the Revolution of 1688, had nothing democratic in its nature. That revolution was directed against a system of Roman Catholic despotism; it gave political power not to the mass of the nation, which had no desire and no capacity to exercise it, but to a group of noble families and their retainers, who, during the reigns of the first two Georges, added all the patronage and influence of the Crown to their social and constitutional weight in the country. The domestic history of England since the accession of George III. had turned chiefly upon the obstinate struggle of this monarch to deliver himself from all dependence upon party. The divisions of the Whigs, their jealousies, but, above all, their real alienation from the mass of the people whose rights they professed to defend, ultimately gave the King the victory, when, after twenty years of errors, be found in the younger Pitt a Minister capable of uniting the interests of the Crown with the ablest and most patriotic liberal statesmanship. Bribes, threats, and every species of base influence had been employed by King George to break up the great Coalition of 1783, which united all sections of the Whigs against him under the Ministry of Fox and North; but the real support of Pitt, whom the King placed in office with a minority in the House of Commons, was the temper of the nation itself, wearied with the exclusiveness, the corruption, and the party-spirit of the Whigs, and willing to believe that a popular Minister, even if he had entered upon power unconstitutionally, might do more for the country than the constitutional proprietors of the rotten boroughs.
[Pitt Minister, 1783.]
[Effect of French Revolution on English Parties.]
From 1783 down to the outbreak of the French Revolution, Pitt, as a Tory Minister confronted by a Whig Opposition, governed England on more liberal principles than any statesman who had held power during the eighteenth century. These years were the last of the party-system of England in its original form. The French Revolution made an end of that old distinction in which the Tory was known as the upholder of Crown-prerogative and the Whig as the supporter of a constitutional oligarchy of great families. It created that new political antagonism in which, whether under the names of Whig and Tory, or of Liberal and Conservative, two great parties have contended, one for a series of beneficial changes, the other for the preservation of the existing order. The convulsions of France and the dread of revolutionary agitation in England transformed both Pitt and the Whigs by whom he was opposed. Pitt sacrificed his schemes of peaceful progress to foreign war and domestic repression, and set his face against the reform of Parliament which he had once himself proposed. The Whigs broke up into two sections, led respectively by Burke and by Fox, the one denouncing the violence of the Revolution, and ultimately uniting itself with Pitt; the other friendly to the Revolution, in spite of its excesses, as the cause of civil and religious liberty, and identifying itself, under the healthy influence of parliamentary defeat and disappointment, with the defence of popular rights in England and the advocacy of enlightened reform.
[Burke’s “Reflections,” Oct. 1790.]
[Most of the Whigs support Pitt against France.]
The obliteration of the old dividing-line in English politics may be said to date from the day when the ancient friendship of Burke and Fox was bitterly severed by the former in the House of Commons (May 6, 1791). The charter of the modern Conservative party was that appeal to the nation which Burke had already published, in the autumn of 1790, under the title of “Reflections on the French Revolution.” In this survey of the political forces which he saw in action around him, the great Whig writer, who in past times had so passionately defended the liberties of America and the constitutional tradition of the English Parliament against the aggression of George III., attacked the Revolution as a system of violence and caprice more formidable to freedom than the tyranny of any Crown. He proved that the politicians and societies of England who had given it their sympathy had given their sympathy to measures and to theories opposed to every principle of 1688. Above all, he laid bare that agency of riot and destructiveness which, even within the first few months of the Revolution, filled him with presentiment of the calamities about to fall upon France. Burke’s treatise was no dispassionate inquiry into the condition of a neighbouring state: it was a denunciation of Jacobinism as fierce and as little qualified by political charity as were the maledictions of the Hebrew prophets upon their idolatrous neighbours; and it was intended, like these, to excite his own countrymen against innovations among themselves. It completely succeeded. It expressed, and it heightened, the alarm arising among the Liberal section of the propertied class, at first well inclined to the Revolution; and, although the Whigs of the House of Commons pronounced in favour of Fox upon his first rupture with Burke, the tide of public feeling, rising higher with every new outrage of the Revolution, soon invaded the legislature, and carried the bulk of the Whig party to the side of the Minister, leaving to Fox and his few faithful adherents the task of maintaining an unheeded protest against the blind passions of war, and the increasing rigour with which Pitt repressed every symptom of popular disaffection.
[The Gironde and the Mountain in the Convention.]
[The Gironde and the Commune of Paris.]
The character of violence which Burke traced and condemned in the earliest acts of the Revolution displayed itself in a much stronger light after the overthrow of the Monarchy by the insurrection of August 10th. That event was the work of men who commanded the Parisian democracy, not the work of orators and party-leaders in the Assembly. The Girondins had not hesitated to treat the victory as their own, by placing the great offices of State, with one exception, in the hands of their leaders; they instantly found that the real sovereignty lay elsewhere. The Council of the Commune, or Municipality, of Paris, whose members had seized their post at the moment of the insurrection, was the only administrative body that possessed the power to enforce its commands; in the Ministries of State one will alone made itself felt, that of Danton, whom the Girondins had unwillingly admitted to office along with themselves. The massacres of September threw into full light the powerlessness of the expiring Assembly. For five successive days it was unable to check the massacres; it was unable to bring to justice the men who had planned them, and who called upon the rest of France to follow their example. With the meeting of the Convention, however, the Girondins, who now regarded themselves as the legitimate government, and forgot that they owed office to an insurrection, expected to reduce the capital to submission. They commanded an overwhelming majority in the new chamber; they were supported by the middle class in all the great cities of France. The party of the Mountain embraced at first only the deputies of Paris, and a group of determined men who admitted no criticism on the measures which the democracy of Paris had thought necessary for the Revolution. In the Convention they were the assailed, not the assailants. Without waiting to secure themselves by an armed force, the orators of the Gironde attempted to crush both the Municipality and the deputies who ruled at the Clubs. They reproached the Municipality with the murders of September; they accused Robespierre of aiming at the Dictatorship. It was under the pressure of these attacks that the party of the Mountain gathered its strength within the Convention, and that the populace of Paris transferred to the Gironde the passionate hatred which it had hitherto borne to the King and the aristocracy. The gulf that lay between the people and those who had imagined themselves to be its leaders burst into view. The Girondins saw with dismay that the thousands of hungry workmen whose victory had placed them in power had fought for something more tangible than Republican phrases from Tacitus and Plutarch. On one side was a handful of orators and writers, steeped in the rhetoric and the commonplace of ancient Rome, and totally strange to the real duties of government; on the other side the populace of Paris, such as centuries of despotism, privilege, and priestcraft had made it: sanguinary, unjust, vindictive; convulsed since the outbreak of the Revolution with every passion that sways men in the mass; taught no conception of progress but the overthrow of authority, and acquainted with no title to power but that which was bestowed by itself. If the Girondins were to remain in power, they could do so only by drawing an army from the departments, or by identifying themselves with the multitude. They declined to take either course. Their audience was in the Assembly alone; their support in the distant provinces. Paris, daily more violent, listened to men of another stamp. The Municipality defied the Government; the Mountain answered the threats and invectives of the majority in the Assembly by displays of popular menace and tumult. In the eyes of the common people, who after so many changes of government found themselves more famished and more destitute than ever, the Gironde was now but the last of a succession of tyrannies; its statesmen but impostors who stood between the people and the enjoyment of their liberty.
Among the leaders of the Mountain, Danton aimed at the creation of a central Revolutionary Government, armed with absolute powers for the prosecution of the war; and he attacked the Girondins only when they themselves had rejected his support. Robespierre, himself the author of little beyond destruction, was the idol of those whom Rousseau’s writings had filled with the idea of a direct exercise of sovereignty by the people. It was in the trial of the King that the Gironde first confessed its submission to the democracy of Paris. The Girondins in their hearts desired to save the King; they voted for his death with the hope of maintaining their influence in Paris, and of clearing themselves from the charge of lukewarmness in the cause of the Revolution. But the sacrifice was as vain as it was dishonourable. The populace and the party of the Mountain took the act in its true character, as an acknowledgment of their own victory. A series of measures was brought forward providing for the poorer classes at the expense of the wealthy. The Gironde, now forced to become the defenders of property, encountered the fatal charge of deserting the cause of the people; and from this time nothing but successful foreign warfare could have saved their party from ruin.
[Defeat and treason of Dumouriez, March, 1793.]
Instead of success came inaction, disaster, and treason. The army of Flanders lay idle during January and February for want of provisions and materials of war; and no sooner had Dumouriez opened the campaign against Holland than he was recalled by intelligence that the Austrians had fallen upon his lieutenant, Miranda, at Maestricht, and driven the French army before them. Dumouriez returned, in order to fight a pitched battle before Brussels. He attacked the Austrians at Neerwinden (March 18), and suffered a repulse inconsiderable in itself, but sufficient to demoralise an army composed in great part of recruits and National Guards. [26] His defeat laid Flanders open to the Austrians; but Dumouriez intended that it should inflict upon the Republic a far heavier blow. Since the execution of the King, he had been at open enmity with the Jacobins. He now proposed to the Austrian commander to unite with him in an attack upon the Convention, and in re-establishing monarchy in France. The first pledge of Dumouriez’s treason was the surrender of three commissioners sent by the Convention to his camp; the second was to have been the surrender of the fortress of Condé. But Dumouriez had overrated his influence with the army. Plainer minds than his own knew how to deal with a general who intrigues with the foreigner. Dumouriez’s orders were disregarded; his movements watched; and he fled to the Austrian lines under the fire of his own soldiers. About thirty officers and eight hundred men passed with him to the enemy.
[Defeats on the North and East. Revolt of La Vendée, March, 1793.]
[The Commune crushes the Gironde, June 2.]
The defeat and treason of Dumouriez brought the army of Austria over the northern frontier. Almost at the same moment Custine was overpowered in the Palatinate; and the conquests of the previous autumn, with the exception of Mainz, were lost as rapidly as they had been won. Custine fell back upon the lines of Weissenburg, leaving the defence of Mainz to a garrison of 17,000 men, which, alone among the Republican armies, now maintained its reputation. In France itself civil war broke out. The peasants of La Vendée, a district destitute of large towns, and scarcely touched either by the evils which had produced the Revolution or by the hopes which animated the rest of France, had seen with anger the expulsion of the parish priests who refused to take the oath to the Constitution. A levy of 300,000 men, which was ordered by the Convention in February, 1793, threw into revolt the simple Vendeans, who cared for nothing outside their own parishes, and preferred to fight against their countrymen rather than to quit their homes. The priests and the Royalists fanned these village outbreaks into a religious war of the most serious character. Though poorly armed, and accustomed to return to their homes as soon as fighting was over, the Vendean peasantry proved themselves a formidable soldiery in the moment of attack, and cut to pieces the half-disciplined battalions which the Government sent against them. On the north, France was now assailed by the English as well as by the Austrians. The Allies laid siege to Condé and Valenciennes, and drove the French army back in disorder at Famars. Each defeat was a blow dealt to the Government of the Gironde at Paris. With foreign and civil war adding disaster to disaster, with the general to whom the Gironde had entrusted the defence of the Republic openly betraying it to its enemies, the fury of the capital was easily excited against the party charged with all the misfortunes of France. A threatening movement of the middle classes in resistance to a forced loan precipitated the struggle. The Girondins were accused of arresting the armies of the Republic in the midst of their conquests, of throwing the frontier open to the foreigner, and of kindling the civil war of La Vendée. On the 31st of May a raging mob invaded the Convention. Two days later the representatives of France were surrounded by the armed forces of the Commune; the twenty-four leading members of the Gironde were placed under arrest, and the victory of the Mountain was completed. [27]
[Civil War. The Committee of Public Safety.]
The situation of France, which was serious before, now became desperate; for the Girondins, escaping from their arrest, called the departments to arms against Paris. Normandy, Bordeaux, Marseilles, Lyons, rose in insurrection against the tyranny of the Mountain, and the Royalists of the south and west threw themselves into a civil war which they hoped to turn to their own advantage. But a form of government had now arisen in France well fitted to cope with extraordinary perils. It was a form of government in which there was little trace of the constitutional tendencies of 1789, one that had come into being as the stress of conflict threw into the background the earlier hopes and efforts of the Revolution. In the two earlier Assemblies it had been a fixed principle that the representatives of the people were to control the Government, but were not to assume executive powers themselves. After the overthrow of Monarchy on the 10th August, the Ministers, though still nominally possessed of powers distinct from the representative body, began to be checked by Committees of the Convention appointed for various branches of the public service; and in March, 1793, in order to meet the increasing difficulties of the war, a Committee of Public Safety was appointed, charged with the duty of exercising a general surveillance over the administration. In this Committee, however, as in all the others, the Gironde were in the majority; and the twenty-four members who composed it were too numerous a body to act with effect. The growing ascendancy of the Mountain produced that concentration of force which the times required. The Committee was reduced in April to nine members, and in this form it ultimately became the supreme central power. It was not until after the revolt of Lyons that the Committee, exchanging Danton’s influence for that of Robespierre, adopted the principle of Terror which has made the memory of their rule one of the most sinister in history. Their authority steadily increased. The members divided among themselves the great branches of government. One directed the army, another the navy, another foreign affairs; the signature of three members practically gave to any measure the force of law, for the Convention accepted and voted their reports as a matter of course.
[Commissioners of the Convention]
Whilst the Committee gave orders as the supreme executive, eighty of the most energetic of the Mountain spread themselves over France, in parties of two and three, with the title of Commissioners of the Convention, and with powers over-riding those of all the local authorities. They were originally appointed for the purpose of hastening on the levy ordered by the Convention in March, but their powers were gradually extended over the whole range of administration. Their will was absolute, their authority supreme. Where the councillors of the Departments or the municipal officers were good Jacobins, the Commissioners availed themselves of local machinery; where they suspected their principles, they sent them to the scaffold, and enforced their own orders by whatever means were readiest. They censured and dismissed the generals; one of them even directed the movements of a fleet at sea. What was lost by waste and confusion and by the interference of the Commissioners in military movements was more than counterbalanced by the vigour which they threw into all the preparations of war, and by the unity of purpose which, at the price of unsparing bloodshed, they communicated to every group where Frenchmen met together.
[Local revolutionary system of 1793]
But no individual energy could have sustained these dictatorships without the support of a popular organisation. All over France a system of revolutionary government sprang up, which superseded all existing institutions just as the authority of the Commissioners of the Convention superseded all existing local powers. The local revolutionary administration consisted of a Committee, a Club, and a Tribunal. [28] In each of 21,000 communes a committee of twelve was elected by the people, and entrusted by the Convention, as the Terror gained ground, with boundless powers of arrest and imprisonment. Popular excitement was sustained by clubs, where the peasants and labourers assembled at the close of their day’s work, and applauded the victories or denounced the enemies of the Revolution. A Tribunal with swift procedure and powers of life and death sat in each of the largest towns, and judged the prisoners who were sent to it by the committees of the neighbouring district. Such was the government of 1793–an executive of uncontrolled power drawn from the members of a single Assembly, and itself brought into immediate contact with the poorest of the people in their assemblies and clubs. The balance of interests which creates a constitutional system, the security of life, liberty, and property, which is the essence of every recognised social order, did not now exist in France. One public purpose, the defence of the Revolution, became the law before which all others lost their force. Treating all France like a town in a state of siege, the Government took upon itself the duty of providing support for the poorest classes by enactments controlling the sale and possession of the necessaries of life.
[Law of the Maximum]
The price of corn and other necessaries was fixed; and, when the traders and producers consequently ceased to bring their goods to market, the Commissioners of the Convention were empowered to make requisition of a certain quantity of corn for every acre of ground. Property was thus placed at the disposal of the men who already exercised absolute political power. “The state of France,” said Burke, “is perfectly simple. It consists of but two descriptions, the oppressors and the oppressed.” It is in vain that the attempt has been made to extenuate the atrocious and senseless cruelties of this time by extolling the great legislative projects of the Convention, or pleading the dire necessity of a land attacked on every side by the foreigner, and rent with civil war. The more that is known of the Reign of Terror, the more hateful, the meaner and more disgusting is the picture unveiled. France was saved not by the brutalities, but by the energy, of the faction that ruled it. It is scarcely too much to say that the cause of European progress would have been less injured by the military overthrow of the Republic, by the severance of the border provinces from France and the restoration of some shadow of the ancient _régime_, than by the traditions of horror which for the next fifty years were inseparably associated in men’s minds with the victory of the people over established power.
[French disasters, March-Sept., 1793.]
The Revolutionary organisation did not reach its full vigour till the autumn of 1793, when the prospects of France were at their worst. Custine, who was brought up from Alsace to take command of the Army of the North, found it so demoralised that he was unable to attempt the relief of the fortresses which were now besieged by the Allies. Condé surrendered to the Austrians on the 10th of July; Valenciennes capitulated to the Duke of York a fortnight later. In the east the fortune of war was no better. An attack made on the Prussian army besieging Mainz totally failed; and on the 23rd of July this great fortress, which had been besieged since the middle of April, passed back into the hands of the Germans. On every side the Republic seemed to be sinking before its enemies. Its frontier defences had fallen before the victorious Austrians and English; Brunswick was ready to advance upon Alsace from conquered Mainz; Lyons and Toulon were in revolt; La Vendée had proved the grave of the forces sent to subdue it. It was in this crisis of misfortune that the Convention placed the entire male population of France between the ages of eighteen and twenty-five at the disposal of the Government, and turned the whole country into one great camp and arsenal of war. Nor was there wanting a mind equal to the task of giving order to this vast material. The appointment of Carnot, an officer of engineers, to a seat on the Committee of Public Safety placed the military administration of France in the hands of a man who, as an organiser, if not as a strategist, was soon to prove himself without equal in Europe.
[The Allies seek each their separate ends.]
Nevertheless, it was to the dissensions and to the bad policy of the Allies more than to the energy of its own Government that France owed its safety. The object for which the Allies professed to be carrying on the war, the establishment of a pacific Government in France, was subordinated to schemes of aggrandisement, known as the acquisition of just indemnities. While Prussia, bent chiefly on preventing the Emperor from gaining Bavaria in exchange for Belgium, kept its own army inactive on the Rhine, [29] Austria, with the full approval of Pitt’s Cabinet, claimed annexations in Northern France, as well as Alsace, and treated the conquered town of Condé as Austrian territory. [30] Henceforward all the operations of the northern army were directed to the acquisition of frontier territory, not to the pursuit and overthrow of the Republican forces. The war was openly converted from a war of defence into a war of spoliation. It was a change which mocked the disinterested professions with which the Allies had taken up arms; in its military results it was absolutely ruinous. In face of the immense levies which promised the French certain victory in a long war, the only hope for the Allies lay in a rapid march to Paris; they preferred the extreme of division and delay. No sooner had the advance of their united armies driven Custine from his stronghold at Famars, than the English commander led off his forces to besiege Dunkirk, while the Austrians, under Prince Coburg, proceeded to invest Cambray and Le Quesnoy. The line of the invaders thus extended from the Channel to Brunswick’s posts at Landau, on the border of Alsace; the main armies were out of reach of one another, and their strength was diminished by the corps detached to keep up their communications. The French held the inner circle; and the advantage which this gave them was well understood by Carnot, who now inspired the measures of the Committee. In steadiness and precision the French recruits were no match for the trained armies of Germany; but the supply of them was inexhaustible, and Carnot knew that when they were thrown in sufficient masses upon the enemy their courage and enthusiasm would make amends for their inexperience. The successes of the Allies, unbroken from February to August, now began to alternate with defeats; the flood of invasion was first slowly and obstinately repelled, then swept away before a victorious advance.
[York driven from Dunkirk Sept. 8.]
It was on the British commander that the first blow was struck. The forces that could be detached from the French Northern army were not sufficient to drive York from before Dunkirk; but on the Moselle there were troops engaged in watching an enemy who was not likely to advance; and the Committee did not hesitate to leave this side of France open to the Prussians in order to deal a decisive stroke in the north. Before the movement was noticed by the enemy, Carnot had transported 30,000 men from Metz to the English Channel; and in the first week of September the German corps covering York was assailed by General Houchard with numbers double its own. The Germans were driven back upon Dunkirk; York only saved his own army from destruction by hastily raising the siege and abandoning his heavy artillery. The victory of the French, however, was ill followed up. Houchard was sent before the Revolutionary Tribunal, and he paid with his life for his mistakes. Custine had already perished, unjustly condemned for the loss of Mainz and Valenciennes.
[Commands given to men of the people.]
[Jourdan’s victory at Wattignies, Oct 15.]
It was no unimportant change for France when the successors of Custine and Houchard received their commands from the Committee of Public Safety. The levelling principle of the Reign of Terror left its effect on France through its operation in the army, and through this almost alone. Its executions produced only horror and reaction; its confiscations were soon reversed; but the creation of a thoroughly democratic army, the work of the men who overthrew the Gironde, gave the most powerful and abiding impulse to social equality in France. The first generals of the Revolution had been officers of the old army, men, with a few exceptions, of noble birth, who, like Custine, had enrolled themselves on the popular side when most of their companions quitted the country. These generals were connected with the politicians of the Gironde, and were involved in its fall. The victory of the Mountain brought men of another type into command. Almost all the leaders appointed by the Committee of Public Safety were soldiers who had served in the ranks. In the levies of 1792 and 1793 the officers of the newly-formed battalions were chosen by the recruits themselves. Patriotism, energy of character, acquaintance with warfare, instantly brought men into prominence. Soldiers of the old army, like Massena, who had reached middle life with their knapsacks on their backs; lawyers, like the Breton Moreau; waiters at inns, like Murat, found themselves at the head of their battalions, and knew that Carnot was ever watching for genius and ability to call it to the highest commands. With a million of men under arms, there were many in whom great natural gifts supplied the want of professional training. It was also inevitable that at the outset command should sometimes fall into the hands of mere busy politicians; but the character of the generals steadily rose as the Committee gained the ascendancy over a knot of demagogues who held the War Ministry during the summer of 1793; and by the end of the year there was scarcely one officer in high command who had not proved himself worthy of his post. In the investigation into Houchard’s conduct at Dunkirk, Carnot learnt that the victory had in fact been won by Jourdan, one of the generals of division. Jourdan had begun life as a common soldier fifteen years before. Discharged at the end of the American War, he had set up a draper’s shop in Limoges, his native town. He joined the army a second time on the outbreak of the Revolutionary War, and the men of his battalion elected him captain. His ability was noticed; he was made successively general of brigade and general of division; and, upon the dismissal of Houchard, Carnot summoned him to the command of the Army of the North. The Austrians were now engaged in the investment of Maubeuge. On the 15th of October Jourdan attacked and defeated their covering army at Wattignies. His victory forced the Austrians to raise the siege, and brought the campaign to an end for the winter.
[Lyons, Toulon, La Vendée, conquered Oct.-Dec. 1793.]
Thus successful on the northern frontier, the Republic carried on war against its internal enemies without pause and without mercy. Lyons surrendered in October; its citizens were slaughtered by hundreds in cold blood. Toulon had thrown itself into the hands of the English, and proclaimed King Louis XVII. It was besieged by land; but the operations produced no effect until Napoleon Bonaparte, captain of artillery, planned the capture of a ridge from which the cannon of the besiegers would command the English fleet in the harbour. Hood, the British admiral, now found his position hopeless. He took several thousands of the inhabitants on board his ships, and put out to sea, blowing up the French ships which he left in the harbour. Hood had received the fleet from the Royalists in trust for their King; its destruction gave England command of the Mediterranean and freed Naples from fear of attack; and Hood thought too little of the consequences which his act would bring down upon those of the inhabitants of Toulon whom he left behind. [31]
The horrors that followed the entry of the Republican army into the city did not prevent Pitt from including among the subjects of congratulation in the King’s Speech of 1794 “the circumstances attending the evacuation of Toulon.” It was perhaps fortunate for the Royalists in other parts of France that they failed to receive the assistance of England. Help was promised to the Vendeans, but it arrived too late. The appearance of Kleber at the head of the army which had defended Mainz had already turned the scale. Brave as they were, the Vendeans could not long resist trained armies. The war of pitched battles ended on the Loire with the year 1793. It was succeeded by a war of merciless and systematic destruction on the one side, and of ambush and surprises on the other.
[Prussia withdrawing from the war on account of Polish affairs.]
At home the foes of the Republic were sinking; its invaders were too much at discord with one another to threaten it any longer with serious danger. Prussia was in fact withdrawing from the war. It has been seen that when King Frederick William and the Emperor concerted the autumn campaign of 1792, the understanding was formed that Prussia, in return for its efforts against France, should be allowed to seize part of western Poland, if the Empress Catherine should give her consent. With this prospect before it, the thoughts of the Prussian Government had been from the first busied more with Poland, where it hoped to enter into possession, than with France, where it had only to fight Austria’s battles. Negotiations on the Polish question had been actively carried on between Berlin and St. Petersburg during the first months of the war; and in January, 1793, the Empress Catherine had concluded a Treaty of Partition with King Frederick William, in virtue of which a Prussian army under General Mollendorf immediately entered western Poland. It was thought good policy to keep the terms of this treaty secret from Austria, as it granted a much larger portion of Poland to Prussia than Austria was willing that it should receive. Two months passed before the Austrian Sovereign learnt how he had been treated by his ally. He then denounced the treaty, and assumed so threatening an attitude that the Prussians thought it necessary to fortify the territory that they had seized. [32] The Ministers who had been outwitted by the Court of Berlin were dismissed; Baron Thugut, who from the first had prophesied nothing but evil of the Prussian alliance, was called to power. The history of this statesman, who for the next eight years directed the war-policy of Austria, and filled a part in Europe subordinate only to those of Pitt and Bonaparte, has until a recent date been drawn chiefly from the representations of his enemies. Humbly born, scornful and inaccessible, Thugut was detested by the Viennese aristocracy; the French emigrants hated and maligned him on account of his indifference to their cause; the public opinion of Austria held him responsible for unparalleled military disasters; Prussian generals and ambassadors, whose reports have formed the basis of Prussian histories, pictured him as a Satanic antagonist. It was long believed of Thugut that while ambassador at Constantinople he had sold the Austrian cypher to the French; that in 1794 he prevented his master’s armies from winning victories because he had speculated in the French funds; and that in 1799 he occasioned the murder of the French envoys at Rastadt, in order to recover documents incriminating himself. Better sources of information are now opened, and a statesman, jealous, bitter, and over-reaching, but not without great qualities of character, stands in the place of the legendary criminal. It is indeed clear that Thugut’s hatred of Prussia amounted almost to mania; it is also clear that his designs of aggression, formed in the school of the Emperor Joseph, were fatally in conflict with the defensive principles which Europe ought to have opposed to the aggressions of France. Evidence exists that during the eight years of Thugut’s ministry he entertained, together or successively, projects for the annexation of French Flanders, Bavaria, Alsace, part of Poland, Venice and Dalmatia, Salzburg, the Papal Legations, the Republic of Genoa, Piedmont, and Bosnia; and to this list Tuscany and Savoy ought probably to be added. But the charges brought against Thugut of underhand dealings with France, and of the willing abandonment of German interests in return for compensation to Austria in Italy, rest on insufficient ground. Though, like every other politician at Vienna and Berlin, he viewed German affairs not as a matter of nationality but in subordination to the general interests of his own Court, Thugut appears to have been, of all the Continental statesmen of that time, the steadiest enemy of French aggression, and to have offered the longest resistance to a peace that was purchased by the cession of German soil. [33]
[Victories of Hoche and Pichegru at Wörth and Weissenburg, Dec. 23, 26.]
Nevertheless, from the moment when Thugut was called to power the alliance between Austria and Prussia was doomed. Others might perhaps have averted a rupture; Thugut made no attempt to do so. The siege of Mainz was the last serious operation of war which the Prussian army performed. The mission of an Austrian envoy, Lehrbach, to the Prussian camp in August, 1793, and his negotiations on the Polish and the Bavarian questions, only widened the breach between the two Courts. It was known that the Austrians were encouraging the Polish Diet to refuse the cession of the provinces occupied by Prussia; and the advisers of King Frederick William in consequence recommended him to quit the Rhine, and to place himself at the head of an army in Poland. At the headquarters of the Allies, between Mainz and the Alsatian frontier, all was dissension and intrigue. The impetuosity of the Austrian general, Wurmser, who advanced upon Alsace without consulting the King, was construed as a studied insult. On the 29th of September, after informing the allied Courts that Prussia would henceforth take only a subordinate part in the war, King Frederick William quitted the army, leaving orders with the Duke of Brunswick to fight no great battle. It was in vain that Wurmser stormed the lines of Weissenburg (Oct. 13), and victoriously pushed forward into Alsace. The hopes of a Royalist insurrection in Strasburg proved illusory. The German sympathies shown by a portion of the upper and middle classes of Alsace only brought down upon them a bloody vengeance at the hands of St. Just, commissioner of the Convention. The peasantry, partly from hatred of the feudal burdens of the old _régime_, partly from fear of St. Just and the guillotine, thronged to the French camp. In place of the beaten generals came Hoche and Pichegru: Hoche, lately a common soldier in the Guards, earning by a humble industry little sums for the purchase of books, now, at the age of twenty-six, a commander more than a match for the wrangling veterans of Germany; Pichegru, six years older, also a man sprung from the people, once a teacher in the military school of Brienne, afterwards a private of artillery in the American War. A series of harassing encounters took place during December. At length, with St. Just cheering on the Alsatian peasants in the hottest of the fire, these generals victoriously carried the Austrian positions at Wörth and at Weissenburg (Dec. 23, 26). The Austrian commander declared his army to be utterly ruined; and Brunswick, who had abstained from rendering his ally any real assistance, found himself a second time back upon the Rhine. [34]
[Pitt’s bargain with Prussia, April, 1794.]
[Revolt of Kosciusko. April, 1794.]
[Möllendorf refuses to help in Flanders.]
The virtual retirement of Prussia from the Coalition was no secret to the French Government: amongst the Allies it was viewed in various lights. The Empress Catherine, who had counted on seeing her troublesome Prussian friend engaged with her detested French enemy, taunted the King of Prussia with the loss of his personal honour. Austria, conscious of the antagonism between Prussian and Austrian interests and of the hollow character of the Coalition, would concede nothing to keep Prussia in arms. Pitt alone was willing to make a sacrifice, in order to prevent the rupture of the alliance. The King of Prussia was ready to continue the struggle with France if his expenses were paid, but not otherwise. Accordingly, after Austria had refused to contribute the small sum which Pitt asked, a bargain was struck between Lord Malmesbury and the Prussian Minister Haugwitz, by which Great Britain undertook to furnish a subsidy, provided that 60,000 Prussian troops, under General Möllendorf, were placed at the disposal of the Maritime Powers. [35] It was Pitt’s intention that the troops which he subsidised should be massed with Austrian and English forces for the defence of Belgium: the Prussian Ministry, availing themselves of an ambiguous expression in the treaty, insisted on keeping them inactive upon the Upper Rhine. Möllendorf wished to guard Mainz: other men of influence longed to abandon the alliance with Austria, and to employ the whole of Prussia’s force in Poland. At the moment when Haugwitz was contracting to place Möllendorf’s army at Pitt’s disposal, Poland had risen in revolt under Kosciusko, and the Russian garrison which occupied Warsaw had been overpowered and cut to pieces. Catherine called upon the King of Prussia for assistance; but it was not so much a desire to rescue the Empress from a momentary danger that excited the Prussian Cabinet as the belief that her vengeance would now make an absolute end of what remained of the Polish kingdom. The prey was doomed; the wisdom of Prussia was to be the first to seize and drag it to the ground. So large a prospect offered itself to the Power that should crush Poland during the brief paralysis of the Russian arms, that, on the first news of the outbreak, the King’s advisers urged him instantly to make peace with France and to throw his whole strength into the Polish struggle. Frederick William could not reconcile himself to making peace with the Jacobins; but he ordered an army to march upon Warsaw, and shortly afterwards placed himself at its head (May, 1794). When the King, who was the only politician in Prussia who took an interest in the French war, thus publicly acknowledged the higher importance of the Polish campaign, his generals upon the Rhine made it their only object to do nothing which it was possible to leave undone without actually forfeiting the British subsidy. Instead of fighting, Möllendorf spent his time in urging other people to make peace. It was in vain that Malmesbury argued that the very object of Pitt’s bargain was to keep the French out of the Netherlands: Möllendorf had made up his mind that the army should not be committed to the orders of Pitt and the Austrians. He continued in the Palatinate, alleging that any movement of the Prussian army towards the north would give the French admittance to southern Germany. Pitt’s hope of defending the Netherlands now rested on the energy and on the sincerity of the Austrian Cabinet, and on this alone.
[Battles on the Sambre, May-June, 1794.]
After breaking up from winter quarters in the spring of 1794, the Austrian and English allied forces had successfully laid siege to Landrecies, and defeated the enemy in its neighbourhood. [36] Their advance, however, was checked by a movement of the French Army of the North, now commanded by Pichegru, towards the Flemish coast. York and the English troops were exposed to the attack, and suffered a defeat at Turcoing. The decision of the campaign lay, however, not in the west of Flanders, but at the other end of the Allies’ position, at Charleroi on the Sambre, where a French victory would either force the Austrians to fall back eastwards, leaving York to his fate, or sever their communications with Germany. This became evident to the French Government; and in May the Commissioners of the Convention forced the generals on the Sambre to fight a series of battles, in which the French repeatedly succeeded in crossing the Sambre, and were repeatedly driven back again. The fate of the Netherlands depended, however, on something beside victory or defeat on the Sambre. The Emperor had come with Baron Thugut to Belgium in the hope of imparting greater unity and energy to the allied forces, but his presence proved useless. Among the Austrian generals and diplomatists there were several who desired to withdraw from the contest in the Netherlands, and to follow the example of Prussia in Poland. The action of the army was paralysed by intrigues. “Every one,” wrote Thugut, “does exactly as he pleases: there is absolute anarchy and disorder.” [37] At the beginning of June the Emperor quitted the army; the combats on the Sambre were taken up by Jourdan and 50,000 fresh troops brought from the army of the Moselle; and on the 26th of June the French defeated Coburg at Fleurus, as he advanced to the relief of Charleroi, unconscious that Charleroi had surrendered on the day before. Even now the defence of Belgium was not hopeless; but after one council of war had declared in favour of fighting, a second determined on a retreat. It was in vain that the representatives of England appealed to the good faith and military honour of Austria. Namur and Louvain were abandoned; the French pressed onwards; and before the end of July the Austrian army had fallen back behind the Meuse. York, forsaken by the allies, retired northwards before the superior forces of Pichegru, who entered Antwerp and made himself master of the whole of the Netherlands up to the Dutch frontier. [38]
[England disappointed by the Allies.]
Such was the result of Great Britain’s well-meant effort to assist the two great military Powers to defend Europe against the Revolution. To the aim of the English Minister, the defence of existing rights against democratic aggression, most of the public men alike of Austria and Prussia were now absolutely indifferent. They were willing to let the French seize and revolutionise any territory they pleased, provided that they themselves obtained their equivalent in Poland. England was in fact in the position of a man who sets out to attack a highway robber, and offers each of his arms to a pickpocket. The motives and conduct of these politicians were justly enough described by the English statesmen and generals who were brought into closest contact with them. In the councils of Prussia, Malmesbury declared that he could find no quality but “great and shabby art and cunning; ill-will, jealousy, and every sort of dirty passion.” From the head quarters of Möllendorf he wrote to a member of Pitt’s Cabinet: “Here I have to do with knavery and dotage…. If we listened only to our feelings, it would be difficult to keep any measure with Prussia. We must consider it an alliance with the Algerians, whom it is no disgrace to pay, or any impeachment of good sense to be cheated by.” To the Austrian commander the Duke of York addressed himself with royal plainness: “Your Serene Highness, the British nation, whose public opinion is not to be despised, will consider that it has been bought and sold.” [39]
[French reach the Rhine, Oct., 1794.]
[Pichegru conquers Holland, Dec., 1794.]
The sorry concert lasted for a few months longer. Coburg, the Austrian commander, was dismissed at the peremptory demand of Great Britain; his successor, Clerfayt, after losing a battle on the Ourthe, offered no further resistance to the advance of the Republican army, and the campaign ended in the capture of Cologne by the French, and the disappearance of the Austrians behind the Rhine. The Prussian subsidies granted by England resulted in some useless engagements between Möllendorf’s corps in the Palatinate and a French army double its size, followed by the retreat of the Prussians into Mainz. It only remained for Great Britain to attempt to keep the French out of Holland. The defence of the Dutch, after everything south of the river Waal had been lost, Pitt determined to entrust to abler hands than those of the Duke of York; but the presence of one high-born blunderer more or less made little difference in a series of operations conceived in indifference and perversity. Clerfayt would not, or could not, obey the Emperor’s orders and succour his ally. City after city in Holland welcomed the French. The very elements seemed to declare for the Republic. Pichegru’s army marched in safety over the frozen rivers; and, when the conquest of the land was completed, his cavalry crowned the campaign by the capture of the Dutch fleet in the midst of the ice-bound waters of the Texel. The British regiments, cut off from home, made their way eastward through the snow towards the Hanoverian frontier, in a state of prostrate misery which is compared by an eye-witness of both events to that of the French on their retreat in 1813 after the battle of Leipzig. [40]
[Treaties of Basle with Prussia, April 5, and Spain, July 22, 1795.]
The first act of the struggle between France and the Monarchies of Europe was concluded. The result of three years of war was that Belgium, Nice, and Savoy had been added to the territory of the Republic, and that French armies were in possession of Holland, and the whole of Germany west of the Rhine. In Spain and in Piedmont the mountain-passes and some extent of country had been won. Even on the seas, in spite of the destruction of the fleet at Toulon, and of a heavy defeat by Lord Howe off Ushant on the 1st of June, 1794, the strength of France was still formidable; and the losses which she inflicted on the commercial marine of her enemies exceeded those which she herself sustained. England, which had captured most of the French West Indian Islands, was the only Power that had wrested anything from the Republic. The dream of suppressing the Revolution by force of arms had vanished away; and the States which had entered upon the contest in levity, in fanaticism, or at the bidding of more powerful allies, found it necessary to make peace upon such terms as they could obtain. Holland, in which a strong Republican party had always maintained connection with France, abolished the rule of its Stadtholder, and placed its resources at the disposal of its conquerors. Sardinia entered upon abortive negotiations. Spain, in return for peace, ceded to the Republic the Spanish half of St. Domingo (July 22, 1795). Prussia concluded a Treaty at Basle (April 5), which marked and perpetuated the division of Germany by providing that, although the Empire as a body was still at war with France, the benefit of Prussia’s neutrality should extend to all German States north of a certain line. A secret article stipulated that, upon the conclusion of a general peace, if the Empire should cede to France the principalities west of the Rhine, Prussia should cede its own territory lying in that district, and receive compensation elsewhere. [41]
[Austria and England continue the war, 1795.]
Humiliating such a peace certainly was; yet it would probably have been the happiest issue for Europe had every Power been forced to accept its conditions. The territory gained by France was not much more than the very principle of the Balance of Power would have entitled it to demand, at a moment when Russia, victorious over the Polish rebellion, was proceeding to make the final partition of Poland among the three Eastern Monarchies; and, with all its faults, the France of 1795 would have offered to Europe the example of a great free State, such as the growth of the military spirit made impossible after the first of Napoleon’s campaigns. But the dark future was withdrawn from the view of those British statesmen who most keenly felt the evils of the present; and England, resolutely set against the course of French aggression, still found in Austria an ally willing to continue the struggle. The financial help of Great Britain, the Russian offer of a large share in the spoils of Poland, stimulated the flagging energy of the Emperor’s government. Orders were sent to Clerfayt to advance from the Rhine at whatever risk, in order to withdraw the troops of the Republic from the west of France, where England was about to land a body of Royalists. Clerfayt, however, disobeyed his instructions, and remained inactive till the autumn. He then defeated a French army pushing beyond the Rhine, and drove back the besiegers of Mainz; but the British expedition had already failed, and the time was passed when Clerfayt’s successes might have produced a decisive result. [42]
[Landing at Quiberon, June 27, 1795.]
[France in 1795.]
A new Government was now entering upon power in France. The Reign of Terror had ended in July, 1794, with the life of Robespierre. The men by whom Robespierre was overthrown were Terrorists more cruel and less earnest than himself, who attacked him only in order to save their own lives, and without the least intention of restoring a constitutional Government to France. An overwhelming national reaction forced them, however, to represent themselves as the party of clemency. The reaction was indeed a simple outburst of human feeling rather than a change in political opinion. Among the victims of the Terror the great majority had been men of the lower or middle class, who, except in La Vendée and Brittany, were as little friendly to the old _régime_ as their executioners. Every class in France, with the exception of the starving city mobs, longed for security, and the quiet routine of life. After the disorders of the Republic a monarchical government naturally seemed to many the best guarantee of peace; but the monarchy so contemplated was the liberal monarchy of 1791, not the ancient Court, with its accessories of a landed Church and privileged noblesse. Religion was still a power in France; but the peasant, with all his superstition and all his desire for order, was perfectly free from any delusions about the good old times. He liked to see his children baptised; but he had no desire to see the priest’s tithe-collector back in his barn: he shuddered at the summary marketing of Conventional Commissioners; but he had no wish to resume his labours on the fields of his late seigneur. To be a Monarchist in 1795, among the shopkeepers of Paris or the farmers of Normandy, meant no more than to wish for a political system capable of subsisting for twelve months together, and resting on some other basis than forced loans and compulsory sales of property. But among the men of the Convention, who had abolished monarchy and passed sentence of death upon the King, the restoration of the Crown seemed the bitterest condemnation of all that the Convention had done for France, and a sentence of outlawry against themselves. If the will of the nation was for the moment in favour of a restored monarchy, the Convention determined that its will must be overpowered by force or thwarted by constitutional forms. Threatened alternately by the Jacobin mob of Paris and by the Royalist middle class, the Government played off one enemy against the other, until an ill-timed effort of the emigrant noblesse gave to the Convention the prestige of a decisive victory over Royalists and foreigners combined. On the 27th of June, 1795, an English fleet landed the flower of the old nobility of France at the Bay of Quiberon in southern Brittany. It was only to give one last fatal proof of their incapacity that these unhappy men appeared once more on French soil. Within three weeks after their landing, in a region where for years together the peasantry, led by their landlords, baffled the best generals of the Republic, this invading army of the nobles, supported by the fleet, the arms, and the money of England, was brought to utter ruin by the discord of its own leaders. Before the nobles had settled who was to command and who was to obey, General Hoche surprised their fort, beat them back to the edge of the peninsula where they had landed, and captured all who were not killed fighting or rescued by English boats (July 20). The Commissioner Tallien, in order to purge himself from the just suspicion of Royalist intrigues, caused six hundred prisoners to be shot in cold blood. [43]
[Project of Constitution, 1795.]
At the moment when the emigrant army reached France, the Convention was engaged in discussing the political system which was to succeed its own rule. A week earlier, the Committee appointed to draw up a new constitution for France had presented its report. The main object of the new constitution in its original form was to secure France against a recurrence of those evils which it had suffered since 1792. The calamities of the last three years were ascribed to the sovereignty of a single Assembly. A vote of the Convention had established the Revolutionary Tribunal, proscribed the Girondins, and placed France at the mercy of eighty individuals selected by the Convention from itself. The legislators of 1795 desired a guarantee that no party, however determined, should thus destroy its enemies by a single law, and unite supreme legislative and executive power in its own hands. With the object of dividing authority, the executive was, in the new draft-constitution, made independent of the legislature, and the legislature itself was broken up into two chambers. A Directory of five members, chosen by the Assemblies, but not responsible except under actual impeachment, was to conduct the administration, without the right of proposing laws; a Chamber of five hundred was to submit laws to the approval of a Council of two hundred and fifty Ancients, or men of middle life; but neither of these bodies was to exercise any influence upon the actual government. One director and a third part of each of the legislative bodies were to retire every year. [44]
[Constitution of 1795. Insurrection of Vendémiaire, Oct. 4.]
The project thus outlined met with general approval, and gained even that of the Royalists, who believed that a popular election would place them in a majority in the two new Assemblies. Such an event was, however, in the eyes of the Convention, the one fatal possibility that must be averted at every cost. In the midst of the debates upon the draft-constitution there arrived the news of Hoche’s victory at Quiberon. The Convention gained courage to add a clause providing that two-thirds of the new deputies should be appointed from among its own members, thus rendering a Royalist majority in the Chambers impossible. With this condition attached to it, the Constitution was laid before the country. The provinces accepted it; the Royalist middle class of Paris rose in insurrection, and marched against the Convention in the Tuileries. Their revolt was foreseen; the defence of the Convention was entrusted to General Bonaparte, who met the attack of the Parisians in a style unknown in the warfare of the capital. Bonaparte’s command of trained artillery secured him victory; but the struggle of the 4th of October (13 Vendémiaire) was the severest that took place in Paris during the Revolution, and the loss of life in fighting greater than on the day that overthrew the Monarchy.
[The Directory, Oct., 1795.]
The new Government of France now entered into power. Members of the Convention formed two-thirds of the new legislative bodies; the one-third which the country was permitted to elect consisted chiefly of men of moderate or Royalist opinions. The five persons who were chosen Directors were all Conventionalists who had voted for the death of the King; Carnot, however, who had won the victories without sharing in the cruelties of the Reign of Terror, was the only member of the late Committee of Public Safety who was placed in power. In spite of the striking homage paid to the great act of regicide in the election of the five Directors, the establishment of the Directory was accepted by Europe as the close of revolutionary disorder. The return of constitutional rule in France was marked by a declaration on the part of the King of England of his willingness to treat for peace. A gentler spirit seemed to have arisen in the Republic. Although the laws against the emigrants and non-juring priests were still unrepealed, the exiles began to return unmolested to their homes. Life resumed something of its old aspect in the capital. The rich and the gay consoled themselves with costlier luxury for all the austerities of the Reign of Terror. The labouring classes, now harmless and disarmed, were sharply taught that they must be content with such improvement in their lot as the progress of society might bring.
[What was new to Europe in the Revolution.]
[Absolute governments of 18th century engaged in reforms.]
At the close of this first period of the Revolutionary War we may pause to make an estimate of the new influences which the French Revolution had brought into Europe, and of the effects which had thus far resulted from them. The opinion current among the French people themselves, that the Revolution gave birth to the modern life not of France only but of the Western Continent generally, is true of one great set of facts; it is untrue of another. There were conceptions in France in 1789 which made France a real contrast to most of the Continental monarchies; there were others which it shared in common with them. The ideas of social, legal, and ecclesiastical reform which were realised in 1789 were not peculiar to France; what was peculiar to France was the idea that these reforms were to be effected by the nation itself. In other countries reforms had been initiated by Governments, and forced upon an unwilling people. Innovation sprang from the Crown; its agents were the servants of the State. A distinct class of improvements, many of them identical with the changes made by the Revolution in France, attracted the attention in a greater or less degree of almost all the Western Courts of the eighteenth century. The creation of a simple and regular administrative system; the reform of the clergy; the emancipation of the Church from the jurisdiction of the Pope, and of all orders in the State from the jurisdiction of the Church; the amelioration of the lot of the peasant; the introduction of codes of law abolishing both the cruelties and the confusion of ancient practice,–all these were purposes more or less familiar to the absolute sovereigns of the eighteenth century, whom the French so summarily described as benighted tyrants. It was in Austria, Prussia, and Tuscany that the civilising energy of the Crown had been seen in its strongest form, but even the Governments of Naples and Spain had caught the spirit of change. The religious tolerance which Joseph gave to Austria, the rejection of Papal authority and the abolition of the punishment of death which Leopold effected in Tuscany, were bolder efforts of the same political rationalism which in Spain minimised the powers of the Inquisition and in Naples attempted to found a system of public education. In all this, however, there was no trace of the action of the people, or of any sense that a nation ought to raise itself above a state of tutelage. Men of ideas called upon Governments to impose better institutions upon the people, not upon the people to wrest them from the Governments.
[In France, the nation itself acted.]
In France alone a view of public affairs had grown up which impelled the nation to create its reforms for itself. If the substance of many of the French revolutionary changes coincided with the objects of Austrian or of Tuscan reform, there was nothing similar in their method. In other countries reform sprang from the command of an enlightened ruler; in France it started with the Declaration of the Rights of Man, and aimed at the creation of local authority to be exercised by the citizens themselves. The source of this difference lay partly in the influence of England and America upon French opinion, but much more in the existence within France of a numerous and energetic middle class, enriched by commerce, and keenly interested in all the speculation and literary activity of the age. This was a class that both understood the wrongs which the other classes inflicted or suffered, and felt itself capable of redressing them. For the flogged and over-driven peasant in Naples or Hungary no ally existed but the Crown. In most of those poor and backward States which made up monarchical Europe, the fraction of the inhabitants which neither enjoyed privilege nor stood in bondage to it was too small to think of forcing itself into power. The nobles sought to preserve their feudal rights: the Crown sought to reduce them; the nation, elsewhere than in France, did not intervene and lay hands upon power for itself, because the nation was nothing but the four mutually exclusive classes of the landlords who commanded, the peasants who served, the priests who idled, and the soldiers who fought. France differed from all the other monarchies of the Continent in possessing a public which blended all classes and was dominated by none; a public comprehending thousands of men who were familiar with the great interests of society, and who, whether noble or not noble, possessed the wealth and the intelligence that made them rightly desire a share in power.
[Movements against governments outside France.]
Liberty, the right of the nation to govern itself, seemed at the outset to be the great principle of the Revolution. The French people themselves believed the question at issue to be mainly between authority and popular right; the rest of Europe saw the Revolution under the same aspect. Hence, in those countries where the example of France produced political movements, the effect was in the first instance to excite agitation against the Government, whatever might be the form of the latter. In England the agitation was one of the middle class against the aristocratic parliamentary system; in Hungary, it was an agitation of the nobles against the Crown; on the Rhine it was an agitation of the commercial classes against ecclesiastical rule. But in every case in which the reforming movement was not supported by the presence of French armies, the terrors which succeeded the first sanguine hopes of the Revolution struck the leaders of these movements with revulsion and despair, and converted even the better Governments into engines of reaction. In France itself it was seen that the desire for liberty among an enlightened class could not suddenly transform the habits of a nation accustomed to accept everything from authority. Privilege was destroyed, equality was advanced; but instead of self-government the Revolution brought France the most absolute rule it had ever known. It was not that the Revolution had swept by, leaving things where they were before: it had in fact accomplished most of those great changes which lay the foundation of a sound social life: but the faculty of self-government, the first condition of any lasting political liberty, remained to be slowly won.
[Reaction.]
Outside France reaction set in without the benefit of previous change. At London, Vienna, Naples, and Madrid, Governments gave up all other objects in order to devote themselves to the suppression of Jacobinism. Pitt, whose noble aims had been the extinction of the slave-trade, the reform of Parliament, and the advance of national intercourse by free trade, surrendered himself to men whose thoughts centred upon informers, Gagging Acts, and constructive treasons, and who opposed all legislation upon the slave-trade because slaves had been freed by the Jacobins of the Convention. State trials and imprisonments became the order of the day; but the reaction in England at least stopped short of the scaffold. At Vienna and Naples fear was more cruel. The men who either were, or affected to be, in such fear of revolution that they discovered a Jacobinical allegory in Mozart’s last opera, [45] did not spare life when the threads of anything like a real conspiracy were placed in their hands. At Vienna terror was employed to crush the constitutional opposition of Hungary to the Austrian Court. In Naples a long reign of cruelty and oppression began with the creation of a secret tribunal to investigate charges of conspiracy made by informers. In Mainz, the Archbishop occupied the last years of his government, after his restoration in 1793, with a series of brutal punishments and tyrannical precautions.
These were but instances of the effect which the first epoch of the Revolution produced upon the old European States. After a momentary stimulus to freedom it threw the nations themselves into reaction and apathy; it totally changed the spirit of the better governments, attaching to all liberal ideas the stigma of Revolution, and identifying the work of authority with resistance to every kind of reform. There were States in which this change, the first effect of the Revolution, was also its only one; States whose history, as in the case of England, is for a whole generation the history of political progress unnaturally checked and thrown out of its course. There were others, and these the more numerous, where the first stimulus and the first reaction were soon forgotten in new and penetrating changes produced by the successive victories of France. The nature of these changes, even more than the warfare which introduced them, gives its interest to the period on which we are about to enter.
CHAPTER III.
Triple attack on Austria–Moreau, Jourdan–Bonaparte in Italy–Condition of the Italian States–Professions and real intentions of Bonaparte and the Directory–Battle of Montenotte–Armistice with Sardinia–Campaign in Lombardy–Treatment of the Pope, Naples, Tuscany–Siege of Mantua– Castiglione, Moreau and Jourdan in Germany Their retreat–Secret Treaty with Prussia–Negotiations with England–Cispadane Republic–Rise of the idea of Italian Independence–Battles of Arcola and Rivoli–Peace with the Pope at Tolentino–Venice–Preliminaries of Leoben–The French in Venice–The French take the Ionian Islands and give Venice to Austria–Genoa–Coup d’état of 17 Fructidor in Paris–Treaty of Campo Formio–Victories of England at sea–Bonaparte’s project against Egypt.
[Armies of Italy, the Danube, and the Main, 1796.]
With the opening of the year 1796 the leading interest of European history passes to a new scene. Hitherto the progress of French victory had been in the direction of the Rhine: the advance of the army of the Pyrenees had been cut short by the conclusion of peace with Spain; the army of Italy had achieved little beyond some obscure successes in the mountains. It was the appointment of Napoleon Bonaparte to the command of the latter force, in the spring of 1796, that first centred the fortunes of the Republic in the land beyond the Alps. Freed from Prussia by the Treaty of Basle, the Directory was now able to withdraw its attention from Holland and from the Lower Rhine, and to throw its whole force into the struggle with Austria. By the advice of Bonaparte a threefold movement was undertaken against Vienna, by way of Lombardy, by the valley of the Danube, and by the valley of the Main. General Jourdan, in command of the army that had conquered the Netherlands, was ordered to enter Germany by Frankfort; Moreau crossed the Rhine at Strasburg: Bonaparte himself, drawing his scanty supplies along the coast-road from Nice, faced the allied forces of Austria and Sardinia upon the slopes of the Maritime Apennines, forty miles to the west of Genoa. The country in which he was about to operate was familiar to Bonaparte from service there in 1794; his own descent and language gave him singular advantages in any enterprise undertaken in Italy. Bonaparte was no Italian at heart; but he knew at least enough of the Italian nature to work upon its better impulses, and to attach its hopes, so long as he needed the support of Italian opinion, to his own career of victory.
[Condition of Italy.]
Three centuries separated the Italy of that day from the bright and vigorous Italy which, in the glow of its Republican freedom, had given so much to Northern Europe in art, in letters, and in the charm of life. A long epoch of subjection to despotic or foreign rule, of commercial inaction, of decline in mind and character, had made the Italians of no account among the political forces of Europe. Down to the peace of Aix-la-Chapelle in 1748 their provinces were bartered between the Bourbons and the Hapsburgs; and although the settlement of that date left no part of Italy, except the Duchy of Milan, incorporated in a foreign empire, yet the crown of Naples was vested in a younger branch of the Spanish Bourbons, and the marriage of Maria Theresa with the Archduke Francis made Tuscany an appanage of the House of Austria. Venice and Genoa retained their independence and their republican government, but little of their ancient spirit. At the outbreak of the Revolutionary War, Austrian influence was dominant throughout the peninsula, Marie Caroline, the Queen and the ruler of Ferdinand of Naples, being the sister of the Emperor Leopold and Marie Antoinette. With the exception of Piedmont, which preserved a strong military sentiment and the tradition of an active and patriotic policy, the Italian States were either, like Venice and Genoa, anxious to keep themselves out of danger by seeming to hear and see nothing that passed around them, or governed by families in the closest connection with the great reigning Houses of the Continent. Neither in Italy itself, nor in the general course of European affairs during the Napoleonic period, was anything determined by the sentiment of the Italian people. The peasantry at times fought against the French with energy; but no strong impulse, like that of the Spaniards, enlisted the upper class of Italians either on the side of Napoleon or on that of his enemies. Acquiescence and submission had become the habit of the race; the sense of national unity and worth, the personal pride which makes the absence of liberty an intolerable wrong, only entered the Italian character at a later date.
[Revival after 1740.]
Yet, in spite of its political nullity, Italy was not in a state of decline. Its worst days had ended before the middle of the eighteenth century. The fifty years preceding the French Revolution, if they had brought nothing of the spirit of liberty, had in all other respects been years of progress and revival. In Lombardy the government of Maria Theresa and Joseph awoke life and motion after ages of Spanish torpor and misrule. Traditions of local activity revived; the communes were encouraged in their works of irrigation and rural improvement; a singular liberality towards public opinion and the press made the Austrian possessions the centre of the intellectual movement of Italy. In the south, progress began on the day when the last foreign Viceroy disappeared from Naples (1735), and King Charles III., though a member of the Spanish House, entered upon the government of the two Sicilies as an independent kingdom. Venice and the Papal States alone seemed to be untouched by the spirit of material and social improvement, so active in the rest of Italy before the interest in political life had come into being.
Nor was the age without its intellectual distinction. If the literature of Italy in the second half of the eighteenth century had little that recalled the inspiration of its splendid youth, it showed at least a return to seriousness and an interest in important things. The political economists of Lombardy were scarcely behind those of England; the work of the Milanese Beccaria on “Crimes and Punishments” stimulated the reform of criminal law in every country in Europe; an intelligent and increasing attention to problems of agriculture, commerce, and education took the place of the fatuous gallantries and insipid criticism which had hitherto made up the life of Italians of birth and culture. One man of genius, Vittorio Alfieri, the creator of Italian tragedy, idealised both in prose and verse a type of rugged independence and resistance to tyrannical power. Alfieri was neither a man of political judgment himself nor the representative of any real political current in Italy; but the lesson which he taught to the Italians, the lesson of respect for themselves and their country, was the one which Italy most of all required to learn; and the appearance of this manly and energetic spirit in its literature gave hope that the Italian nation would not long be content to remain without political being.
[Social condition.]
[Tuscany.]
Italy, to the outside world, meant little more than the ruins of the Roman Forum, the galleries of Florence, the paradise of Capri and the Neapolitan coast; the singular variety in its local conditions of life gained little attention from the foreigner. There were districts in Italy where the social order was almost of a Polish type of barbarism; there were others where the rich and the poor lived perhaps under a happier relation than in any other country in Europe. The difference depended chiefly upon the extent to which municipal life had in past time superseded the feudal order under which the territorial lord was the judge and the ruler of his own domain. In Tuscany the city had done the most in absorbing the landed nobility; in Naples and Sicily it had done the least. When, during the middle ages, the Republic of Florence forced the feudal lords who surrounded it to enter its walls as citizens, in some cases it deprived them of all authority, in others it permitted them to retain a jurisdiction over their peasants; but even in these instances the sovereignty of the city deprived the feudal relation of most of its harshness and force. After the loss of Florentine liberty, the Medici, aping the custom of older monarchies, conferred the title of marquis and count upon men who preferred servitude to freedom, and accompanied the grant of rank with one of hereditary local authority; but the new institutions took no deep hold on country life, and the legislation of the first Archduke of the House of Lorraine (1749) left the landed aristocracy in the position of mere country gentlemen. [46] Estates were not very large: the prevalent agricultural system was, as it still is, that of the _mezzeria_, a partnership between the landlord and tenant; the tenant holding by custom in perpetuity, and sharing the produce with the landlord, who supplied a part of the stock and materials for farming. In Tuscany the conditions of the _mezzeria_ were extremely favourable to the tenant; and if a cheerful country life under a mild and enlightened government were all that a State need desire, Tuscany enjoyed rare happiness.
[Naples and Sicily.]
[Piedmont.]
Far different was the condition of Sicily and Naples. Here the growth of city life had never affected the rough sovereignty which the barons exercised over great tracts of country withdrawn from the civilised world. When Charles III. ascended the throne in 1735, he found whole provinces in which there was absolutely no administration of justice on the part of the State. The feudal rights of the nobility were in the last degree oppressive, the barbarism of the people was in many districts extreme. Out of two thousand six hundred towns and villages in the kingdom, there were only fifty that were not subject to feudal authority. In the manor of San Gennaro di Palma, fifteen miles from Naples, even down to the year 1786 the officers of the baron were the only persons who lived in houses; the peasants, two thousand in number, slept among the corn-ricks. [47] Charles, during his tenure of the Neapolitan crown, from 1735 to 1759, and the Ministers Tanucci and Caraccioli under his feeble successor Ferdinand IV., enforced the authority of the State in justice and administration, and abolished some of the most oppressive feudal rights of the nobility; but their legislation, though bold and even revolutionary according to an English standard, could not in the course of two generations transform a social system based upon centuries of misgovernment and disorder. At the outbreak of the French Revolution the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies was, as it still in a less degree is, a land of extreme inequalities of wealth and poverty, a land where great estates wasted in the hands of oppressive or indolent owners, and the peasantry, untrained either by remunerative industry or by a just and regular enforcement of the law, found no better guide than a savage and fanatical priesthood. Over the rest of Italy the conditions of life varied through all degrees between the Tuscan and the Neapolitan type. Piedmont, in military spirit and patriotism far superior to the other Italian States, was socially one of the most backward of all. It was a land of priests, nobles, and soldiers, where a gloomy routine and the repression of all originality of thought and character drove the most gifted of its children, like the poet Alfieri, to seek a home on some more liberal soil.
[Professions and real intentions of the Directory and Bonaparte, 1796.]
During the first years of the Revolution, an attempt had been made by French enthusiasts to extend the Revolution into Italy by means of associations in the principal towns; but it met with no great success. A certain liberal movement arose among the young men of the upper classes at Naples, where, under the influence of Queen Marie Caroline, the Government had now become reactionary; and in Turin and several of the Lombard cities the French were not without partisans; but no general disaffection like that of Savoy existed east of the Alps. The agitation of 1789 and 1792 had passed by without bringing either liberty or national independence to the Italians. When Bonaparte received his command, that fervour of Republican passion which, in the midst of violence and wrong, had seldom been wanting in the first leaders of the Revolutionary War, had died out in France. The politicians who survived the Reign of Terror and gained office in the Directory repeated the old phrases about the Rights of Man and the Liberation of the Peoples only as a mode of cajolery. Bonaparte entered Italy proclaiming himself the restorer of Italian freedom, but with the deliberate purpose of using Italy as a means of recruiting the exhausted treasury of France. His correspondence with the Directory exposes with brazen frankness this well-considered system of pillage and deceit, in which the general and the Government were cordially at one. On the further question, how France should dispose of any territory that might be conquered in Northern Italy, Bonaparte and the Directory had formed no understanding, and their purposes were in fact at variance. The Directory wished to conquer Lombardy in order to hand it back to Austria in return for the Netherlands; Bonaparte had at least formed the conception that an Italian State was possible, and he intended to convert either Austrian Lombardy itself, or some other portion of Northern Italy, into a Republic, serving as a military outwork for France.
[Bonaparte separates the Austrian and Sardinian Armies, April, 1796.]
[Armistice and peace with Sardinia.]
The campaign of 1796 commenced in April, in the mountains above the coast-road connecting Nice and Genoa. Bonaparte’s own army numbered 40,000 men; the force opposed to it consisted of 38,000 Austrians, under Beaulieu, and a smaller Sardinian army, so placed upon the Piedmontese Apennines as to block the passes from the coast-road into Piedmont, and to threaten the rear of the French if they advanced eastward against Genoa. The Piedmontese army drew its supplies from Turin, the Austrian from Mantua; to sever the two armies was to force them on to lines of retreat conducting them farther and farther apart from one another. Bonaparte foresaw the effect which such a separation of the two armies would produce upon the Sardinian Government. For four days he reiterated his attacks at Montenotte and Millesimo, until he had forced his own army into a position in the centre of the Allies; then, leaving a small force to watch the Austrians, he threw the mass of his troops upon the Piedmontese, and drove them back to within thirty miles of Turin. The terror-stricken Government, anticipating an outbreak in the capital itself, accepted an armistice from Bonaparte at Cherasco (April 28), and handed over to the French the fortresses of Coni, Ceva, and Tortona, which command the entrances of Italy. It was an unworthy capitulation for Turin could not have been taken before the Austrians returned in force; but Bonaparte had justly calculated the effect of his victory; and the armistice, which was soon followed by a treaty of peace between France and Sardinia, ceding Savoy to the Republic, left him free to follow the Austrians, untroubled by the existence of some of the strongest fortresses of Europe behind him.
[Bridge of Lodi, May 10.]
In the negotiations with Sardinia Bonaparte demanded the surrender of the town of Valenza, as necessary to secure his passage over the river Po. Having thus led the Austrian Beaulieu to concentrate his forces at this point, he suddenly moved eastward along the southern bank of the river, and crossed at Piacenza, fifty miles below the spot where Beaulieu was awaiting him. It was an admirable movement. The Austrian general, with the enemy threatening his communications, had to abandon Milan and all the country west of it, and to fall back upon the line of the Adda. Bonaparte followed, and on the 10th of May attacked the Austrians at Lodi. He himself stormed the bridge of Lodi at the head of his Grenadiers. The battle was so disastrous to the Austrians that they could risk no second engagement, and retired upon Mantua and the line of the Mincio. [48]
[Bonaparte in Milan. Extortions.]
Bonaparte now made his triumphal entry into Milan (May 15). The splendour of his victories and his warm expressions of friendship for Italy excited the enthusiasm of a population not hitherto hostile to Austrian rule. A new political movement began. With the French army there came all the partisans of the French Republic who had been expelled from other parts of Italy. Uniting with the small revolutionary element already existing in Milan, they began to form a new public opinion by means of journals and patriotic meetings. It was of the utmost importance to Bonaparte that a Republican party should be organised among the better classes in the towns of Lombardy; for the depredations of the French army exasperated the peasants, and Bonaparte’s own measures were by no means of a character to win him unmixed goodwill. The instructions which he received from the Directory were extremely simple. “Leave nothing in Italy,” they wrote to him on the day of his entry into Milan, “which will be useful to us, and which the political situation will allow you to remove.” If Bonaparte had felt any doubt as to the meaning of such an order, the pillage of works of art in Belgium and Holland in preceding years would have shown him that it was meant to be literally interpreted. Accordingly, in return for the gift of liberty, the Milanese were invited to offer to their deliverers twenty million francs, and a selection from the paintings in their churches and galleries. The Dukes of Parma and Modena, in return for an armistice, were required to hand over forty of their best pictures, and a sum of money proportioned to their revenues. The Dukes and the townspeople paid their contributions with good grace: the peasantry of Lombardy, whose cattle were seized in order to supply an army that marched without any stores of its own, rose in arms, and threw themselves into Pavia, killing all the French soldiers who fell in their way. The revolt was instantly suppressed, and the town of Pavia given up to pillage. In deference to the Liberal party of Italy, the movement was described as a conspiracy of priests and nobles.
[Venice.]
[Battle on the Mincio, May 29.]
The way into Central Italy now lay open before Bonaparte. Rome and Naples were in no condition to offer resistance; but with true military judgment the French general declined to move against this feeble prey until the army of Austria, already crippled, was completely driven out of the field. Instead of crossing the Apennines, Bonaparte advanced against the Austrian positions upon the Mincio. It suited him to violate the neutrality of the adjacent Venetian territory by seizing the town of Brescia. His example was followed by Beaulieu, who occupied Peschiera, at the foot of the Lake of Garda, and thus held the Mincio along its whole course from the lake to Mantua. A battle was fought and lost by the Austrians half-way between the lake and the fortress. Beaulieu’s strength was exhausted; he could meet the enemy no more in the field, and led his army out of Italy into the Tyrol, leaving Mantua to be invested by the French. The first care of the conqueror was to make Venice pay for the crime of possessing territory intervening between the eastern and western extremes of the Austrian district. Bonaparte affected to believe that the Venetians had permitted Beaulieu to occupy Peschiera before he seized upon Brescia himself. He uttered terrifying threats to the envoys who came from Venice to excuse an imaginary crime. He was determined to extort money from the Venetian Republic; he also needed a pretext for occupying Verona, and for any future wrongs. “I have purposely devised this rupture,” he wrote to the Directory (June 7th), “in case you should wish to obtain five or six millions of francs from Venice. If you have more decided intentions, I think it would be well to keep up the quarrel.” The intention referred to was the disgraceful project of sacrificing Venice to Austria in return for the cession of the Netherlands, a measure based on plans familiar to Thugut as early as the year 1793. [49]
[Armistice with Naples, June 6.]
[Armistice with the Pope, June 23.]
The Austrians were fairly driven out of Lombardy, and Bonaparte was now free to deal with southern Italy. He advanced into the States of the Church, and expelled the Papal Legate from Bologna. Ferdinand of Naples, who had lately called heaven and earth to witness the fury of his zeal against an accursed horde of regicides, thought it prudent to stay Bonaparte’s hand, at least until the Austrians were in a condition to renew the war in Lombardy. He asked for a suspension of hostilities against his own kingdom. The fleet and the sea-board of Naples gave it importance in the struggle between France and England, and Bonaparte granted the king an armistice on easy terms. The Pope, in order to gain a few months’ truce, had to permit the occupation of Ferrara, Ravenna, and Ancona, and to recognise the necessities, the learning, the taste, and the virtue of his conquerors by a gift of twenty million francs, five hundred manuscripts, a hundred pictures, and the busts of Marcus and Lucius Brutus. The rule of the Pope was unpopular in Bologna, and a Senate which Bonaparte placed in power, pending the formation of a popular Government gladly took the oath of fidelity to the French Republic. Tuscany was the only State that remained to be dealt with. Tuscany had indeed made peace with the Republic a year before, but the ships and cargoes of the English merchants at Leghorn were surely fair prey; and, with the pretence of punishing insults offered by the English to the French flag, Bonaparte descended upon Leghorn, and seized upon everything that was not removed before his approach. Once established in Leghorn, the French declined to quit it. By way of adjusting the relations of the Grand Duke, the English seized his harbour of Porto Ferraio, in the island of Elba.
[Battles of Lonato and Castiglione, July, Aug., 1796.]
Mantua was meanwhile invested, and thither, after his brief incursion into Central Italy, Bonaparte returned. Towards the end of July an Austrian relieving army, nearly double the strength of Bonaparte’s, descended from the Tyrol. It was divided into three corps: one, under Quosdanovich, advanced by the road on the west of Lake Garda; the others, under Wurmser, the commander-in-chief, by the roads between the lake and the river Adige. The peril of the French was extreme; their outlying divisions were defeated and driven in; Bonaparte could only hope to save himself by collecting all his forces at the foot of the lake, and striking at one or other of the Austrian armies before they effected their junction on the Mincio. He instantly broke up the siege of Mantua, and withdrew from every position east of the river. On the 30th of July, Quosdanovich was attacked and checked at Lonato, on the west of the Lake of Garda. Wurmser, unaware of his colleague’s repulse, entered Mantua in triumph, and then set out, expecting to envelop Bonaparte between two fires. But the French were ready for his approach. Wurmser was stopped and defeated at Castiglione, while the western Austrian divisions were still held in check at Lonato. The junction of the Austrian armies had become impossible. In five days the skill of Bonaparte and the unsparing exertions of his soldiery had more than retrieved all that appeared to have been lost. [50] The Austrians retired into the Tyrol, beaten and dispirited, and leaving 15,000 prisoners in the hands of the enemy.
Bonaparte now prepared to force his way into Germany by the Adige, in fulfilment of the original plan of the campaign. In the first days of September he again routed the Austrians, and gained possession of Roveredo and Trent. Wurmser hereupon attempted to shut the French up in the mountains by a movement southwards; but, while he operated with insufficient forces between the Brenta and the Adige, he was cut off from Germany, and only escaped capture by throwing himself into Mantua with the shattered remnant of his army. The road into Germany through the Tyrol now lay open; but in the midst of his victories Bonaparte learnt that the northern armies of Moreau and Jourdan, with which he had intended to co-operate in an attack upon Vienna, were in full retreat.
[Invasion of Germany by Moureau and Jourdan, June-Oct. 1796.]
[The Archduke Charles overpowers Jourdan.]
Moreau’s advance into the valley of the Danube had, during the months of July and August, been attended with unbroken military and political success. The Archduke Charles, who was entrusted with the defence of the Empire, found himself unable to bring two armies into the field capable of resisting those of Moreau and Jourdan separately, and he therefore determined to fall back before Moreau towards Nuremberg, ordering Wartensleben, who commanded the troops facing Jourdan on the Main, to retreat in the same direction, in order that the two armies might throw their collected force upon Jourdan while still at some distance north of Moreau. [51] The design of the Archduke succeeded in the end, but it opened Germany to the French for six weeks, and showed how worthless was the military constitution of the Empire, and how little the Germans had to expect from one another. After every skirmish won by Moreau some neighbouring State abandoned the common defence and hastened to make its terms with the invader. On the 17th of July the Duke of Würtemberg purchased an armistice at the price of four million francs; a week later Baden gained the French general’s protection in return for immense supplies of food and stores. The troops of the Swabian Circle of the Empire, who were ridiculed as “harlequins” by the more martial Austrians, dispersed to their homes; and no sooner had Moreau entered Bavaria than the Bavarian contingent in its turn withdrew from the Archduke. Some consideration was shown by Moreau’s soldiery to those districts which had paid tribute to their general; but in the region of the Main, Jourdan’s army plundered without distinction and without mercy. They sacked the churches, they maltreated the children, they robbed the very beggars of their pence. Before the Archduke Charles was ready to strike, the peasantry of this country, whom their governments were afraid to arm, had begun effective reprisals of their own. At length the retreating movement of the Austrians stopped. Leaving 30,000 men on the Lech to disguise his motions from Moreau, Charles turned suddenly northwards from Neuburg on the [***] August, met Wartensleben at Amberg, and attacked Jourdan at this place with greatly superior numbers. Jourdan was defeated and driven back in confusion towards the Rhine. The issue of the campaign was decided before Moreau heard of his colleague’s danger. It only remained for him to save his own army by a skilful retreat. Jourdan’s soldiers, returning through districts which they had devastated, suffered heavier losses from the vengeance of the peasantry than from the army that pursued them. By the autumn of 1796 no Frenchman remained beyond the Rhine. The campaign had restored the military spirit of Austria and given Germany a general in whom soldiers could trust; but it had also shown how willing were the Governments of the minor States to become the vassals of a foreigner, how little was wanting to convert the western half of the Empire into a dependency of France.
[Secret Treaty with Prussia, Aug. 5.]
With each change in the fortunes of the campaign of 1796 the diplomacy of the Continent had changed its tone. When Moreau won his first victories, the Court of Prussia, yielding to the pressure of the Directory, substituted for the conditional clauses of the Treaty of Basle a definite agreement to the cession of the left bank of the Rhine, and a stipulation that Prussia should be compensated for her own loss by the annexation of the Bishopric of Münster. Prussia could not itself cede provinces of the Empire: it could only agree to their cession. In this treaty, however, Prussia definitely renounced the integrity of the Empire, and accepted the system known as the Secularisation of Ecclesiastical States, the first step towards an entire reconstruction of Germany. [52] The engagement was kept secret both from the Emperor and from the ecclesiastical princes. In their negotiations with Austria the Directory were less successful. Although the long series of Austrian disasters had raised a general outcry against Thugut’s persistence in the war, the resolute spirit of the Minister never bent; and the ultimate victory of the Archduke Charles more than restored his influence over the Emperor. Austria refused to enter into any negotiation not conducted in common with England, and the Directory were for the present foiled in their attempts to isolate England from the Continental Powers. It was not that Thugut either hoped or cared for that restoration of Austrian rule in the Netherlands which was the first object of England’s Continental policy. The abandonment of the Netherlands by France was, however, in his opinion necessary for Austria, as a step towards the acquisition of Bavaria, which was still the cherished hope of the Viennese Government. It was in vain that the Directory suggested that Austria should annex Bavaria without offering Belgium or any other compensation to its ruler. Thugut could hardly be induced to listen to the French overtures. He had received the promise of immediate help from the Empress Catherine; he was convinced that the Republic, already anxious for peace, might by one sustained effort be forced to abandon all its conquests; and this was the object for which, in the winter of 1796, army after army was hurled against the positions where Bonaparte kept his guard on the north of the still unconquered Mantua. [53]
[Malmesbury sent to Paris, Oct., 1796.]
In England itself the victory of the Archduke Charles raised expectations of peace. The war had become unpopular through the loss of trade with France, Spain, and Holland, and petitions for peace daily reached Parliament. Pitt so far yielded to the prevalent feeling as to enter into negotiations with the Directory, and despatched Lord Malmesbury to Paris; but the condition upon which Pitt insisted, the restoration of the Netherlands to Austria, rendered agreement hopeless; and as soon as Pitt’s terms were known to the Directory, Malmesbury was ordered to leave Paris. Nevertheless, the negotiation was not a mere feint on Pitt’s part. He was possessed by a fixed idea that the resources of France were exhausted, and that, in spite of the conquest of Lombardy and the Rhine, the Republic must feel itself too weak to continue the war. Amid the disorders of Revolutionary finance, and exaggerated reports of suffering and distress, Pitt failed to recognise the enormous increase of production resulting from the changes which had given the peasant full property in his land and labour, and thrown vast quantities of half-waste domain into the busy hands of middling and small proprietors. [54]
Whatever were the resources of France before the Revolution, they were now probably more than doubled. Pitt’s belief in the economic ruin of France, the only ground on which he could imagine that the Directory would give up Belgium without fighting for it, was wholly erroneous, and the French Government would have acted strangely if they had listened to his demand.
[Bonaparte creates a Cispadane Republic, Oct., 1796.]
Nevertheless, though the Directory would not hear of surrendering Belgium, they were anxious to conclude peace with Austria, and unwilling to enter into any engagements in the conquered provinces of Italy which might render peace with Austria more difficult. They had instructed Bonaparte to stir up the Italians against their Governments, but this was done with the object of paralysing the Governments, not of emancipating the peoples. They looked with dislike upon any scheme of Italian reconstruction which should bind France to the support of newly-formed Italian States. Here, however, the scruples of the Directory and the ambition of Bonaparte were in direct conflict. Bonaparte intended to create a political system in Italy which should bear the stamp of his own mind and require his own strong hand to support it. In one of his despatches to the Directory he suggested the formation of a client Republic out of the Duchy of Modena, where revolutionary movements had broken out. Before it was possible for the Government to answer him, he published a decree, declaring the population of Modena and Reggio under the protection of the French army, and deposing all the officers of the Duke (Oct. 4). When, some days later, the answer of the Directory arrived, it cautioned Bonaparte against disturbing the existing order of the Italian States. Bonaparte replied by uniting to Modena the Papal provinces of Bologna and Ferrara, and by giving to the State which he had thus created the title of the Cispadane Republic. [55]
[Idea of free Italy.]
The event was no insignificant one. It is from this time that the idea of Italian independence, though foreign to the great mass of the nation, may be said to have taken birth as one of those political hopes which wane and recede, but do not again leave the world. A class of men who had turned with dislike from the earlier agitation of French Republicans in Italy rightly judged the continued victories of Bonaparte over the Austrians to be the beginning of a series of great changes, and now joined the revolutionary movement in the hope of winning from the overthrow of the old Powers some real form of national independence. In its origin the French party may have been composed of hirelings and enthusiasts. This ceased to be the case when, after the passage of the Mincio, Bonaparte entered the Papal States. Among the citizens of Bologna in particular there were men of weight and intelligence who aimed at free constitutional government, and checked in some degree the more numerous popular party which merely repeated the phrases of French democracy. Bonaparte’s own language and action excited the brightest hopes. At Modena he harangued the citizens upon the mischief of Italy’s divisions, and exhorted them to unite with their brethren whom he had freed from the Pope. A Congress was held at Modena on the 16th of October. The representatives of Modena, Reggio, Bologna, and Ferrara declared themselves united in a Republic under the protection of France. They abolished feudal nobility, decreed a national levy, and summoned a General Assembly to meet at Reggio two months later, in order to create the Constitution of the new Cispadane Republic. It was in the Congress of Modena, and in the subsequent Assembly of Reggio (Dec. 23), that the idea of Italian unity and independence first awoke the enthusiasm of any considerable body of men. With what degree of sincerity Bonaparte himself acted may be judged from the circumstance that, while he harangued the Cispadanes on the necessity of Italian union, he imprisoned the Milanese who attempted to excite a popular movement for the purpose of extending this union to themselves. Peace was not yet made with Austria, and it was uncertain to what account Milan might best be turned.
[Rivoli, Jan. 14, 15, 1797.]
[Arcola, Nov. 15-17.]
Mantua still held out, and in November the relieving operations of the Austrians were renewed. Two armies, commanded by Allvintzy and Davidovich, descended the valleys of the Adige and the Piave, offering to Bonaparte, whose centre was at Verona, a new opportunity of crushing his enemy in detail. Allvintzy, coming from the Piave, brought the French into extreme danger in a three days’ battle at Arcola, but was at last forced to retreat with heavy loss. Davidovich, who had been successful on the Adige, retired on learning the overthrow of his colleague. Two months more passed, and the Austrians for the third time appeared on the Adige. A feint made below Verona nearly succeeded in drawing Bonaparte away from Rivoli, between the Adige and Lake Garda, where Allvintzy and his main army were about to make the assault; but the strength of Allvintzy’s force was discovered before it was too late, and by throwing his divisions from point to point with extraordinary rapidity, Bonaparte at length overwhelmed the Austrians in every quarter of the battle-field. This was their last effort. The surrender of Mantua on the 2nd February, 1797, completed the French conquest of Austrian Lombardy. [56]
[Peace of Tolentino, Feb. 19, 1797.]
The Pope now found himself left to settle his account with the invaders, against whom, even after the armistice, he had never ceased to intrigue. [57] His despatches to Vienna fell into the hands of Bonaparte, who declared the truce broken, and a second time invaded the Papal territory. A show of resistance was made by the Roman troops; but the country was in fact at the mercy of Bonaparte, who advanced as far as Tolentino, thirty miles south of Ancona. Here the Pope tendered his submission. If the Roman Court had never appeared to be in a more desperate condition, it had never found a more moderate or a more politic conqueror. Bonaparte was as free from any sentiment of Christian piety as Nero or Diocletian; but he respected the power of the Papacy over men’s minds, and he understood the immense advantage which any Government of France supported by the priesthood would possess over those who had to struggle with its hostility. In his negotiations with the Papal envoys he deplored the violence of the French Executive, and consoled the Church with the promise of his own protection and sympathy. The terms of peace which he granted, although they greatly diminished the ecclesiastical territory were in fact more favourable than the Pope had any right to expect. Bologna, Ferrara, and the Romagna, which had been occupied in virtue of the armistice, were now ceded by the Papacy. But conditions affecting the exercise of the spiritual power which had been proposed by the Directory were withdrawn; and, beyond a provision for certain payments in money, nothing of importance was added to the stipulations of the armistice.
The last days of the Venetian Republic were now at hand. It was in vain that Venice had maintained its neutrality when all the rest of Italy joined the enemies of France; its refusal of a French alliance was made an unpardonable crime. So long as the war with Austria lasted, Bonaparte exhausted the Venetian territory with requisitions: when peace came within view, it was necessary that he should have some pretext for seizing it or handing it over to the enemy. In fulfilment of his own design of keeping a quarrel open, he had subjected the Government to every insult and wrong likely to goad it into an act of war. When at length Venice armed for the purpose of protecting its neutrality, the organs of the invader called upon the inhabitants of the Venetian mainland to rise against the oligarchy, and to throw in their lot with the liberated province of Milan. A French alliance was once more urged upon Venice by Bonaparte: it was refused, and the outbreak which the French had prepared instantly followed. Bergamo and Brescia, where French garrisons deprived the Venetian Government of all power of defence, rose in revolt, and renounced all connection with Venice. The Senate begged Bonaparte to withdraw the French garrisons; its entreaties drew nothing from him but repeated demands for the acceptance of the French alliance, which was only another name for subjection. Little as the Venetians suspected it, the only doubt now present to Bonaparte was whether he should add the provinces of Venetia to his own Cispadane Republic or hand them over to Austria in exchange for other cessions which France required.
[Preliminaries of Leoben, April 18.]
Austria could defend itself in Italy no longer. Before the end of March the mountain-passes into Carinthia were carried by Bonaparte. His army drove the enemy before it along the road to Vienna, until both pursuers and pursued were within eighty miles of the capital. At Leoben, on the 7th of April, Austrian commander asked for a suspension of arms. It was granted, and negotiations for peace commenced. [58] Bonaparte offered the Venetian provinces, but not the city of Venice, to the Emperor. On the 18th of April preliminaries of peace were signed at Leoben, by which, in return for the Netherlands and for Lombardy west of the river Oglio, Bonaparte secretly agreed to hand over to Austria the whole of the territory of Venice upon the mainland east of the Oglio, in addition to its Adriatic provinces of Istria and Dalmatia. To disguise the act of spoliation, it was pretended that Bologna and Ferrara should be offered to Venice in return. [59]
[French enter Venice.]
But worse was yet to come. While Bonaparte was in conference at Leoben, an outbreak took place at Verona, and three hundred French soldiers, including the sick in the hospital, perished by popular violence. The Venetian Senate despatched envoys to Bonaparte to express their grief and to offer satisfaction; in the midst of the negotiations intelligence arrived that the commander of a Venetian fort had fired upon a French vessel and killed some of the crew. Bonaparte drove the envoys from his presence, declaring that he could not treat with men whose hands were dripping with French blood. A declaration of war was published, charging the Senate with the design of repeating the Sicilian Vespers, and the panic which it was Bonaparte’s object to inspire instantly followed. The Government threw themselves upon his mercy. Bonaparte pretended that he desired no more than to establish a popular government in Venice in the place of the oligarchy. His terms were accepted. The Senate consented to abrogate the ancient Constitution of the Republic, and to introduce a French garrison into Venice. On the 12th of May the Grand Council voted its own dissolution. Peace was concluded. The public articles of the treaty declared that there should be friendship between the French and the Venetian Republics; that the sovereignty of Venice should reside in the body of the citizens; and that the French garrison should retire so soon as the new Government announced that it had no further need of its support. Secret articles stipulated for a money payment, and for the usual surrender of works of art; an indefinite expression relating to an exchange of territory was intended to cover the surrender of the Venetian mainland, and the union of Bologna and Ferrara with what remained of Venice. The friendship and alliance of France, which Bonaparte had been so anxious to bestow on Venice, were now to bear their fruit. “I shall do everything in my power,” he wrote to the new Government of Venice, “to give you proof of the great desire I have to see your liberty take root, and to see this unhappy Italy, freed from the rule of the stranger, at length take its place with glory on the scene of the world, and resume, among the great nations, the rank to which nature, destiny, and its own position call it.” This was for Venice; for the French Directory Bonaparte had a very different tale. “I had several motives,” he wrote (May 19), “in concluding the treaty:–to enter the city without difficulty; to have the arsenal and all else in our possession, in order to take from it whatever we needed, under pretext of the secret articles; … to evade the odium attaching to the Preliminaries of Leoben; to furnish pretexts for them, and to facilitate their execution.”
[French seize Ionian islands.]
[Venice to be given to Austria.]
As the first fruits of the Venetian alliance, Bonaparte seized upon Corfu and the other Ionian Islands. “You will start,” he wrote to General Gentili, “as quickly and as secretly as possible, and take possession of all the Venetian establishments in the Levant…. If the inhabitants should be inclined for independence, you should flatter their tastes, and in all your proclamations you should not fail to allude to Greece, Athens, and Sparta.” This was to be the French share in the spoil. Yet even now, though stripped of its islands, its coasts, and its ancient Italian territory, Venice might still have remained a prominent city in Italy. It was sacrificed in order to gain the Rhenish Provinces for France. Bonaparte had returned to the neighbourhood of Milan, and received the Austrian envoy, De Gallo, at the villa of Montebello. Wresting a forced meaning from the Preliminaries of Leoben, Bonaparte claimed the frontier of the Rhine, offering to Austria not only the territory of Venice upon the mainland, but the city of Venice itself. De Gallo yielded. Whatever causes subsequently prolonged the negotiation, no trace of honour or pity in Bonaparte led him even to feign a reluctance to betray Venice. “We have to-day had our first conference on the definitive treaty,” he wrote to the Directory, on the night of the 26th of May, “and have agreed to present the following propositions: the line of the Rhine for France; Salzburg, Passau for the Emperor; … the maintenance of the Germanic Body; … Venice for the Emperor. Venice,” he continued, “which has been in decadence since the discovery of the Cape of Good Hope and the rise of Trieste and Ancona, can scarcely survive the blows we have just struck. With a cowardly and helpless population in no way fit for liberty, without territory and without rivers, it is but natural that she should go to those to whom we give the mainland.” Thus was Italy to be freed from foreign intervention; and thus was Venice to be regenerated by the friendship of France!
[Genoa.]
In comparison with the fate preparing for Venice, the sister-republic of Genoa met with generous treatment. A revolutionary movement, long prepared by the French envoy, overthrew the ancient oligarchical Government; but democratic opinion and French sympathies did not extend below the middle classes of the population; and, after the Government had abandoned its own cause, the charcoal-burners and dock-labourers rose in its defence, and attacked the French party with the cry of “Viva Maria,” and with figures of the Virgin fastened to their hats, in the place where their opponents wore the French tricolour. Religious fanaticism won the day; the old Government was restored, and a number of Frenchmen who had taken part in the conflict were thrown into prison. The imprisonment of the Frenchmen gave Bonaparte a pretext for intervention. He disclaimed all desire to alter the Government, and demanded only the liberation of his countrymen and the arrest of the enemies of France. But the overthrow of the oligarchy had been long arranged with Faypoult, the French envoy; and Genoa received a democratic constitution which place the friends of France in power (June 5).
[France in 1797.]
While Bonaparte, holding Court in the Villa of Montebello, continued to negotiate with Austria upon the basis of the Preliminaries of Leoben, events took place in France which offered him an opportunity of interfering directly in the government of the Republic. The elections which were to replace one-third of the members of the Legislature took place in the spring of 1797. The feeling of the country was now much the same as it had been in 1795, when a large Royalist element was returned for those seats in the Councils which the Convention had not reserved for its own members. France desired a more equitable and a more tolerant rule. The Directory had indeed allowed the sanguinary laws against non-juring priests and returning emigrants to remain unenforced; but the spirit and traditions of official Jacobinism were still active in the Government. The Directors themselves were all regicides; the execution of the King was still celebrated by a national _fête_; offices, great and small, were held by men who had risen in the Revolution; the whole of the old gentry of France was excluded from participation in public life. It was against this revolutionary class-rule, against a system which placed the country as much at the mercy of a few directors and generals as it had been at the mercy of the Conventional Committee, that the elections of 1797 were a protest. Along with certain Bourbonist conspirators, a large majority of men were returned who, though described as Royalists, were in fact moderate Constitutionalists, and desired only to undo that part of the Revolution which excluded whole classes of the nation from public life. [60]
[Opposition to the Directory.]
Such a party in the legislative body naturally took the character of an Opposition to the more violent section of the Directory. The Director retiring in 1797 was replaced by the Constitutionalist Barthélemy, negotiator of the treaty of Basle; Carnot, who continued in office, took part with the Opposition, justly fearing that the rule of the Directory would soon amount to nothing more than the rule of Bonaparte himself. The first debates in the new Chamber arose upon the laws relating to emigrants; the next, upon Bonaparte’s usurpation of sovereign power in Italy. On the 23rd of June a motion for information on the affairs of Venice and Genoa was brought forward in the Council of Five Hundred. Dumolard, the mover, complained of the secrecy of Bonaparte’s action, of the contempt shown by him to the Assembly, of his tyrannical and un-republican interference with the institutions of friendly States. No resolution was adopted by the Assembly; but the mere fact that the Assembly had listened to a hostile criticism of his own actions was sufficient ground in Bonaparte’s eyes to charge it with Royalism and with treason. Three of the Directors, Barras, Rewbell, and Laréveillère, had already formed the project of overpowering the Assembly by force. Bonaparte’s own interests led him to offer them his support. If the Constitutional party gained power, there was an end to his own unshackled rule in Italy; if the Bourbonists succeeded, a different class of men would hold all the honours of the State. However feeble the Government of the Directory, its continuance secured his own present ascendency, and left him the hope of gaining supreme power when the public could tolerate the Directory no longer.
[Coup d’état, 17 Fructidor (Sept. 3).]
The fate of the Assembly was sealed. On the anniversary of the capture of the Bastille, Bonaparte issued a proclamation to his army declaring the Republic to be threatened by Royalist intrigues. A banquet was held, and the officers and soldiers of every division signed addresses to the Directory full of threats and fury against conspiring aristocrats. “Indignation is at its height in the army,” wrote Bonaparte to the Government; “the soldiers are asking with loud cries whether they are to be rewarded by assassination on their return home, as it appears all patriots are to be so dealt with. The peril is increasing every day, and I think, citizen Directors, you must decide to act one way or other.” The Directors had no difficulty in deciding after such an exhortation as this; but, as soon as Bonaparte had worked up their courage, he withdrew into the background, and sent General Augereau, a blustering Jacobin, to Paris, to risk the failure or bear the odium of the crime. Augereau received the military command of the capital; the air was filled with rumours of an impending blow; but neither the majority in the Councils nor the two threatened Directors, Carnot and Barthélemy, knew how to take measures of defence. On the night of the 3rd September (17 Fructidor) the troops of Augereau surrounded the Tuileries. Barthélemy was seized at the Luxembourg; Carnot fled for his life; the members of the Councils, marching in procession to the Tuileries early the next morning, were arrested or dispersed by the soldiers. Later in the day a minority of the Councils was assembled to ratify the measures determined upon by Augereau and the three Directors. Fifty members of the Legislature, and the writers, proprietors, and editors of forty-two journals, were sentenced to exile; the elections of forty-eight departments were annulled; the laws against priests and emigrants were renewed; and the Directory was empowered to suppress all journals at its pleasure. This coup d’état was described as the suppression of a Royalist conspiracy. It was this, but it was something more. It was the suppression of all Constitutional government, and all but the last step to the despotism of the chief of the army.
[Peace signed with Austria, Oct. 17.]
The effect of the movement was instantly felt in the negotiations with Austria and with England. Lord Malmesbury was now again in France, treating for peace with fair hopes of success, since the Preliminaries of Leoben had removed England’s opposition to the cession of the Netherlands, the discomfiture of the moderate party in the Councils brought his mission to an abrupt end. Austria, on the other hand, had prolonged its negotiations because Bonaparte claimed Mantua and the Rhenish Provinces in addition to the cessions agreed upon at Leoben. Count Ludwig Cobenzl, Austrian ambassador at St. Petersburg, who had protected his master’s interests only too well in the last partition of Poland, was now at the head of the